Primal Anxiety, Sanctified Landscapes: The Imagery of Primitiveness in the Ethnographic Fictions of Laurens van der Post

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An image of Bushmen etched by ethnographers rapidly emerged as a centerpiece of anthropological practice during the first decades (1947-1968) of the Cold War. But that unifying image of a mythic human past--of absolute primitiveness with ethnographic authenticity--was constructed in the Kalahari before any anthropologist arrived there. The popular image was forged in Laurens van der Post's TV films for the BBC, first shown in 1956, and in his books derived from those films, and almost simultaneously by the Marshall family's work. The Cold War forged a crisis in Euroamerican ontology, a crisis of personal and collective identity, of continuity with the past and continuation with the future. It was most forcefully couched in terms of a threat to cultural life as Western Europe and America knew it, a threat perceived to be posed by modernity with its science and technology and its more perplexing questioning of cultural meaning, a threat made tangible in an atmosphere of immanent nuclear annihilation and lingering ecological dissolution reinforced by a modernist communist menace. "A metaphorically powerful response to the crisis arose in a revival of attention to humankind's presumptive primordial roots; along with extinct and extant primates, Bushmen quickly became a main subject of this attention, proposed as examplars of Euroamerica's image of what its evolutionary alter ego ought to be and could become again. I focus on this image as it evolved in the work of van der Post, who articulated most explicitly that diffuse Euroamerican fear smoldering in the ashes of World War II. Van der Post configured his myth in conceptions of natural being and an individualized collective unconsious drawn from Jung and the antimodern reflections of T.S. Eliot. The imagery of his books and films has since been absorbed by countless millions all over the world. The expression of spiritual loss found in them resonates with general cultural fear persisting in Euroamerica; that, coupled with the compensation of mystical love, is what appeals to those who share his faith. Bushmen ethnographers, although moving from a differnt motivation, echoed the essentialist rhetoric embedded in this popular discouse. An analysis of van der Post's contribution to this discourse tells much about the anthropological interest that followed."