The problem with ‘Bushman studies’

Abstract

The problem, as we see it, is not so much that different disciplines study Bushmen from different perspectives. Rather, it lies in the nature of the intellectual lineage in which Bushman studies as a discrete field of knowledge-making is situated. The oldest part of this lineage has roots in a centuries-old European view of Bushmen as racially and culturally primitive curiosities. It survives to this day in the practice of putting individual Bushmen on display to the colonial gaze in so-called cultural villages. Bushman studies as an intellectual activity can be said to have begun with Wilhelm Bleek's linguistic researches in the 1850s and 1860s, and with George Stow's researches into rock art in the 1860s and 1870s. The field was developed further by researchers like Lucy Lloyd and Dorothea Bleek in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It grew rapidly with the development of academic anthropology in southern Africa from the 1920s onward. Stow, and to some extent Bleek, saw the Bushman groups of their time as political and cultural actors who had histories that needed to be studied alongside those of other peoples. Historians like George Theal helped entrench the notion of 'the Bushmen' as the authentically autochthonous inhabitants of southern Africa. But from the late 19th century onward, in keeping with the increasingly racialised ethnographic thinking that was then developing in Europe and the United States, Bushmen came to be portrayed by researchers and popular writers alike less and less as actors in history, and more and more as savages who had a culture of a sort, but no meaningful past. Their ahistorical 'primitiveness' was seen as standing in sharp contrast to the dynamic evolution of European societies. In the hands, quite literally, of physical anthropologists, Bushmen became mainly objects of pseudo-scientific racial profiling. Scholarly perspectives on the 'value' (or otherwise) of studying Bushmen varied widely, but few, if any, researchers saw them as having a history worth investigating. After World War II, Bushman studies expanded rapidly as an academic field, particularly in the disciplines of anthropology and linguistics, and, a little later, of archaeology. Research into rock art, done at first by amateur enthusiasts and later by academics, also expanded markedly. While members of institutions like the Harvard Kalahari Research Group produced particular kinds of disciplinary knowledge about Bushmen for academics, writers like Laurens van der Post contributed to a growing and insatiable popular Western imaginary centred on the idea of the Bushman as pristine hunter-gatherer with prehistoric links to (mainly desert) landscapes. …