The relation between knowledge and the visual, on the one hand, and knowledge about peoples on the other, is a prime concern in visual anthropology. The impact of the visual on the everyday life of the Ju/’hoansi is my concern here. The results of a field trip in July 1996 to Otjozondjupa (previously known as Bushmanland) in [i]Namibia, are discussed in terms of the question, ‘How do subjects make sense of the anthropological?’ Our ‘subject community’ was the Ju/’hoansi of Nyae Nyae. The ‘texts’ we interrogated via Ju/’hoansi popular memory were those made of them by documentary filmmaker John Marshall, South African feature film director Jamie Uys, and a documentary made for the Discovery Channel.

‘Science’ versus ‘priest-craft’
The Ju/’hoansi and broader San populations, among many instances of Third and Fourth World peoples, have been argued to be quintessentially the Other to the historical Same of Europe (Mudimbe 1988). This relationship was predicated upon the differences assumed to define Europeans (the Same) in contradistinction to Africans (the Other). The encounter between Europe and Africa has spanned five centuries, and progressed through missionary contact, colonisation, interactions with anthropologists, archaeologists and ethnographic filmmakers, through to the economics of development in the post-colonial era. When the victorious ‘scientific’ order of knowledge was faced with cultures predicated on other kinds of world-views, it responded through two mutually exclusive avenues:
– the world view and behaviour of the Other was treated as ‘priest-craft’[ii] and consequently something to be vanquished. The early history of contact between San and white (and black) settlers whom they encountered, for example, is dominated by extermination. Conversely,
– science tried to ‘conserve’ the Other in museums, in film, photographs and video, in body through mummification and even in the field itself. Rob Gordon (1985) calls this ‘death by conservation’.

However, a third avenue characterized by postmodernity, has collapsed the modernist distinctions between science and priest-craft. The respective narrators of Dancing at the future (Stander 1996) and The art of tracking (Discovery Channel 1996) have, as I will argue in the next chapter, located ethnography at the intersection of these previously opposed discourses. Ethnography is then commodified via the language of cultural tourism, thinly dressed up in the semantics of ‘conservation’ and ‘development’. This particular language of conservation is embedded in the mystique of ‘priest-craft’ and indigenous knowledge, and is evoked for ‘scientific’ and development purposes.

Claims made in the late 1990s, by researchers on the validity of ‘ancient indigenous knowledge’ in relation to ‘science’, however, blur the previous separation of the Western Same and the anthropological Other. The new ethnospiritual/ecoscience integrates the mystical, the empirical and the theoretical. These intersect within a meta-discourse of a global fraction of capital, that of eco-tourism. ‘Man’ – that is to say, some ‘men’ – e.g. the ‘Bushmen’ – are ontologically rejoined with ‘nature’, which has now become a ‘scientific’ pursuit in the interests of cultural tourism.

Anthro-tourism and human conservation
When science draws on the paradigm of ‘conservation’ it tends to view indigenous cultures as autonomous objects of study and manipulation. Indeed, this ‘scientific’ value for the ‘scholarly research’ of creating reserves for Bushmen is a recurring call (Gordon 1992: 60, 64, 148). As Dancing at the future and The art of tracking suggest, rehabilitation through eco-tourism satisfies ‘… the practical demands of Western science’ (Dancing 1996). N.A.A Davis (1954: 53), reports, for example, that the 1950s policy of the South West African Administration (SWAA)[iii] was to preserve ‘the genuinely primitive Bushmen’ and ‘make them useful and contented people’ (Davis 1954: 57). The SWAA-ethnologist KFR Budack classified the ‘Bushmen’ as quintessential hunter-gatherers, knowing no other economy. Assumptions which derive from this hold is that Bushmen: a) are incapable of future planning; b) lack objectivity with regard to the natural world; c) are ‘conditioned’ to killing animals and cannot therefore raise them; and d) have no experience or knowledge of farming (quoted in Volkman 1985). These are recurring motifs in the films discussed in this book. As Gordon (1992: 216) states:
… science has a vested interest in the Bushmen, for, as Trefor Jenkins said, from the vantage point of science, the Bushmen are ‘southern Africa’s model people’ (Jenkins 1979: 280). Whereas filmmakers and journalists were the Bushmen image makers par excellence, it was scientific research that lent credibility to their enterprise.

Laurence Marshall, leader of the Harvard-Peabody Bushman Expeditions of the 1950s, commented that the Bushmen fill this scientific role because they were:
… a happy race, free from strains and stresses of civilization. Crime is unknown, and they are as honest as the day and would rather avoid than look for trouble. Even the lions seem to leave them alone. They never molest lions and the lions seem to return the compliment (Davis 1954: 57).

It is not clear which group of San Marshall is referring to here, as Gordon’s (1992) study shows that the San have historically been part and parcel of environmental degradation, banditry and resistance, trade and travel. The ‘enchantment of misunderstanding’ derives from fascination with the exotic and the ‘laws’ of development (Gordon 1992: 216).

Where the early objective was to wean the ‘Bushmen’ from their ‘nomadic habits’ (Davis 1954), a variant of ‘conservation’ was the earlier SWAA-idea to establish a nature reserve in which ‘Bushmen’ would be encouraged to live as Neolithic relics to prevent the ‘biological crime’ of their extinction (Reitz 1941, quoted in Volkman 1986; Gordon 1985). The ‘Bushmen also provide a rare and vanishing opportunity to study people in the primordial social stage which our ancestors passed through ages ago’, stated Edward S. Ross (1976: 23) of the California Academy of Sciences. Ross sees the return to ‘nature’, hunting and foraging, as conferring some kind of eco-human rehabilitation:
Those bushmen who still live as hunter-gatherers may well be termed ‘the Legitimate People’ for they have the prime legitimacy – ecological legitimacy. If left free of outside influences, they can live indefinitely on the annual productivity of an environment without damaging or destroying its capital assets … (Ross 1976: 23).

The discourses intercepted by The Gods must be crazy (1980) not surprisingly, therefore, also interpellated the San as the primordial object of the tourists’ gaze (Gordon 1992: 12). This gaze assumed the San as a cultural isolate, and living in ecological harmony. Philanthropist John Perrott (1992: 59) uncritically quotes adventurer and ‘anthropologist’ Jack Wheeler, who identifies the ‘Bushmen’ as a ‘priceless treasure’ in the ‘living Paleolothic’ (1992: 64). This enduring naturist discourse of ‘genuine Bushmen’ (Davis 1954), ‘extinction’ and ‘racial mysteries’ (Marshall and Marshall 1956: 11) underpins an eco-spiritual notion of the ‘loss’ of a timeless original culture before the Fall (in Eden).

The 1988 expedition to Botswana, which Perrott (1992: v) recounts, forms part of his funding appeal to assist organisations working for the survival of the San and their culture. The symbiotic relationship between the ‘Bushmen’ and wild animals[iv] is the discursive mechanism he invokes to petition Westerners who often seem more concerned with animals than people in Africa: ‘… if the animals could be protected, why not a few people who were still living nomadically?’ (Perrott 1992: 164).

Perrott’s description of Bushmen as ‘wild’ or ‘tame’ calls into question the Western Same’s perception of the Other, with which this chapter was introduced. Calling on an early form of anthropological discourse, Perrott (1992: 169) observes that ‘it would be a case of permitting a few wild Bushmen back into the few natural enclaves called parks – land where they can rejoin their animals’. He is, however, suspicious of this kind of anthro-tourism where the Ju/’hoansi ‘would have been required to wear skins and pretend to be wild, what John Marshall calls “The Plastic Stone Age”’ (Perrott 1992: 180).[v]
‘Preservation’ of San culture in the guise of a few remaining ‘wild’ hunter-gatherer Bushmen is Perrott’s partial answer to the problem of vanquishment. But conservation also contains the seeds of vanquishment in the form of the touristic encounter: ‘You can’t bring throngs of people out here to gawk at them up close. Tourism would soon destroy what the tourists come to see’. This would be the final irony for, as Ross (1976: 23) avers, ‘Man becomes less and less a bushman’; he simultaneously becomes ‘less and less human’.

Early anthropology was popularly understood as the science of disappearing societies. This is evidenced by Perrott in his fear of a tourist overload, and by Ross (1976: 25) in his photographs of ‘sadly-acculturated groups dependent on Bantu and European farmers’. This integrated economy, in which ex-primitives sometimes act in the contemporary world as real primitives (MacCannell 1990) while also participating in development projects and broader forms of modern and postmodern exchange, contributes of course to this disappearance. Perrott (1992: 180) is clear on the problem, which is why he makes a distinction between those ‘tame Bushmen’ who had made the transition into a mixed economy and those ‘wild Bushmen’ he claims have not. But he fails to realise that anthropology, too, is one of the catalysts in this destruction: ‘At the very instance they [our subjects] become known to us as they are doomed’ (Bastian, quoted in Fabian 1985: 10). This is the paradox facing indigenous societies, and those anthropologists, celebrities and environmentalists working with them to protect their natural resources. For example, one of the results of the Kayapo cooperation with environmentalist pressure groups is that the
… ensuing ideological consumption of ‘nature’, in which both the Kayapo and their environment may be regarded as being held ‘hostages’ by political decision makers at different levels, seems to pertinently raise a question regarding the compatibility between a Kayapo and Western conceptualisation of nature and the environment (Crawford 1995: 8).

The Body Shop’s return to the Kayapo, for access to their indigenous knowledge of ‘natural’ health products, admits that priest-craft and science can successfully co-exist. But this occurs through a paradox: the Kayapo use video cameras to document – and perhaps reinvent – their own authenticity and alien incursions on their land and culture. They then deploy this authenticity to appeal internationally for justice. The question that remains to be answered is: have they found ways of being simultaneously both cultural isolates and world citizens?

Whereas in the age of modernity when Fourth World societies offered remote ‘destinations’ for academic endeavour, now in the postmodern age, they are the mass-mediated objects of consumption. Ontological differences and discrepancies of popular memories of the ‘present’ in relation to the ‘past’, offer new forms of visual exploitation. The Ju/’hoansi are both ‘there’ (in the desert) and ‘here’ (on TV in our living rooms). Filmmakers and TV-hosts, for example, sometimes try to become ‘the other’ by dressing both ‘them’ (the Bushmen) and themselves in skins and other ‘traditional’ garb (Anita in Uit en tuis; Alby Mangels in Adventure bound). This collapsing of both ‘space’ and ‘time’, ‘us’ and ‘them’, and ‘far’ and ‘near’ in the image and through tourist-bushman encounters, is the essence of ‘cultural’ tourism. Very little sustainable development accrues to the subjects of these representations because they are held in a kind of ecological suspension, on the margins of the international economic sectors exploiting them. Cultural or eco-tourism is basically the commodification by capital of the romance of anthropology. This kind of gaze is part of a broader global process in which the ethnographic has been appropriated into the public sphere. Commodification of ‘the ethnographic’ takes place within the context of a ‘mobilized gaze’ that is part and parcel of transnational media flows (Friedberg 1995).

Be-texting and be-coming
Anthropology and film exhibit paradoxical representational processes in that both require presence and absence to produce meaning. The two-stage anthropological methodology involves first, ‘interpellation into’ the Other (‘becoming’); and then endistancing from this assumed subjectivity ‘from’ the Other through re-interpellation back into the Historical Same in producing the film or study. This relationship between ‘becoming’ and ‘othering’ involves manipulating the distance between ‘them’ and ‘us’ (Crawford 1992: 68-9). As noted, TV-presenters sometimes also assume (and revitalise) this ‘becoming’ role, thus conferring a spurious eco-anthropological legitimacy on the encounter. TV-presentation, however, has nothing to do with ethnography, which is the translation of the native’s world of meanings into the anthropologists’ terminology.

‘Becoming’ is itself a metaphor for participation which can never be complete. Neither is it a natural consequence of presence or insertion in the ‘other culture’ (Crawford 1992). The TV-image of Mangels, therefore, is merely visual – it has no methodological significance whatsoever. Mangels uses the travelogue technique of ‘arriving’ and being co-present as the basis of presumed authority to speak for the other.

Anthropologists, while not absorbed into the Other, cannot be the same after the encounter (Hastrup 1986: 9-10). Only tourists remain the same – because while they have ‘seen’ everything, they have understood nothing – or very little. Mangels in a loincloth foolishly stalking elephants with a ‘Bushman’ hunter armed with only a bow is a stark and irresponsible confirmation of this. This form of cultural nomadism feeds a need in the West, which requires reassurance that it has not destroyed all vestiges of ecological legitimacy in its Cartesian-driven escape from primordialism.

