Dancing in two worlds: Experiencing n/om inside the Ju/’hoan Bushman dance

Abstract

The Ju/’hoan Bushmen or San of southern Africa host one of the oldest surviving dance forms. Openly conducted in public for the whole community, the dance serves as the primary locus for healing, conflict resolution, wellbeing, rejuvenation, social reunion, spiritual expression and performance art. Central to the dance is awakening n/om, what the Bushmen regard as a vibrational force that resides in the body of the strongest dancers. Often described as an energy or power that makes the body shake, n/om is more accurately a blend of somatic vibration, heightened emotion and sacred song. N/om is also the source of a dancer’s capacity to heal sickness in themselves and others. The following composite account of an insider’s perspective of the n/om dance is based on decades of field research interviews with Ju/’hoan n/om dancers and our own experience as accepted members of several Bushman dance communities. We focus on the experience of n/om in the body and how this enables the dancer to dance between two worlds – that of everyday knowing and the ineffable spiritual realm or what the Ju/’hoansi call second creation and first creation, respectively.