Confirmation that some First Peoples have survived intact is somehow seen to hold a key to the West’s own redemption. If there are still worlds to be explored – if only from our own living rooms – audiences can still be moved to awe. None of this, however, has much to do with anthropology, and it furthermore completely ignores the fact that, in our case, the San, have themselves played an active role in ecological devastation (Gordon 1992: 39). Projecting one’s fantasies onto the people being filmed on the one hand – and learning from them on the other – is the difference, argues Marshall (1993), between The hunters (Marshall 1958) and N!ai: Story of a !Kung woman (1978).

Textualising the ‘past’
The ‘naturalistic’ mystique of First Peoples is both a resource and a curse. It is a resource because it provides opportunities for the ‘Bushmen’ to exchange the stereotypical image of themselves and their artefacts for cash income. But it is a curse in that the ‘Bushmen’ are frequently manipulated by discursive forces, often beyond their control and comprehension, to exhibit tourist-orientated behaviour, and to feed now largely academically discredited but popularly legitimate anthropological paradigms of a stone-age people frozen in time.

In the face of this, the Ju/’hoansi have partly absorbed their Othered exclusion by turning it into a resource. In a world of travelling images in which anthropology no longer has sole ethnographic authority, cultural tourism is a tactic some Ju/’hoansi and ≠Khomani have mobilized to attract resources to their villages. One of the symbolic commodities that can be sold easily is the image of ‘poverty’. Historically having little material culture to exchange, the San became dependent upon transacting their authenticity. The mechanism of exchange is conducted through interviews and photographs,[vi] films and videos with and of the Ju/’hoansi.

Ironically, inauthenticity is the result of the Discovery Channel’s documentary about Ju/’hoansi storytelling, Hunters of the Kalahari (Discovery Channel 1995). When we asked villagers at N/aqmtjoha why they had cooperated with the filmmakers in representing themselves as traditionally-clothed pristine stone-age relics, they replied that they wore the skins because they wanted to look ‘poor’. (These skins, as with some village dance groups we interviewed, were obtained by the filmmakers from curio shops, the local Dutch Reformed Church, and collectors.) Like all First Peoples, the Ju/’hoansi are increasingly self-conscious about their place in the wider world. If their narratives and images of their front-stages are understood by them to be commodifiable, then Hunters of the Kalahari and other films, therefore, offer a long-term ground for exchange – no matter the nature of their representations. Exchange relationships between the Ju/’hoansi and other visitors take some of the following forms:
-the cooperation of entire villages with filmmakers and other visitors, perhaps to indicate their legitimacy to the land in the face of Herero and Kavango incursions into Otjozondjupa;
– interviews become negotiating points for financial transactions; and
– transactions for information and photographs act like magnets to attract yet more visitors to these otherwise remote villages.

The Ju/’hoansi, !Xoo and ≠Khomani appear to make little distinction between anthropologists and linguists, zoologists and entomologists, tourists and friends, filmmakers and photographers, donors and development workers. All these social practices are reduced into the text of the Western Same, the people who have power and money, and whose largesse has made them dependent upon such tourists in terms of cash exchange, development projects and inter-village transport. As N!ai and her husband, /Kunta, indicated to us, they felt powerless to influence the kinds of films made, but were happy to take the income and goods derived. The Ju/’hoansi’s textual self-construction is that of villagers who have interpellated themselves as ‘past’. To be real ‘Bushmen’ means to appear ‘poor’. N!ai, as in her film entitled N!ai: Story of a !Kung woman, continued to insist that life in the ‘old days’ was better than now: ‘Now life is difficult. Now I do not even have money. I am eating here and I do not have maize’, she told Kaitira Kandjii. (Commodification brings its own dependencies. Nutritious bush foods may be available from foraging, but pre-packaged store-bought food is obviously more convenient, and often less nutritious.) Front-stage authenticity is communicated via a strategic friendliness and a transactional hospitality. In stark contrast are some traditional ≠Khomani who have little, if any, understanding of conventional exchange relations.

Speaking back to the same
N!ai partly operates as a kind of ‘guerrilla’ film, in that it features scenes of the making of The Gods must be crazy (1980), in which the cast, now living in modernity, make sceptical remarks about the anthropological restorations and traditional clothes with which they have been fitted.[vii] The idyllic Eden-like representation of the ‘Bushmen’ in Uys’ film evoked a storm of criticism from North American academics and Marshall himself (see Tomaselli 1992). Yet our research in July 1996 at /Aotcha Pan similarly revealed that N!ai and members of her family, also had reservations about some scenes in the film, N!ai. This related mainly to the sequence in N!ai which depicts drunkenness, decaying social relationships and N!ai accusing her daughter of being a prostitute. N!ai commented:
The quarrel with my daughter was not part of the film script. John had his cameras on. It was just a normal day and I was just quarrelling. That my son-in-law was jealous and he was accusing my daughter of sleeping with a black man. It was not true that’s why I was angry (interviewed by Kandjii, 13 July 1996).

N!ai’s husband, /Kunta, added that ‘I did not know that people will know about what I was saying to my wife’. When asked if they had discussed this scene with Marshall, /Kunta replied: ‘Now that John has shown the film to many people, there is nothing that I can do’. Dependent personalities often feign powerlessness: ‘It is up to John to think what he can do’, replied N!ai. N!ai told Kandjii that Marshall ‘has been very good’ to her: ‘When John is here he gives me all kinds of things – clothes, blankets and foodstuffs – John is “Omuhona uande” (Herero – ‘my boss’)’.[viii] The reference to ‘my boss’ in Africa may sometimes be a form of endearment, but it also indicates a client-patron relationship. Social relationships – like authenticity – are resources for dependent people. Researchers like ourselves offer opportunities for the forging of new client-patron relationships. N!ai and /Kunta possibly saw a relationship with Kandjii and me as worth cultivating.[ix] Further, some societies make unwarranted accusations as a means of controlling or balancing relationships, of controlling sharing and reciprocity, or enforcing equality. By suggesting that some visitors are stingy, they might be hoping to elicit more generous responses from others.

During one interview at /Aotcha Pan, our interpreter, ≠Oma (Leon) Tsamkxao, sharply questioned the responses from some elderly informants on their lack of vision regarding possibilities for self-directed, sustainable development beyond the small scale transaction involving visitors. As he commented more generally:
In terms of capacity building for Bushmen to film themselves, people here do not understand filming or making film about themselves or environment. Filming is something foreign to them. I want tourists and filmmakers who come here to bushmanland for filming to learn teach us how to film … We also want to learn us to do things for ourselves. This is what I call development (interviewed by Kandjii, 12 July 1996).

≠Oma Tsamkxao’s frustration in not having a camera is palpable, as he wants to video some of the real issues regarding the relationship, which results in the petty commodity exchange of small amounts of money for video and photographic images and cultural artefacts.[x] With the exception of Marshall’s films, these are the myths that draw tourists to ‘Bushmanland’ in the first place. ≠Oma Tsamkxao knows that images can be both positive and negative vis-à-vis the projection of a people.[xi]

Othering/becoming and the textual tourist
My argument has been that the othering/becoming relations with regard to academic researchers, cultural tourists and filmmakers, have been partly orchestrated by the subjects themselves. Certainly, the appropriation of images from visitors, starting with the Polaroid snapshots handed out by Laurence Marshall to his contacts in the early 1950s, must have marked a significant moment in the ensuing exchange.[xii] Both parties in the encounter have since commodified ethnographic methods. In ‘becoming’, some visitors might have been seduced into an imported Western anthropological text constructed by the subjects themselves. This is the discursive resource they have developed in what they see as facilitating exchange relationships of one kind or another.

If the observers are seduced by this mercantile text which is interpreted as ‘culture’, but which masks something else, then it is they who have become the exploited rather than the exploiter (in academic terms of course). This exploitation occurs in the sense that the power to determine what meanings are exchanged during the encounter, is determined by the subjects. The last laugh is on the observers as those who do the ‘looking’ are subverted by their subjects who have reversed the direction of this looking relationship in the act of exchange.

The notion of ‘authenticity’, the prime discursive resource embedded in the social (stereotypical) text, and strategically appropriated by indigenous people, has been popularised from the ‘academic text’ of the discipline by filmmakers, scholars and the media in general. The resulting myth of the ‘Bushmen’ will provide fodder for all these constituencies for many years to come. These contradictory interventions and media interpretations will provide the ground for exchange for the Ju/’hoansi for as long as they continue. The new commodity is psychospiritual ecoscience, as negotiated and agreed upon by both parties to the encounter.

NOTES
[i] ≠Oma Tsamkxao was employed as an interpreter by Sonja Speeter, a German anthropologist whom we joined for the duration of our ten-day-visit to the Otjozondjupa Region. Speeter had negotiated our access to the Ju/’hoansi through the Nyae Nyae Development Foundation and John Marshall. Her thesis topic was: Family in the field: The polymorphic ethnography of the Marshall family
[ii] The two kinds of scientific understanding clash with each other by virtue of an internal ideological inconsistency in the Western intellectual heritage: the Western tradition cannot make up its mind as to where the experiencing subject fits into our self-proclaimed intellectual marker of Science. Richard Rorty (1980: 328) has pointed out that there is, in Western thought, a very specific kind of dialogue within which valid knowledge-claims can be made, and that this debate draws its agenda from the judgement we today pass on those who, like the Inquisition’s Cardinal Bellarmine, sought to refute Galileo’s cosmological claims. For our modern culture, we tend to dismiss claims that fail to conform to a specific mode of justification, as the equivalent of Bellarmine’s ‘priest-craft’ (cf. Shepperson and Tomaselli 1992).
[iii] South West Africa was at that time administered by the South African government on a mandate issued by the League of Nations following the First World War.
[iv] Ross (1976: 23) offers a similar analogy with practices of the ‘Natural Sciences’: ‘I happen to need to hunt and gather insect specimens and photographs in untrampled regions’.
[v] As proposed by SWAA, the Ju/’hoansi would: a) be forbidden to keep cattle, maintain gardens or practice subsistence farming; b) be permitted to hunt with bows, and gather with digging sticks; c) teach children at school how to hunt and gather; d) organise ‘hunting bands’, supervised by bush rangers, to be experienced by a ‘special class’ of tourists flown to overnight camp sites. Conservation officers, including eight Ju/’hoansi, would lead ‘nature walks’ (SWAA Administration 1984, quoted by Volkman 1986). In contrast, European tourists who demanded their removal (Hitchcock 1985) opposed inclusion of San in Botswana game parks.
[vi] Early anthropologists like Franz Boaz, and their expedition photographers, clicked for both ethnography and commerce. Native Americans, as subjects for these photographers, also partly constituted their clientele (Blackman 1980).
[vii] A comment recorded on the out-takes sound track of the film is a girl appealing to a man who has lost interest in ‘long ago’ stories: ‘These things are going to another place like America – it’s good to tell the old stories which long ago died so that people can hear them’ (Biesele, comments on transcriptions, 18.00-18.15).
[viii] N!ai had nothing good to say about Jamie Uys, whom she claimed had never paid her for her work on Gods. She also complained that G/aq’o, the star of both Uys films and three other feature films, had a house while she did not. (G/aq’o’s house at Tjum!kui was built in 1994. He was paid a basic monthly retainer by Mimosa Films until his death in 2003.)
[ix] During the first two visits, N!ai showed little interest. The questions posed on the film, however, obtained her direct attention, on our third visit to /Aotcha Pan.
[x] The lodge owner at Tjum!kui who manages a cultural tourism company incorporates permission to take photographs into the price that visitors are charged, which is passed onto the indigenous performers. Americans buy everything; Germans only want traditional items; and the Japanese usually don’t buy at all: ‘They take photos’ (Arno Oosthuizen, interview, July 1996).
[xi] Marshall had, in December 1995, taught ≠Oma Tsamkxao the basics of video production while he was at Documentary Educational Resources (DER) in Watertown, USA. Temple University’s Department of Anthropology documented ≠Oma Tsamkxao’s visit to the Smithsonian’s Human Studies Film Archives and his viewing of out-takes from the various Marshall expeditions on a 16mm editing table, which occurred during this visit.
[xii] The still photographs taken by the Marshalls were never marketed. Some appeared in print in Marshall Thomas (1963) and Ruby (1993).

The ‘exterminating’ impact of Uys’ The Gods must be crazy (1980) on the Ju/’hoansi, is a topic discussed by Robert Gordon (1992: 1). This film’s use of tongue-in-cheek documentary codes includes the ‘pseudoscientific narrator’ humorously relating the central San character’s first encounters with the signs of modernity (a coke bottle, tyre tracks in the sand, etc.). This narration draws on the naturist perceptions of the Other, so successfully popularised by early anthropology, and by commentators like Ross (1976), and Davis’ informants (1954).[i]

Alby Mangels’ commentary in Adventure bound (1993) sums up the debilitating Western common sense: ‘They do not seem to carry the pressure of the past as we do in the West’. Trapped in time as the Bushmen are, all ‘we’ (the West) can do is ‘dance’ (with them) as the encounter straddles ‘then’ and ‘now’. What is ironic in Mangels’ commentary is that it unwittingly intercepts a root metaphor for Ju/’hoansi symbolic action. The ritual of dancing offers a way of accessing ‘boiling energy’ to effect spiritual contact, healing and to address dislocations in the harmony of quotidian life (cf. Katz et al. 2001; Katz 1982). Mangels’ visualisation of this idea, however, evokes a Western view of the Bushmen as non-rational, given to instinctive impulses rather than intellectual cognition. The result is to exoticise an activity that has serious cultural and spiritual dimensions. I now turn to our negotiation of the multiple texts – popular memory, film, and social – that we encountered in Otjozondjupa.

Development: Dancing with time
Otjozondjupa is serviced by the Nyae Nyae Development Foundation of Namibia (NNDFN) and various state agencies (Health, Environment, and through the often erratic provision of food rations). While we were there in July 1996, the average individual calorie intake was 2,500 a day. This dropped to 1,000 in 1997, when government rations were not delivered (P. Wiessner, Personal comment, 5 April 1998). We interviewed villagers at N/aqmtjoha and the /Aotcha Pan on the films about them, and especially on their perception of the Herero, who were pushing northwards into Otozondjupa with their cattle.

Photo-elicitation techniques applied by Jeursen and Morgan, with regard to a 1992-Spoornet calendar in which ‘Bushmen’ are shown to be living in traditional and environmental splendour, however, revealed no agreement that life ‘long ago’ was better than it is now. The ‘old days’ were a ‘hard existence’, the villagers of Kapteinspos told us.

Some informants at /Aotcha Pan explained that their contemporary settled existence was better in quality than the indeterminate time reflected on the calendar.[ii] Some of these informants included the now elderly people who had first met the Marshalls in the early 1950s – ‘Kaptein’ Kgau//au and !U, amongst others. From his experience of translating the sound tracks at DER in 1994, ≠Oma Tsamkxao observed that he had learned about the history of the Ju/’hoansi from these films: ‘I heard about their complaint of how they lived in the old days and how they live now. I can say now that the Bushmen in the old days had no option or opportunity to have an education or lead a better life … The children can go to school and study’.

The Ju/’hoansi conception of history in terms of “the old days” or “long ago”, is described by Lorna Marshall (1976: 53):
Although they look respectfully to the past, they are not history-minded. They make no effort to hold actual past events systematically in mind or teach them to their children – neither events that concern the living people nor those concerning their forebears. They remember what they happen to remember their father and grandfathers telling them.

This observation was corroborated by John Yellen (1984), who found that no contemporary !Kung informants recognised Stone Age tools excavated in the area.[iii] Lorna Marshall (1976: 52) further observed that her informants from the 1950s showed little interest in the outside world. This world, however, has since become much better known to them.

We explained that by looking so pristinely poor on film the N/aqmtjoha villagers, in fact, came across to Western audiences as living in primitive affluence; a pure condition that such audiences interpreted as idyllic and natural. We explained that Western audiences did not recognise the poverty that they wanted to convey in Hunters of the Kalahari (1995). The result was heated debate and a rejection of our argument. The R10,000 paid to the group by the Discovery Channel for their cooperation on Hunters of the Kalahari, no doubt contradicted our position.[iv]

John Marshall’s response to Hunters of the Kalahari was as hostile as it was to the The Gods must be crazy films (interview, March 1995). Anthropological consultant and authority on Bushmen folk tales Megan Biesele, previous director of the Nyae Nyae Foundation, was berated for her association with the film. Yet, Biesele (1999 – with Hitchcock) had consistently warned the filmmakers of recurring problems: over-sexualising, factual inaccuracies, cultural incongruities, speaking ‘for’ the Ju/’hoansi, and tending towards a romantic The Gods must be crazy-flavour. In Barnard et al. (1996), Biesele and her colleagues stated that the only reason she had associated herself with the film was because of a request from the Nyae Nyae Farmers Cooperative (NNFC), which feared gross misrepresentation. Biesele explained:
The experience showed Biesele, as a translator-after-the-fact, a bit of the frustration felt by the often-voiceless indigenous subjects of ethnographic film. Lacking education, finances, and information, these people have little power to influence images made of them. The bottom line of creative control, particularly in film, seems to be capital, lacking in most communities (and indeed among consultants, translators, and others) (Biesele and Hitchcock 1999: 148).

In the USA, the actors in the reconstructed colonial villages assume multivocality in the way that they sometimes adopt bygone speech accents and grammar – a front-stage performance. They even temporarily distinguish themselves from visitors by forms of address like, ‘in your society and time, but here and now we …’. While the Ju/’hoansi spoke to us in their own contemporary Ju/’hoan language, those who understood English, Afrikaans and Herero were more than happy to talk to us in these tongues. Though wanting to create an impression of the ‘old days’, they nevertheless conducted their transactions in the present. The point is that this front-stage reception (which is often misinterpreted by visitors as ‘hospitality’) may be a strategy of engagement for visitors moving from transient to more permanent forms of exchange. As ≠Oma remarked: ‘People have decided to ask for money or any form of payment because they do not get any benefit from films and books about them’.

Beating about the bush [text]
When Kaitira Kandjii and I interviewed Hereros at /Gam, on ownership rights to this waterhole, we were accused of being spies for the Ju/’hoansi at Baraka (the Foundation’s training centre and the headquarters of the Nyae Nyae Farmer’s Cooperative). This occurred despite the fact that Kandjii had found and was subsequently interviewing members of his own extended clan: ‘Tomaselli’s (white) skin colour became an issue. He was associated with other white people who were fighting for the rights of Bushmen to have a right to the land. Staying at Baraka became a political issue’ (Kandjii 1997).

The Ju/’hoansi at /Gam contradicted the Herero-claim of joint ownership of the waterhole. They were much more accommodating and, indeed, were resisting the Herero take-over by remaining at /Gam. They remained at /Gam regardless of the offer by the NNFC to provide them with facilities and sanctuary within the boundaries of the conservancy further north.

It was the association with the Foundation and popular Ju/’hoansi assent to our visit, that might have made them very careful in muting statements that might have goaded the more powerful Herero. No matter the village or the informant, the stock response to how the Ju/’hoansi identified the Herero, was: ‘No, they did not have any rude words for these people’. This held despite the fact that the Herero had so often dispossessed them in the past, and that they had occasionally engaged in warfare with them. The Herero held, and still hold, San groups in labour and economic bondage. They thus concealed the boo words or common sense othering discourses (for example, Herero as ‘thorn tree’, as one informant eventually described them),[v] the sub-texts we were aiming to identify as an indication of historical social relations between the two groups (Kandjii 1997). Far from the Ju/’hoansi being unaware of the ‘burden of the past’ or the ‘pressures of the future’, their responses suggested an intimate and dynamic knowledge of historically contested terrains and social relations. By cooperating with tourist companies, they also claim common cause with the government to keep the Herero out of Otozondjupa (Benjamin Xishe in Gordon 1996).

One of the reasons we were able to identify this discordant sub-text was because Kandjii and myself were less interested in confirming the 1950s-Marshall ethnographies, than in knowing what the Ju/’hoansi wanted to tell us in their own terms in the mid-1990s. Speaking Afrikaans and Herero proved to be a boon, as it was in these languages that the Ju/’hoansi sometimes undermined or inflected differently what they were telling the official interpreter in Ju/’hoansi (and from there to English).

Translating interpreters/interpreting translations
What and where is Otozondjupa? Geographically, this is clear. Politically, it is less clear. Discursively, it is not clear at all. It is this latter aspect – authenticity – that is under contestation (Biesele et al. 1996). The notion of a ‘conservancy’, which gained currency in the mid-1990s, in which ‘Bushmen’ live in harmony with wildlife, underpins ‘a strange alchemy of traditional Bushmen and modern science, with a team of unlikely scientists’ (Narrator, Dancing at the future, 1996). This alchemy, which rehabilitates psychospiritual ecoscience via cultural tourism, is being pitted against John Marshall’s (1996) modernist counter-argument for farming.

Ecological legitimacy is found in various forms and articulations in relation to cultural tourism: for example, in the guises of conservancy, living museums and cultural ecology.

Conservancy[vi]
The idea of a ‘conservancy’ evokes in the minds of its detractors, the earlier image of a nature park. This zoological portrait works at a number of levels: first, is the expeditionary discourse of early films like The Denver Africa expedition (1926), a safari of observers through a kind of primeval human zoo-land (Gordon 1997b). Laura Bolton’s description of her most treasured and poignant memory with the Bushmen is set in this indeterminate place and time. Tuning into the nightly short-wave music broadcast from Leopoldville occasioned the moment:

Forms moved from the darkness into the light of our campfire against the backdrop of the dark thorn trees. It was the Bushmen moving softly toward me out of the night, silently, stealthily, with movements usually associated with one animal stalking another. My body grew tense, in anticipation, but I soon realised that what had drawn them from the darkness was the radio several feet distant from me. With a shuffling, soundless dance step they moved circling past me, completely absorbed.

I wondered what they were feeling listening to the music, and as if in answer to my question they began to dance. Perhaps they danced in ancient ritual; perhaps they improvised as they went along. I only know that for me in that stupendous moment they danced to this symphony exactly as it should be danced to, with a profound primeval reverence. It was Beethoven’s Ninth, the setting of Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’, in which he proclaimed the brotherhood of men everywhere (Bolton 1969: 178-9).

‘Dance’ is a recurring reference in observations of the Bushmen, and as is explained below, buffers the utterer from any real material commitment in their encounters with the Other. It was this boundary, which melted when Charlize performed the fire dance at Ngwatle in July 2003 (Chapter 4).

Living museums
Theme parks reconstruct earlier pre-modern conditions and lifestyles. These are designed mainly for the tourist’s gaze as through the restoration of villages found in living towns like Colonial Williamsburg in the USA. ‘Living museums’ integrate surviving or relocated dwellings and buildings, with re-enacted forms of petty commodity production, enacted slave-master vignettes, and other social and cultural activities. The question here is whether the ‘citizens’ of these restored parks and towns are forcibly or voluntarily located; and whether they are simply employees entertaining and educating spectators via interpretations of bygone scenarios. How they relate to these roles of domination and subordination for paying audiences, especially those who may make few distinctions between historical reconstruction and Disneyfied entertainment, is a crucial point. At Klein Dobe, for example, a village where the Ju/’hoansi have a partnership with Arno Oosthuizen, owner of Tshumkwe Lodge. He brings tourists to a front-stage next to the village. The village remains a private and concealed back-stage. The front-stage is a clearing with three unoccupied skerms on view. The villagers then dance, sing and perform in the area demarcated for visitor use. Our interviews with some of the performers elicited the response that their public enactments were simply a way of making money. This was confirmed by ‘Kaptein’ Kgau//au of Kapteinspos. Tourist activities (also at Kapteinspos) included the possibility of hunting and gathering with villagers. The lodge owner and some Ju/’hoansi were more romantic – they saw the recuperation of the youngsters belonging to nearly lost traditions, now being rekindled by the elders through the profit motive, as one of the results of this commercial relationship.

The Klein Dobe people clearly distinguished between ‘front-stage’ acting in traditional garb for tourists, and ‘back-stage’ life for themselves where they reclothed in Western dress. Trance dancing mainly occurred back-stage across the track beyond the gaze of tourists, for example. These performers are well aware that they are ‘acting’, and were quite clear on how to negotiate levels of tourist access between front- and back-stages. They thus protected their affirmations of belief in their repertoire of rituals via this performative spatial distinction. The importance of this kind of agency is that trance dances are amongst the mechanisms available to San peoples for coping with the vortex of change (Gordon 1992: 212; Katz 1982; Lewis-Williams 1981; Guenther 1976).

A key question is whether or not the employers of theme citizens and cultural tourism see their business intervention as some form of ‘ethno-survival’ for a pre-historical remnant on the brink of ‘extinction’. If employers or agents make no distinctions between front- and back-stage, then such re-enactments are necessarily advertised and sold in a naturalising way. As has occurred elsewhere, the vitiation of public rituals into paid tourist attractions evacuates people of the very meanings and social practices by which they organise their lives (Greenwood 1978).

The nature of the contractual relationships between Ju/’hoansi cultural troupes and entrepreneurs like Oosthuizen and Stander who have the wherewithal (telephones, faxes, four wheel drive vehicles, financial acumen, and capital) to facilitate cultural tourism, needs further research. The management of the NNFC has attempted to promote tourism, but conflicts have occurred between NNFC and some of the participating communities on the allocation of income. These appear to hinge on the question of decentralisation of authority to ensure that benefits also flow to the participating villages, households, and individuals (Hitchcock n.d.; Biesele and Hitchcock 1999). The perceived inequitable distribution of proceeds elicited strongly argued positions by the Kapteinpos and Klein Dobe villagers on their right to make their own contracts with whomever they wished – while recognising that the Cooperative might have some as yet indeterminate role to play in managing the process more equitably.

Cultural ecology
The more difficult question of cultural ecology is raised by Crawford (1993) – the problem of the Western gaze at ‘nature’ as a form of consumption. The concept of nature in modernity, which helped define non-Western cultures as ‘primitive’ and ‘traditional’ in the first place, secures short-term advantages for Western consumers rather than the long-term survival of humanity in general. The relationship between the Kayapo and the Body Shop may be one particular globalised case; the relations between the lodge owner and the Klein Dobe community, however, occur mainly at the micro-level.

What is required is a structural multi-sectoral development plan for Otozondjupa as a whole. The Living in a Finite Environment Project (LIFE), a USAID and Government of Namibia initiative, is working on capacity building and the possibilities of tourism. However, the assumptions that underlie this sector are often at variance with local beliefs. Dancing at the future (1996), for example, outlines the benefit of a narrow-based conservancy in which the Ju/’hoansi and large carnivores are argued to share a common destiny. This film reveals its (in)authenticity by going back-stage (see Gordon 1997a) to uncover knowledge ‘that we in Western science don’t even know about’ (Stander, Dancing). The hidden dimension of knowledge is seen in terms of its benefit to modern science, and not necessarily in the reverse.

Another contradiction is that the Ju/’hoansi’s popular marketing resources are films and TV-programmes which are an anathema to critical anthropologists, but not necessarily to those depicted, as I have argued with regard to Hunters of the Kalahari. As G/aq’o, the hero of the two Gods-films told us in exasperation, they were just stories (fictions). Why would one say that Western audiences think that the situations in which the Bushmen are narratively located are real? Why would Americans think the films are pro-apartheid? Gods and other films like them, presumably, have a different historical relation to the societies they depict when compared to films like The sound of music and The Salzburg connection, which promote the city of Salzburg as one of Europe’s premier tourist destinations.

Yes, some films might kill (Gordon 1992: 1), but more likely, they rearticulate ‘culture’, ‘identity’, and ‘ideology’ as economic resources in relation to travelling discourses. However, in a postmodern world where consumption is the driving force, very few people or communities are able to escape the effects of mediatisation. Survival now depends on producing symbolic goods which feed the frenzy of cultural and tourist consumption, whether of objects, artefacts, images, performances, or tourism.

‘Seeing is believing’
The media have brought previously remote Fourth World-societies into the global public gaze. But the images circulated tend to be the mythical constructions rather than the self-perceptions of those imaged. Cultures have been turned into commodities even if the subjects of these ways of life do not themselves feel commoditised or integrated into the global relations of image production. As such, one of the recuperations has been the ‘scientific gaze’, now revalidated in a world which places high credibility on the act of ‘seeing’, now also in the context of the recuperation of ‘indigenous knowledge’. ‘Seeing [and hearing] is believing’, especially when offered in the form of documentary, one of the forms mobilized by the Gods-films. For example, the narrator’s mystical animist identification in The art of tracking of the hunter’s strategy – ‘In my imagination, I become the animal I am stalking’ – is linked to the supposed San cosmology that animals derived from humans.[vii] Zoologist Charles Handley, who hunted with the Ju/’hoansi in 1952 while a member of that Marshall Family Expedition, explains more credibly that hunters ‘could actually think like the animal enough so that they soon knew what its strategy was, where it was going. They could take shortcuts and intersect the trail again where they thought it was going to come’ (interview, 26 February 1997).

Handley’s explanation locates experience and interpretation as the talents used by hunters – not some kind of mystical ability unknown to outsiders. This means that the ability to track is learnt, not genetically encoded, and ‘conservation’ in the sense of cultural and geographical mummification is a positivist red herring.

When science as a discourse of realism (positivism) is chosen, which is the resource offered by the Kayapo to The Body Shop in the form of indigenous knowledge about herbs, medicines, perfumes etc., then conservation is impossible because the Other has validity only as an object of study in its ‘raw’ form. However, this relationship can also be a dynamic one which confers some influence to the Kayapo via the economic power of The Body Shop in global relations. Similarly, as ‘Kaptein’ Kgau//au stated, ironically contradicting the dichotomy between tradition and modernity assumed by Stander’s assistant: ‘It is better that you get up … only then things will begin to happen … and [people] will say: “This is how he worked, and these are the plans he made”’ (Dancing at the future 1996).

When ‘anthropology’, also a realism, is chosen, the resource highlighted by Stander and the makers of The art of tracking, then ethno-spiritual/eco-science takes on an ecological legitimacy. ≠Oma Tsamkxao, confirming his allegiance to Marshall’s (1996) anti-tourist position, stated that:
I do not regard cultural tourism as being development … Through cultural tourism people are seen as living in the ‘old days’. Tourists come here to Bushmanland looking for Bushmen who live in a traditional way. If they do not find them, they go to other places and buy (traditional) loincloth and give them to the people to wear.

Recognising this problem, where tourists bluntly invade private cultural back-stages, the Namibian Airlines’ in-flight magazine offers ‘useful advice to travellers visiting Eastern Bushmanland’. Willie Olivier in the Namibian Air in-flight magazine (n.d.) warns that ‘traditional societies are often offended by ill-mannered tourists’ who ‘sneak up’ for photographs and haggle about the price of curios. ≠Oma Tsamkxao, implicitly recognising the tension between back- and front-stages, continues:
If the tourists want Bushmen to dance or sing they should let them do that in the cloth they are wearing. Tourists also demand Bushmen to dance and sing whenever they want them to do so. Bushmen have their own time of dancing. It is not good to decide for people when to dance and sing and also to film them (interviewed by Kandjii, 10 July 1996).

Dancing is usually associated with curing ceremonies, not entertainment for outsiders, unless allocated front-stage. The reference to ‘dancing’ is the driving motif of Dancing at the future. Here it is used as a healing metaphor in restoring social equilibrium ruptured in the clash between ‘tradition’ and the ‘modern’, the ‘past’ and the ‘future’, and ‘us’ and ‘them’. This is itself an affirmative articulation in comparison to the depiction of ‘dancing’ as a metaphor of a ‘lost’ ecological balance, entrapping the ‘Bushmen’ in a perpetual circular motion captured by the camera in the present, but whose significance and culture is located by the presenter in the ‘past’ (for example, Adventure bound). Bolton’s (1969-1979) description of ‘Bushmen’ dancing to Beethoven with ‘profound primeval reverence’ fixes this ‘long ago’ time in the observers’ mind. Or, as Laurens van der Post (1988: 24) puts it, dance provided a way for Bushmen to endure the visitor’s exacting presence. Dance sustained the ‘natural Bushman’ in the face of the ‘wilful’ Western lifestyle which influenced them by day.

The San have become, for the world’s media, a diorama of moral values,[viii] a natural existence for man before the Fall. The genuflection towards ‘conservation’ is perhaps an indication of the West’s own moral failure: it is laundering its own anxieties[ix] through the ‘Bushmen’. It does this by constantly drawing correspondences between ‘genetics’ and ‘community’, an ancient culture ‘rekindled’, and a modern culture that has ‘lost’ its innocence. By keeping the ‘Bushmen’ from ‘extinction’, contemporary filmmakers have encoded a parable, which keeps the idea alive that modernity might still save its own soul, and restore something of the ecological balance destroyed by industrial society. As the films analysed here suggest, this might be done via a mixture of science and priest-craft. Scientists like Flip Stander and Louis Liebenberg are presented in film as the facilitators who can ‘unlock a huge reservoir of Bushman knowledge’ which, as the rider states, ‘could be applied to satisfy the practical demands of Western science’ (Narrator, Dancing at the future, 1996). Even in its regeneration of priest-craft, science remains Cartesian and imperialistic.

Marketing ecological legitimacy
What is a paradox for anthropologists is an opportunity for markets and the subjects of culture. Commoditising traditions – invented or otherwise – is one way of tapping into the economic benefits promised by the postmodern condition.[x] Salzburg, Austria, for example, promotes itself as ‘The sound of music country’, notwithstanding the scant legitimacy of that film in Austria itself. Here, the ‘folkloric’ is the late-20^th-Century merchant character of Salzburg wrapped up in indigenous clothing (Lugar 1992: 195). The myth popularised by the film becomes the reality that tourists come to see. What they come to see becomes the reality that the Salzburgers themselves promote. Film and video perform a similar function for Otozondjupa, though on a minimally organised scale when compared to the Austrian city.[xi] Tourists, photographers and filmmakers visit Tjum!kui to ‘see’ the Bushmen; ‘tourists’ (of the anthropological kind) visit to ‘study’ the Ju/’hoansi, who paradoxically sometimes negotiate their motives in terms of their mythical image of ‘poverty’. ‘Tourists’ (of the botanical kind) walk the terrain to ‘find’ plants via which indigenous medicines can be re-legitimated and re-introduced for villages too far from, and too dependent upon, the Western medicine offered by the Clinic (Mirchoff of Health Unlimited, interview, Tjum!kui, 11 July 1996).

The Bushman ‘image’ projected is derived from the merging of ‘reality’ and myth. It is this myth which can become an income generator for the Ju/’hoansi communities, provided they want to play the role. The heir to the cinematically depicted Von Trapp family in Salzburg is the tourist industry; but the heirs of the Ju/’hoansi could be the Ju/’hoansi themselves. This is the difference, and is what underlies the conflict between the Cooperative and the villagers themselves.

Clash of the Ti-texts
Clashes between John Marshall, who advocates farming, and conservancy advocates (which includes small-scale cattle husbandry), reached a peak in April 1996. Eighteen anthropologists objected to a scene in Marshall’s promotional film, A Kalahari family (1994). This scene depicts the Nyae Nyae Residents’ Committee, firing Axel Thoma, the then director of the Nyae Nyae Development Foundation (Biesele et al. 1996).

Thoma, financially backed by the USAID Living in a Finite Environment Program, had argued for a mixture of cattle and vegetable farming interspersed with game areas. The eighteen anthropologists suggested that Marshall had misrepresented the cause of Thoma’s expulsion (see Biesele 1996 and Marshall’s reply 1996). The struggle between these constituencies cut, of course, across the Ju/’hoansi themselves. The Chairman of the NNFC, /’Angn!ao /’Un, stated:
We do not want to leave off our ancient ways completely: we want to continue teaching them to our children along with the new things they are learning in our Village Schools Project. But outsiders [the Herero] want our resources for cattle … [Cattle] compete, if they are too many, with the wild game of the bush we are trying to protect. We live from these game by hunting them in our ancient ways … We also protect the game so that we can try to control and profit from tourism (nd. Duggan-Cronin Museum, Kimberley).[xii]

This statement encapsulates all of the discourses impacting on the Ju/’hoansi in the 1990s. It is, however, one that admits change, adaptation, and development. /Angn!ao/U’un’s assessment contradicts the ideology reproduced by Stander’s assistant in Dancing. When addressing the camera in her capacity as ‘expert’ she, the cameraman and editor, dances with the problem of the Ju/’hoansi becoming appropriately modern. In failing to locate themselves within the social relationships of Nyae Nyae of which they are part, they are unaware that the condition described by her does not apply to the Ju/’hoansi in the film. Put differently, when ‘man’ exempts ‘himself’ from the activity paradoxically being imposed by him, environmental and human consequences always follow. The ecological legitimacy that Stander is calling for cannot be unproblematically accomplished within this contradiction. One aspect of this contradiction is that foreign big-game hunters have been licensed to shoot lions; but the Ju/’hoansi are denied this, even when lions are killing their livestock. Lions, thus, have been described by ≠Oma Tsamkxao as ‘… the dogs of Western conservation’ (Bixler et al. 1993).

Reaching for star-texts
Negative developmental results have partly to do with the problems realised when people forget the original agenda within which an area of study came about. The need to ‘subdue the earth’, central to the methodological dispute between Galileo and the Church, becomes the objective. Farming, cultural tourism, and other forms of production and exchange in Nyae Nyae, are all products of this process. All are destructive in one way or another – there is no untainted solution.

Anthropology and, to a lesser extent, cultural studies, and least visual sociology, have tried to recover the subjectivity (that is, acknowledge the conscious presence of the body) of the analyst or actor within the system of relations being studied. Postmodern analysis, in contrast, is positively hostile to the idea that concrete ‘authors’ have anything to do with discursive developments. Otozondjupa exhibits aspects of pre-modernism, modernism and even post-modernism. Into this melange, the new ‘alchemy’ of science is meshed with priest-craft via development projects. The admixture offers a wealth of contradictions. As Belinda Jeursen observes:
The image we see so often in South African advertising of men, women and children walking in single file across a desert is not what I was expecting … I also didn’t expect to find a hut crammed to capacity with Ju/’hoansi men, women and children watching an old Bruce Lee film. As we put up our tents in the dark, a ghetto blaster somewhere else in the settlement provided a new set of sounds for the African night.

For a population long held to be the exemplar of the cultural isolate, their current lifestyle is a curious mixture of Hollywood movies (shown at Baraka), encounters with tourists, academics and development workers, shebeens, and a variety of languages, both European and African. Development agencies in the Nyae Nyae, can shape solutions within broader historical processes but they cannot change the general direction of history.

Whatever the outcome of plans for development in Nyae Nyae, it is clear that interests represented in the arguments from all sources include academics, donors, aid agencies, wildlife departments, tourist capital, and the Ju/’hoansi themselves. Outsiders in all manner of media are really conducting the real dance ‘at’ the future: government and foundation reports, film and video, advertising, and scholarly articles. The discourses draw on all three paradigms: science, priest-craft, and ethno-spiritual/eco-science. The boundaries of these grids of signification are becoming increasingly difficult to identify, determined as they are by global and competing ideological and economic interests. The negative case is merging with the positive affirmation in a new ethno-code adopted by significant parties to the encounter and popularised through TV and video (Greenwood 1978: 137).

If we look at the intersection of all these debates and discourses, then perhaps it becomes possible to differentiate between the ends that different actors seek to reach. From the point of view of the Ju/’hoansi, art commerce and cultural tourism become not a resource for operators and entrepreneurs, but something else. What we found can thus be seen as a form of principal tactic that people use within the broader strategy of combining development with survival on their own terms. Maybe ‘Kaptein’, the Klein Dobe community and Angn!ao/Un have already glimpsed the future and have set some planning – and regulation – in motion.

NOTES
[i] Professor L.S. Forsdick, Northwestern University; Dr. M. Gusinde, US National Science Foundation, and Col. W. Morden, leader of the Morden Africa Expedition of the American Museum for Natural History (Davis 1954: 57).
[ii] All respondents pointed out incongruities in the dress, posture, and locations of the subjects depicted.
[iii] Similar lack of recognition occurred in April 1995, when an archaeologist showed flints he had found on Klein Mesetling Pan in Botswana to two Central Kalahari !Kung hunters who had also worked in Namibia.
[iv] The R10,000 had been injudiciously spent within months of receipt in an area where the two meagre shops and scores of shebeens were 80-minutes drive or a day’s walk away. This is the kind of lack of capacity that ≠Oma Tsamkxao was complaining about and which is echoed by someone in a Hunters of the Kalahari outtake: ‘The money is used for drinking and the cattle are just sitting there (not being cared for). This is a bad way to do things’ (Biesele 11.32).
[v] Biesele (1997) further develops this point.
[vi] The conservancy model is explained in Jones (1995), and a variety of Namibian Ministry of Environment and Tourism documents. An agreement was signed in April 1998, between the newly created Nyae Nyae Conservancy, located in the Eastern part of the Otjozondjupa Region, and the La Rochelle Hunting and Guest Farm. This agreement grants the Ju/’hoansi hunting and farming rights, and La Rochelle occupancy of a former hunting camp at Klein Dobe (The Namibian, 15 April 1998).
[vii] Compare this comment with Laurens van der Post (1988: 18-19): ‘The Bushman seemed to know what it actually felt like to be an elephant, a lion, an antelope, a steenbuck, a lizard, a striped mouse, mantic, baobab tree … Even as a child it seemed to me that his world was one without secrets between one form of being and another’.
[viii] This phrase belongs to Jake Homiak.
[ix] This phrase belongs to Tim Burke (2002).
[x] Cultural Villages in 1996 earned about N$200 a day, with about N$60 for each additional participant in hunting and gathering activities.
[xi] Polly Wiessner reports that in Vermont, where she grew up, the relocated Von Trapp family used The sound of music to attract tourists to this town. After the first ten years, younger generations of Von Trapps stood embarrassed as their elders dressed in traditional Austrian garb and sang, just as the Ju/’hoansi youth do. Maria’s youngest son then expanded the lodges and offered riding, cross-country skiing, theatre, music, hiking, and hosted old car shows, but only events of very high standards. The younger generation moves forward, does not remain in the past, and business booms.
[xii] Translated from the original by Biesele.

Post-Birmingham cultural studies have been severely criticised for offering little more than a ‘“white on white” textual orientation’ (Giroux and McLaren 1994: x). Edward Said (1979: 93) writes of a ‘textual attitude’, which prefers ‘the schematic tendency of a text to the disorientations of direct encounters with the human’. The mess and confusion found in everyday life, as well as the supernatural is ‘bracketed out’ because they obscure the clarity of the structure (Husserl 1969). Texts become walls that academics insert between ‘us’ and ‘them’ to protect ‘us’ from having to deal with the ambiguities, contradictions, and confusion of everyday life (Malan 1995; Conquergood 1998; Pollock 1998). Students often delight in the prospect of analysing oral literatures in typed translation, via the application of the usual post-structuralist French gurus. The result inevitably is a white, usually French-shaped Eurocentric reading of oral and other narratives in non-European regions.

Reverse cultural studies: Voices from the field
Academy-bound textualist scholarship claiming to be studying the ‘popular’, though often exquisitely analysed and written, tends to background quotidian empirical significance. Detail, immediacy, and self-reflexivity are as important as is texualised theory, in which human agency is described and recognised, and in which voices from the field, our ‘subjects of observation’, are engaged by researchers as their equals (in human dignity and thus as co-producers of knowledge).

The analytical textualist disjunction between distance and immediacy, separation and immersion, exploitation and collaboration, holds that ‘there is nothing outside the text’ (Jackson 1989: 184). Textualism thus legitimately ignores the flux of human interrelationships and the ways in which meanings are intersubjectively integrated, embodied in gestures and performance, as well as in words (Jousse 1997; Bakhtin 1986: 6). De Saussure’s semiological logic, for example, imprisons us in a nominalist world of linguistic structures. If semiology is itself one such structure, then trying to ‘see through’ it leaves nothing to which reference can be made, except possibly some prior structure in a potentially infinite regress (Shepperson and Tomaselli 1999).

One result of textualism, and especially binary assumptions in some studies and the popular imagination, is to assume the myth that the ‘Bushmen’ have ‘disappeared’ and that when they were ‘living’, they always only had one ‘way of life’. Such analyses, which pepper much contemporary literature, lack historical periodisation, and assume that all San speak/spoke only one language (cf. Wilmsen 1986a for a critique of this position; also see Chapman 1996: 21-31). This homogenizing effect is the result of antecedent theorising about the indigenous other as an undifferentiated mass, an authorising of the textual over its relationship with the contextual, and of assumptions about history.

In the postmodern age of hyper-mediated realities and fractured development periodisations, the Other becomes a resource for discursive rearticulation, integration, and expropriation. The mythical images, sounds, and values offered by so-called First Peoples are appropriated by advertisers to expropriate long-lost mythical images to sell something (in South Africa, for example, cars [Mazda], telephone services [Telkom], toothpaste [Colgate], railways [Spoornet], an Internet book store [Kalahari.net], Game Parks [Kagga Kamma], a cut price airline [Kulula.com], and others). What is sold has nothing to do with the ‘actors’ (whether real or imagined), but with the imperative of capital, which integrates anything that communicates into messages that encourage consumption. Ironically, the very people used to retail such products are themselves largely unable to afford them. They remain materially isolated from the very texts they are promoting, de-linked from consumption despite their performance, and in spite of their textualisation and inter-textualisation. Nothing – not epistemology, not ways of seeing – is unsettled in the exchange. They remain ‘them’; we remain ‘us’, secure in our distanced otherness.

Being there: Pre-textual experience
My studies in visual anthropology arose from my own often-extraordinary experiences in the field as both filmmaker and researcher (cf. Tomaselli 1997: Preface). Students participating in field trips, whose academic growth was often previously confined within a discipline of detached textualism and theoretical hegemonies, more often than not returned to the university; dusty, tired, and homesick. They generally discover that the Text is indeed a prison-house of language. The immediacy of their interactions, the depth of their intercultural encounters, and the empathy which develops from their being touched by the experience, fundamentally changes not only their perception of who and what was previously the Other, but also of the way that textualism insists on the binary relationship of researcher and researched. Systematically delving beyond the text also locates students as participants in the encounter, inexorably within the community and system of relations being studied (McLennan-Dodd 2003; Lange 2003a; cf. also Brown 2001). These students come to realise that as necessary as abstraction is, that it can also be endistancing/alienating/reifying, if not for themselves, then most certainly for their subjects/hosts/collaborators, who constantly complain that they are unable to recognise themselves, their experiences and conditions in the written work of academics studying them. Some students are less sanguine about research outcomes. Belinda Jeursen, for example, counters with regard to inevitable self-interest: ‘Perhaps part of what is being bought is “feeling good about ourselves”, because we are helping the other instead of just exploiting them. We are also buying academic leverage/publishing power’ (e-mail, 12 June 2002). Silikat van Wyk is well aware of this, but he, Belinda Kruiper, Vetkat, Dawid, and others point out the potential worth of academic studies for future generational knowledge on their community.

Finding ways of overcoming the epistemological divide between researchers and researched has been my objective. Researchers, development agencies and filmmakers certainly do have the power to see, to search, and to seize (Conquergood 1998: 3). They sometimes claim ownership of individuals, whole communities, and most certainly of the texts that they have taken from them. This power is well understood and resented by many who are subject to this kind of compulsive extractive gaze (cf. Hurston 1990: 2). The dependency of indigenous peoples on other people’s records, which hold their cultural history, breeds hostility. Suspicions about textual (cultural, linguistic, spiritual) theft become rife, and texts come to be seen as both the means to liberation and subjugation.

Yet even those scholars who are critical of the academic compulsion tend to write in ways not easily accessible to those ‘oppressed people everywhere [who] must watch their backs, cover their tracks, hide their feelings, and veil their meanings’ (Conquergood 1998: 30). How to discuss these issues with our hosts/subjects/ collaborators/co-researchers is a key element of our overall project. I am, of course, aware of the irony that this particular chapter may be just as opaque to our sources as any others. When theory is being enunciated, restricted codes are the usual means of communication.

Recovering experience
One mechanism by which to reduce the distance between our subjects and us is to restore E.P. Thompson’s (1968) notion of ‘experience’[i] to the analysis of structure and determination. Intersubjectival, observer-observed (both ‘us’ of ‘them’ and ‘them’ of ‘us’) interactions, and the nature of negotiations, which engage and lessen these kinds of separations, are constantly being explored. Our assumption is that in studying the ‘other’, we as researchers need to simultaneously interrogate our own subjectivities, identities, and motivations, as we ourselves negotiate and shape our encounters with our subjects. Jeursen, for example, concludes with regard to her own field experiences: ‘Ethically, it was far too uncomfortable for me. “Otherness” was reinforced rather than reduced by my interactions. I became more aware of my “otherness” than theirs’, uncomfortable with my own motivations’ (Jeursen, e-mail, 12 June 2001). For most of us, however, sustained partnerships over the ten-year study period has returned both material and symbolic benefits to our hosts (for example, the publication of Bregin and Kruiper [2004], the exhibition of Vetkat’s art nationally (see Tomaselli 2003; Lange forthcoming), Lange’s large purchases of crafts, mainly from the Ngwatle community, and from specific ≠Khomani crafters for distribution to South African museums and schools, and visits by Belinda and Vetkat to work with students in Durban (piggy-backed on the exhibitions)). The making of videos on individual craftsmen for sale at their roadside stalls was negotiated in 2005, while a full-colour calendar of Vetkat’s art was published in 2004 by an Italian environmental organisation. The funds raised from the sale of the calendar were donated to the establishment of a heritage and art centre at Welkom where Belinda and Vetkat took up residence in mid-2005. They are recipient of donations of various kinds. These are used at the centre and donated to the local school in Welkom. Professional TV-directors, on our recommendation, have been working with Belinda and Vetkat on documenting her book, his art, and broader community issues. The Protea Hotel in Upington bought scores of Vetkat’s prints for display and is promoting this model of social responsibility within the wider hotel group. The multiplier effect for local communities of aspects of our work has been considerable. Our work is distributed to organisations like WIMSA and SASI, and our video documentation on dispossession, land and human rights, and other pressing issues is circulated to appropriate organisations when requested by particular communities.

Apart from their micro-ethnographies and contributions to developmental outcomes, students discuss relationships between observers and observed in terms of agency and dependency, resistance and domination, inclusions/exclusions, of borders and othering. (cf. for example Boloka 2001; Simões 2001a; 2001b; McLennan-Dodd 2004). Some, however, cannot initially see the wood for the trees: the prior theoretical text, the idealised development model is determining irrespective of contrary conditions and concrete evidence which they both witness and experience on the ground. This is the theoretical version of ‘Simple Simon says …’. In such cases, questions to be addressed need to relate to students’ and our subjects’ mimicry of textualism (Taussig 1993: 254-5). For example, the Ju/’hoansi in Nyae Nyae are among the most intensively studied of First Peoples and have learned the discourses of the academic traveller since they first interacted with the eight Marshall Expeditions in the 1950s. Contemporary cultural tourists are often told what they have come to hear – that which is already in the ‘timeless’ text. The text is up for sale, opportunistically dangled by the observed for purposes of exchange.
The Kruipers, in contrast to the !Xoo and Ju/’hoansi, have constituted an economy of organised begging, based on allegations of theft of indigenous knowledge, poverty, and entitlement. For example, our party went tracking with a new venture[ii] at Witdraai in June 2005, only to find themselves part of a marketing text/tactic recovering traditional stereotypes. A Canadian journalist, in addition, felt cajoled, harassed, and humiliated. The defining moment was when the driver barrelled up the dune in a bakkie sporting a bow and arrow. The tracker took the weapon and struck the classic crouching hunting pose. ‘This is not real, it’s put on for us, its phoney’, complained Catherine Dunphy. ‘It’s disrespectful of tourists who are interested in, and compassionate of, their plight. We had just been commodified, much as ‘we’ have commodified them. I doubted the authenticity of the show; there was no intimate cultural connection or attempt to really communicate who they were to us. I did not want a phoney photo op’. (This ‘op’ is in stark contrast to Isak Kruiper’s desire for a meaningful interaction (see below)). The guide also demanded additional payment over and above the tracking/guide fee for the right of the tourists/students/the journalist to take photographs. Each and every shot was to be charged for, at the moment of exposure, with a surcharge added for video. ‘If one has stop every few minutes to dig out money, it kills the intimacy of the aesthetic experience, because one is preoccupied with the transaction’, observed Mashaya. Our group, however, negotiated a flat fee. Yes, the ‘Bushmen’ have stories to tell, but they also have stories to sell.

In research transactions, academics and filmmakers pay for what they already know, sometimes erroneously thinking that they are the only owners of new ‘information’ presented, now in the form of mimicry, which is then simply repackaged and resold to the next visitor. The Kruipers have re-presented themselves in terms of the Western image of ‘all’ Bushmen. Any informal interaction between them and casual travellers passing through the area is conducted as a transaction to be paid for. As Dawid Kruiper told us:
I’ve realised that people just take photos. And then all of a sudden they’re on brochures … I saw this child sitting on the front page … My child’s child, Ladytjie, sits on the front page. And if you look at the thing like that, it’s a brochure, then they just sell the brochure at the airport again to tourists. That’s what I saw. He makes money easily, makes money out of my people. That’s why I decided on a price (Dawid Kruiper, interview, 29 September 2000).

Thus even the most marginalized people have responded to the reach of commodification by placing a value on previously uncommodified relations.[iii]The question confronting students is to be able to determine when informal chats are just that, and when exchange relations are at play. Dawid Kruiper wants to know how the information he is asked about will be used so that he can determine a value: ‘R500? If I had to say, “what did I give? What did I give?” Now, “what did I do?” And the interview that was conducted is flat on the table. Does it just stay here or does it go further? Does the interview go further or does the interview just die on the table?’ (Dawid Kruiper, interview, 29 September 2000). As understood by Dawid, an interview is an oral form, intangible, it is what it is, and it exists in and of itself. It is however the tangible application of the story which finds additional circulation beyond his control and earning power which is of concern to him. He and some of his kin sometimes promote an interview or photograph’s exchange value, but then at a later stage they object to its use value for the purchaser. The purchaser is thereby positioned by the seller as ‘exploiter’ and then required to make restitution for a legitimate purchase. Interviewers or photographers always find themselves in a double bind.

As individuals and communities have come to trust us, to open up to us, and to consider us as possible allies in their discursive struggles with other, perhaps less sensitive researchers, development agencies, journalists etc., the immediate pressure for commodification lessens, though bantering about what we are told we ‘owe’ for ‘taking’ indigenous knowledge sometimes reaches stratospheric proportions. Key to a less mercantile relationship is our willingness to include verbatim quotes via which our informants believe – and can see their positions – to be situationally reflected. This approach means that the words still belong to our sources, while the argument belongs to the writer/s. They no longer inexorably use their (oral) texts/speech/(hard luck) stories as decoys to protect themselves from ‘the white man’ or ‘the black man’ whose hegemony they have to rely on/negate for survival. Such hidden texts are themselves negotiated and struggled over as researchers and researched try to find common ground. Sometimes they manifest as symbolic games (cf. Dyll 2003), and at other times blunt resentment is articulated. Unless the researcher can distinguish between which texts are being offered as red herrings and which are not, they will be deliberately misled, and in addition have paid for the privilege (cf. Grosskurth 1988). However, there remains the myth that one interview results in students being empowered with a whole degree, or better still, with automatic well-paying jobs, suggesting little understanding of how the knowledge industry – or exchange relations – actually work.

Negotiating exchange relations
The question of power relations arises: who exactly is in control during the research encounter? Common sense suggests that the researcher is the dominant partner: they have the funds, the choice and the wherewithal. Researcher-researched negotiations, however, are often a lot more complex – the explicit level of appearance often conceals submerged processes at work. On our first arrival among the ≠Khomani at Witdraai in early 2000, first-time student researchers reported feelings of being controlled, circumscribed, and commodified by those they had come to get to know and interview. They were alienated by this discomforting experience of reversal (Von Strauss 2000). While interviewing Dawid Kruiper, we took four days to negotiate an affordable payment for his interview via his personal assistant, Anna Festus, and then four hours to crack his attempts to feed us his ‘anthro-tourist text’ – to get into questions of context and previously concealed meanings, the ‘hidden transcript’ deployed by marginalized people as a tactic of evasion and camouflage (Scott 1990). As Belinda Kruiper revealed, ‘we’re just making up the story because ai, tog, the people they want to know! … Ninety percent of the time they do not really say truthfully to a so-called white person what their hearts feel. They’re still intimidated by the very past, the white thing’ (Belinda Kruiper, interview, 23 October 2001). We try to examine the said (the text) in relation to the unsaid (performative – mobility, action, agency) (Conquergood 1998: 31). The said is relatively easy to get – one just has to buy it. The unsaid takes a lot longer; it takes trust, empathy, and immediacy. It takes time, participation, and experience; it assumes an acknowledgement of the noumenal (unknowable/spiritual) world, and it privileges knowing through feeling and participation (De Certeau 1988: 235) over comprehending via containment, inscription, abstraction, and closure (Ricoeur 1971). There is also a sense of investment felt by our sources in my students and myself. In June 2005, Silikat wanted to know why Vanessa and Caleb, with whom he had previously worked, no longer visited. I explained that Vanessa had emigrated to Australia and did not yet have a job, but that Caleb was working in Durban as a para-medic; that he and his fiancé had done a month’s voluntary work for the Trust at Ngwatle after his graduation. Silikat sent Vanessa a text message via Mary’s cell phone. Long-term relations are part of community expectations, but the issue of client-patron relations is never far below the surface.

Community reassurance emerges in the face of insecurities wrought by the academics’ recurring mobility, extraction of knowledge, and its valorisation elsewhere. The tendency to commodify relationships then fades. ‘Praat is werk’ (Afrikaans – ‘talking is our profession’), Anna Festus told us in April 2000. The relationship changes significantly when talking is no longer automatically equated with ‘work’ or income. The observers are now allies, friends, and family – at least until allegiances change. Such new relationships can be a whole lot more complicated – and unsettling for researchers. Our subjects build up an entire set of relations and recognitions, a consciousness of who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ in a given environment, anchoring the idea of identity to that of ‘community’. Being not a stranger somewhere entails some level of public conduct and commitment to a ‘comm­unity’. Which community (political, alcoholic, temperate, ‘western/pastoral’, urban, rural, peri-urban, insider/outsider, modern/traditional, ethic, familial) of the many that criss-cross our subjects’ lives and social networks is never quite clear. Manipulation often finds an alibi in participation: how do ‘we’ keep our guard?

Textualism, in contrast, offers a defence against incorporation, manipulation, empathy, and alienation. It may be oblivious to unwitting collaboration in hidden texts, beguiling strategies of co-optation, and the deployment of performance to decentre from the text – ploys known only to the subject community (cf. Conquergood 1998: 26). Textualism offers a way of maintaining difference, distance, and differentiation. It relies on other texts for context. It does not impose researcher loyalty to the community, or require responsibility towards those about whom one is writing. Decentring mechanisms are assumed to find their traces in linguistic structure irrespective of performativity. The quotidian cultural clutter and institutional forms of oppression in which so many marginalized human beings live, love, and die, remain bracketed out of that to be studied. Fieldwork is not considered necessary in this approach. Those excluded, the subjects of fieldwork, however, cannot be easily understood ‘on the basis of what books – texts – say’ (Said 1979: 93). My students and collaborators from literary studies tell me something similar every time we go to the Kalahari. As Nelia Oets puts it:
Although text-bound research (or textualism) may (or may not) change one’s view of and insight into the world around you, it often includes not only personal isolation during your research, but also detachment from, and unawareness of, the real lived experiences of real, marginalized people. It becomes the analysis of structures and power relations … in words and through words only. It does not prepare you for the people you are writing about. These encounters open up unexplored spaces of one’s own subjectivity and generate a whole new set of problems and questions regarding the way that we make meaning, the way that power relations operate and are being used in these encounters (e-mail, 11 June 2002) (cf. also Oets 2003).

Texts tend to conceal their contexts; they provide processed signification instead of spontaneous organic experience, and they interpret in advance of the encounter. Being there, however, as Oets remarks, leads to respect, not only in the sense of their different culture, but for them as individuals.

In stark contrast to the privileging of the Text, autoethnography, reflexivity and participatory methods are unsettling, confusing, and require one to take a stand. They raise our subjects’ expectations, sometimes unrealistically so. Closure is almost impossible to attain, as indicated in recurring questions about the whereabouts and career paths of previous students. Subjects insist on responsibility and emotional energy, they demand political allegiance, and they bring their own sets of inclusions and exclusions, responsibilities and obligations. This new relationship is long-term, unsettling, and unpredictable. Belinda Kruiper indicated to us that the fact that we regularly return to the community, and send back interview transcriptions, letters, and papers that relate to our interactions with them, indicates that they are respected and not exploited. The next time we met Dawid Kruiper in 2002 (and thereafter), no lengthy negotiations and large payments had to occur, even though the interviewer was new to him. During our first visit in 2000 we had to pre-negotiate every interview, pay for every photograph snapped, and painstakingly haggle over conditions of exchange. We felt trapped and controlled, used and abused. Now we have easier access, no longer commodified at each and every level of each and every interaction, except for formal tours such as the one on tracking mentioned above. I wonder about our use-value for the ≠Khomani.

In September 2004 a new gatekeeper attempted to isolate Dawid from us. I was required to pay him R20 for dope by his new personal assistant (PA), a divisive outsider from the Cape, who blatantly controlled access and our initial discussion, telling us that the ‘old’ (SASI, WIMSA, CPA), and the road side sellers were ‘out’, and that the ‘new’ was ‘in’ (a new San traditional house [council], //Makai, established by herself). Certain of the CCMS-party were included ‘in’, but I was informed that I was to be excommunicated because my University had published the Bregin and Kruiper (2004) book, Belinda and Vetket being ‘out’. I was held personally responsible for the book’s unacceptable content, which the PA claimed promoted ‘lies’ and negativity, though I’d had nothing to do with Belinda’s interpretations or the book itself.[iv] (At the time, Belinda, Vetkat and Isak were US guests of Journey into the heart, a shamanistic group.) The next day Dawid and I chatted amiably on the roadside, much to PA’s dismay, who was unable to re-insert the barrier of the previous night. Having sewn confusion in ≠Khomani politics, she was herself excommunicated before even a year had passed. Such is the bewildering complexity of shifting alliances amongst Kalahari communities.

We continue to work with our sources who are as concerned as are we about the ‘new’ politics. In June 2005, Silikat engaged Mary at length on her co-authored article, ‘Meeting points’ (2003), discussing the geometric patterns and the narrative she and her contributors wrote on them. In this context, Belinda Kruiper commented: ‘So you see your own voice going out there linked with words like methodology and stuff, only in contexts because you’ve been partaking … you almost understand what is being said’ (interview, 23 October 2001). They have an original typed record of what they told us, and copies of the resulting publications. The record is in itself a form of memory, and therefore available for mobilisation in a variety of conditions. Silikat indicated that he recognised this value in our work, and then suggested that I donate my Sani to him, as it was now part of Kalahari folklore.

The incessant requests/demands for money, gifts, and sometimes the parading by drunken parents of their dirty kids to manipulate white liberal guilt largely gave way to co-operation, to interest, and to a greater sense of involvement. This accessibility occurred because we had as a team, if of constantly changing researchers, possibly succeeded over the years in establishing our collective bona fides that have been able to withstand attempts by mischievous individuals like the PA to undermine them. Campfire dissemination and discussion of our work, feedback on our unpublished articles from the individuals/communities concerned, via scribbled letters, scratchy cell phone conversations, and invitations to Belinda and Vetkat to work with our students on campus in Durban, suggested to sections of the traditional ≠Khomani that we are listening, absorbing, perhaps in solidarity with their plight. We can facilitate in getting their own points of view across to other academics, development workers, agencies, and the state, which they perceive as not listening, not caring, not delivering: Whether they can identify with our analysis, is another matter.

In discussing our work and videos (shown on portable TV-screens and on laptops with DVDs when we visit), sitting around campfires, our hosts tell us that they feel (relatively) empowered in that they can recognise themselves in these forms of representation:
Suddenly a big envelope comes from the University of Natal, and [our] names are in academic circles. And they’re seeing it. Before that the people come and talk and take photos, but they see nothing. Just seeing your name there brings out a new thing (Belinda Kruiper, interview, 23 October 2001).

Our subjects/hosts know that their voices have not been reconstituted into often incomprehensible abstractions from which they are now absent and, in fact, request that we translate more of our work more often into Afrikaans (cf. for example Tomaselli and Oets 2004). Our research teams are multi-ethnic, multiracial, multigendered, and multilinguistic. We are not just ‘white’ [or ‘black’] men or women trying to know somebody else’s business (Conquergood 1998: 30), even if that is how we were initially seen on arrival at Kagga Kamma in April 1999, and Witdraai in 2000.

Our ‘being there’, camping instead of always staying in the adjacent Molopo Lodge, was particularly significant. Belinda Kruiper said that in their experience with other researchers:
There was never just the human, just hanging out. That’s why I always believe … they’re too quick, they fly into Upington, they pick up the people, and they start recording data. They haven’t had time to necessarily sit at the home and just enjoy the fire first or sleep over. You can’t just make assumptions on flying in or spending three hours and sitting in an air-conditioned vehicle and a hotel in the evening chatting … (interview, 24 July 2001).
This, we all agreed, was the methodology of ‘hanging out’, and an important element in our practice. Things happen, we go with the flow, nothing is set in stone. Paradigm fundamentalism recedes as we try to make sense of often incomprehensible situations, encounters and stories.

Searching for methods: Semiotics from below
How to find a method, which does not impose regimes of theory and interpretation, mimicry, or Western imaginaries on our subjects, is the task we are addressing. My own approach is a visual anthropological semiotics, which proceeds from C.S. Peirce (Hartshorne and Weiss 1931-1935; 1958).[v] Peirce’s phaneron permits the study of mental interpretants by interpreters in contexts, providing a conceptual starting point within which to accommodate the potential indeterminacies of translation (Quine 1969) that exist between tourists/observers/filmmakers/researchers/missionaries on the one hand, and performers and their indigenous communities on the other. The phaneron contains the conditions for signification given the presence of a subject: all that is present to the mind during any encounter is its content. Different interacting minds may have different contents, different interpretations, and different expectations of the same encounters, and therefore, any encounter contains infinite conditions for potential misunderstanding and conflict. Any situation in space and time can contain a great many simultaneous phanerons. It is this phaneroscopic method, not theory, which is our starting point. The theory – in which the concerns of our subjects/hosts are inscribed – emerges from application of method.

Semiotics finds its origins in Peirce’s attempt to replace Kant’s systematic philosophy, and not in the projects possible within it. Although Peirce acknowledged a kind of ‘unknowable’ material reality, he accepted that this reality could not be utterly divorced from experience. (In June 2005, for example, Belinda Kruiper told me that she gave the Bushman shaman book her hundred per cent seal of approval, even as I contemplated its misleading cover, questioned whether the spiritual is ‘real’ or not, and pondered on its mildly New Age appearance.)[vi] Signs, such as the relation between reality and experience, also had to be conceived of as fitting into Peirce’s philosophy. Peirce saw the causal action of concepts not in the arbitrary will of an abstract agent, but in the general conduct of a community of people who seek to find something out about their worlds. Peirce’s work, thus, is more relevant, especially with regard to understanding African ontologies, than that which has emerged from the European tradition after Kant.

Peirceian semiotics begins from the essence of the human pragmatic relation with nature, the environment, and the noumenal world. Signification has substance in practice, within the common habits that evolve and change as practices become elaborated through time. By virtue of the connection between a sign and a habit in the formation of the interpretant, any phaneron will be defined by the pragmatic capacities of the signifying subject present at the time of the phaneron’s realisation. For example, for filmmaker/anthropologist Jean Rouch, surrealism offers filmmakers a means of escaping the formal constraints of conventional film and observation. Via ciné-trance, and the handheld cameras that make this possible, one can detect Rouch’s method for a freeing-up of the constraints of consciousness – a desire to ‘write with the body’, to dream, to tap the unexplored power of the unconscious in its overturning of ‘reality’, of system, of convention (Young 1995: 191; see also Stoller 1992). Healing follows these kinds of rules also (cf. Biesele 1993; Katz 1982; Keeney 2005). For me and Jake Homiak, however, we wonder what role marijuana plays in all this ‘boiling energy’. The substance is rarely mentioned in anthropological studies on trance-dancing, healing, and shamanism. Dope is a ubiquitous commodity in the Kalahari.

Rouch’s use of surreality in film aimed to document the scientifically unexplainable, the immense experiential overload of ritual possession: ciné-trance offers a method to visualise, in the movement between observation and participation and across disjunctive points of view; the crossings-over into the unconscious world, much as we experienced it during the fire dance at Ngwatle (cf. also Sætre 2003; Reinhardt 2003; Lange et al. 2003: 87-90). Subject and Object are reconnected in the phaneron, which can include the noumenal – the possession – which is itself unknowable within normal scientific categories. By these means Rouch believed it to be possible to at least represent the noumenal even if science could not explain the phenomenon as such. Perhaps this is what the film Dancing at the future, was attempting to document.

The necessity for praxis is what makes the phaneron an ideal vehicle within which to conceptualise the idea of a context, since the difficulty associated with the real situation of crucial contexts generating conflicting actions is hard to theorise in the usual textual environment. As long as there is an insistence on all parties in a single juncture having to signify in an identical manner, as Rorty (1980) suggests is the case in the ‘epistemological’ tradition of the West, then the need for uniformity of subjectivities will persist. This uniformity, in turn, can only be conceived of where subjectivity is a disembodied non-material ghost in the machine, not subject to the concrete constraints of the real world within which signs are both generated and propagated. The noumenal is a discourse partly adopted by Belinda Kruiper in her comments about ‘truth’ and ‘from the heart’, as she mobilises essentialism as explanation in her interactions with all manor of visitors, including ourselves.

The phaneron of signification in Africa, then, necessarily includes some degree of indeterminacy in the way expected interpretants will be generated. This would be the case because, if Frans Tempels (1959) was correct, there will be always one subject seeing a whole undissociated ‘common sense’ textualised object, and at least one other experiencing a dynamic relation of force. The point is that without a sympathetic intellectual approach to what Bushmen might experience, there is no way of telling whether a programme affecting them is intelligible to them. This situation is something of a limiting case, in that for the most part the people in question have a history of getting by, irrespective of how the requirements of the political centre (before, during, or after colonisation) have changed in translation.

Africans have become accustomed to seeing well-meaning development agencies, engineers, and sociologists traipsing across their fields and squatter camps. They have become equally accustomed to seeing their efforts fail abjectly. A shift in the ground of the West’s common sense, which will loosen the hegemonic grip of Cartesian objectivity on the activity of intercultural engagement, is one of the requirements of our method. I tell students that dreams are as important to their analyses as any other form of knowing: They are required to be in research mode 24 hours a day. In June 2005, Belinda Kruiper reminded me of a nightmare I had had when we first stayed over at Blinkwater in 2002. Her advice was for me to de-stress, hang out, and let things happen.

The utility of the Peirceian approach is its sensitivity to the material, spiritual, and cultural needs of peoples in worlds where modernity remains both a problem and a goal. Such peoples transcend at least three periodisations: the pre-modern, modern, and postmodern. The problem is that the totalising conception of individuality inherent in post-structuralist thought is rarely found in the field where the tyranny of community sustains some degree of social cohesion in otherwise embattled and often alcohol-driven disintegrating social structures. Self-serving individuality, however, does break out every now and again, mainly in the scramble for scarce resources, political positioning and, on occasion, the need to get intoxicated.

The task, for me if not for all my students, remains the democratic empowerment of those whose marginalization is often exacerbated by theories that condemn people to predetermined speaking positions on account of suspicious theories of culture. Power relations cannot be negated. Like ideology, we can engage them, try to tame them, and negotiate mutual benefit to the best ability of all parties to the encounter. They exist at all levels, enveloping everyone and everything, both explicitly and implicitly. As development worker Fiona Archer points out, the problem is that academic subtexts are often written alongside development texts – the latter are negotiated with sources, but the academic texts which often derive from development texts, often (re)appear in journalism, photo books, TV, and dissertations without warning, approval, or the initial understanding of the subjects. That’s why, she argued, Belinda felt exploited: ‘She had applied herself fully to the development text that was written for the Kalahari – only to find later that she had been part of two texts, unknowingly and unnegotiated with her’ (Fiona Archer, e-mail, 18 June 2002).

In phaneroscopic terms, the twin texts – development, academic/journalism – form the often-ambiguous transtextual location where our sources frequently find themselves positioned by researchers. Researchers/writers, however, rarely make epistemological distinctions between the different texts – outcomes are basically different genres of the same text: Field report, research article, media release, white paper, video production, web entry, etc. This disagreement over category of discourse/genre is a prime example of indeterminacy of translation: the academics’ phaneron, in which everything is interconnected, here becomes an unwitting transgression of the ≠Khomani’s separation of the respective texts into: a) developmental (‘helpful to us’); b) research (‘helpful to “them” in their careers’); and c) extraction/export (‘money making’ by often unknown pictorial and known alleged information thieves.) In a world where most of the Same will do anything to get themselves in the media to secure their 15 minutes of fame, this resistance by the Other to ‘being represented’ has more to do with the consequences of inappropriate development and strategies than it does with not wanting to become famous.

Absorbing exclusion/surviving through structuralism
Third and Fourth World-peoples are argued to be ‘Other’ to the historical ‘Same’ of Europe (Mudimbe 1988). This relationship was predicated upon the differences assumed to define Europeans (the Same) in contradistinction to Africans (the Other). As argued in Chapter 5, two mutually exclusive avenues emerged when the victorious ‘scientific’ order of knowledge was faced with cultures predicated on other kinds of world views: the world view and behaviour of the Other was treated as ‘priest-craft’ (Rorty 1980: 328), and was consequently in need of vanquishment.

Conversely, ‘science’ tried to ‘conserve’ the Other in museums, media, mummification, body moulding for dioramas, and cultural tourism. Saartjie Baartman, a late 17th Century Khoi, for example, was taken to Europe, exhibited at freak shows, forced into prostitution, and even in death suffered further indignity as pathologists cut up and studied her ‘exotic’ genitals, brain, and buttocks. Having been dismembered, she was then resurrected and again put on public/pubic display at a Paris Museum. (Baartman’s body was returned to South Africa in 2002 to a hero’s welcome, where competing constituencies within the Khoisan community contested ownership over her remains.)

Africans have, since colonialism, often absorbed and applied to themselves the categories and methodologies of the European tradition. In a reverse/perverse kind of way, the ‘traditional’ ≠Khomani and some Ju/’hoansi villagers have internalised the Western discourse on ‘Bushmen’, and now represent themselves to the world in terms of this mythical image. (The !Xoo at Ngwatle do perform for cameras and the odd tourist party, but theirs is an organic enactment, not based on media images of ‘the Bushmen’.) For the Kruipers especially, the result is multiple dependencies – economic, cultural and social – which exacerbate Kruiper (and Ju/’hoansi) interactions in a world which now voraciously consumes images of cultural myths re-enacted by supposedly pre-modern peoples who realise that their very ‘primitiveness’ may well be their prime developmental resource in a postmodern economy. ‘Ostri-San: Pink ostriches and real Bushmen’, the title of an unpublished article by Elana Bregin, provides some indication of how such images are constructed:

The name did not bode well, conjuring up disturbing visions of ‘farmed’ Bushmen penned up alongside commercial ostriches … But despite all my misgivings, the chance to meet ‘real’ Bushmen in the flesh was too enticing to resist. So I’d needed little persuading to leap into the battered Sani and head off into the hot blue yonder: destination, to check out Ostri-San, North West Province’s newest ‘cultural’ attraction, described in the brochure as ‘Ostrich Show Farm and Working Bushmen’.

Situated in the scenic heart of the Magaliesberg tourist Mecca … Ostri-San is a unique combination of commercial farming venture, cultural village, museum and exotic spectacle. Turning in past the sign with flying pink Ostrich and bow-wielding Bushmen, we are greeted by the cheerful welcome of Ndebele-design flower boxes and pots in full bloom … we are very glad of the chance to cool off and unwind at the outdoor tables of The Bushman’s Cove Restaurant and Coffee Shop. The décor is, appropriately, Bushman theme … we are not surprised to find a menu heavily weighted on the side of Ostrich cuisine.

… The venture is partly Danie Jacobs’ brainchild … He explains that San and ostriches both inhabit the Kalahari. Both fit uneasily into the conventional categories of nature. And ostriches have always featured large in San survival. So for him, no other name would do.

He shepherds us off to the appropriately named ‘White House’. The long, thatch-roof building is divided into the Ostrich Production Unit, where hatching machines incubate up to a 1,000 eggs at a time; and a section devoted to the Bushman display.

I’m not sorry to leave the clinical environs of the ostrich production unit behind us and wander across to the adjacent Bushman section. Here, the walls are hung with sandstone slabs of Rock Art – facsimiles of the genuine articles found in the sandstone caves of the Cape Cedarberg Mountains and Natal Drakensberg. These are … the work of Danie himself, who has reproduced actual scenes from the caves …

Standing beside a tepee-shaped skerm woven from the thatch of Kalahari dune grass, Danie takes us through an engrossing demonstration of ‘Bushman life as it was’ … One can’t help being awe-struck by the amazing knowledge, skill and enterprise of the Bushmen people, their complete attunement to the environment in which they lived. Everything had its use and nothing was wasted. They epitomised economy, balance, and respect for their environment, belonging without ownership. Ironically, it was these very qualities that spelt their doom. There was no place for them in a mercenary world that saw accumulation, possession, and ambition as the hallmarks of human value.[vii]

Danie leads the way energetically up the gravel path, past the ostrich pens full of long-necked, long-toed, long-lashed birds doing their high-stepping ballet trots or kneeling; stubby wings fanned out in graceful swaying courtship dance. At the top of the slope, is the Bushman ‘village’, where, beside thatch skerms, the people wait around their fire, clad in the expected traditional skins, the younger boys in beaded gxais or loincloths, the women bare-breasted and sporting ostrich skin skirts …

The adults are hard at work, making their popular crafts to sell to the tourists. With great precision, they burn their delicate animal, insect, and human figures onto bone shards and stone slabs; or string necklaces and bracelets from seedpods and eggshell beads …

The Bushmen (the term they themselves prefer to San) … say they enjoy meeting people from other cultures and are eager for the chance to talk to them face to face, so that they can explain what they are about and clear up some of the misconceptions. It hurts them that they are continually talked about and written about by others, without any idea of what is being said. ‘The words never come back to us’, says group leader Isak Kruiper, whose Nama name !Gnoap means Porcupine. ‘People don’t always write the truth about us. But we don’t know what they say, so we have no chance to correct the wrong impressions’. They appreciate it when visitors take the trouble to try and converse with them – even if through an interpreter, so that they have the chance to answer their questions themselves. How is it here for them at Ostri-San? It is not home, they say, and their hearts long for the red dunes of their beloved Kalahari, where every plant, animal, bird, and insect is known to them. But here is where survival is. They have a plentiful supply of Ostrich eggs to paint on, all the Ostrich meat they can eat, and the opportunity to sell their crafts to tourists …

Although not everyone in the party shared my feelings, I found my encounter with the First People a truly unforgettable experience. I felt as though I took a little bit of desert magic home with me.

The magic, however, was short-lived. A few years later we learned that Danie had left Ostri-San, and that in 2005 Coetzee was investigated by social services for exploiting the children who were on display for tourists when they should have been at school. Yet another example of the endless exploitation by white showmen of the Bushmen? Isak, Lys, Silikat, and some others moved back to Witdraai in late 2004.

Being represented is not in itself the issue. Representation is both income-generating and offers the promise of power. Dawid, for example, told us that he wants the Cape Town Museum to make a mould of him, for public display, when he dies. This diorama, previously located in a Museum of Natural History, sparked in the mid-1980s and beyond, intense ideological struggles on the part of the Khoi/San who argued that apart from the negative image of Khoi primitivity being perpetuated, that this kind of museumological representation is sacrilegious. Kruiper, however, sees a financial opportunity, and the possibility of his continued posthumous appeal to protect ‘traditionalism’, by joining his publicly displayed forebears in moulded form. It seems that most of the pressure to ban the diorama came from the urban, Christianised, Cape Khoi community, whereas the San interviewed by anthropologist Frans Prins, are proud to be associated with the diorama and would like it to be reassembled at the !Khwa ttu San Culture and Education Centre just outside Cape Town (e-mail, 14 June 2002). In Baartman’s case, the Western scientific objectifying gaze destroyed the subject. On her ‘liberation’, the subject was again objectified, this time in a struggle between political discourses and constituencies, being fought out by specific claimants of the mantle of First People status. The central issue here is that of ownership (ideological, of origins, and of control of representation).

Postmodernism collapses the distinctions between science and priest-craft. Ethnography is here commodified via the language of cultural tourism, and is thinly dressed up in discourses of ‘conservation’, ‘development’, and ‘eco-tourism’. The ‘Bushmen’ need to be preserved because ‘we’ can learn from (and exploit) their indigenous knowledge. The subject is the living custodian of an object: A science currently unknown to the Western world. The subject/object is then objectified in a scientific (mainly zoological) discourse in order to valorise new forms of knowledge. This new psychospiritual paradigm can be empowering to both observers and observed, though for different reasons (Sehume 2001). It can also be exploitative as modernist science and TV again plunder the knowledge of the indigenous Other (Chapter 5).

Methods we have developed to bridge the difference with our hosts provide a way for our informants to develop and relate to, and develop, written accounts to impact both wider perception and policy via their own record-in-the-making (for example, Bregin and Kruiper 2004). In other words, they have learned to play the scripto-centric game via: a) subverting the textual epistemologies of outside chroniclers and agents; and b) the power and status conferred upon specific members/leaders of the community who have allied themselves to particular textual epistemologies encoded, for example, in the work of development and other agencies. In resisting writers/TV-producers and their texts about them (especially if they claim not to have been paid, or underpaid, for their cooperation), the traditional ≠Khomani – for all their complaining – work with us partially, I suspect, because our own texts are encouraged to document perceived instances of indigenous knowledge theft, inequitable power relations, and other transgressions, whether external, internal, or domestic, to the cooperating community.

Political economy: Negotiating differentiation
Our research has revealed how even marginalized and dependent communities negotiate global processes and structures in pre-modern, modern and postmodern contexts, even in the face of globally determining structures, discourses, and processes (Boloka 2001; Simões 2001b). This work opens up previously unelaborated analytical spaces that account for the nature of social and cultural action between the global and the local, and between often-isolated communities and globalising structures. They provide ways of understanding local communal and individual intersubjective negotiations of global processes, and also suggest strategies for continuing this inter-interstitial research in which ordinary, often marginalized communities’ experiences and statements can be actively included into explanations provided by the political economy-paradigm. Human agency is thereby returned to the analysis, and previously hostile subject-communities begin to appreciate the symbolic value of being included in someone else’s story. Perhaps the outcome is this: The (San) Other now has a vehicle by means of which to respond to and engage the (researchers’) Same. This has very real policy implications.

It also has serious implications for the ways in which we as cultural studies-scholars go about our work. The question is, do we have the capacity to decentre the field’s whiteness, its Eurocentricism and its growing textualist hegemony? If so, this requires that we consider, in this case, our sometimes literate, sometimes a-literate and more usually illiterate subjects, as co-producers of knowledge. They know where they stand in this uneasy relationship, but do we? Reversing the power relations, the intellectual gaze, and the value of our research is not just an intellectual exercise. It’s an ethical one too.

NOTES
[i] Allied concepts are Raymond Williams’ (1958) ‘structures of feeling’, and Richard Hoggart’s (1979) contention that literature is a way of knowing. These concepts are especially useful where historical analysis is concerned and where it is impossible for researcher to experience conditions first-hand.
[ii] Sponsored by the BBC Comic Relief group, most of whom had visited the project.
[iii] Perhaps Kruiper has a point. A recently published book, Bushman Shaman by Bradford Keeney (2005), based on research conducted in Botswana, carries a picture of the Kruipers conducting a dance by firelight in a cave at the Kagga Kamma Park, in the Western Cape, South Africa. The picture is copyrighted to a photographic agency, and its performers were not the subjects of the research. This disjuncture between the community photographed on the cover and those studied is not explained in the book.
[iv] Elana had joined us on a visit to Ostri-San in September 2001, discussed below, and had generated media publicity for Vetkat’s art exhibitions in Durban, where she met Belinda and formed a relationship with her. Oets later drove Elana to Blinkwater in May 2003 where the genesis of the book took shape. The UKZN-Press is an independent organisation.
[v] Students have different ways of relating to their host communities: auto-ethnography (McLennan-Dodd 2003), surrealism (Lange 2003b), via travel writing (Jeursen and Tomaselli 2002), more formal ‘textual’ theories like Pro Poor Tourism (Wang 2002), self-reflexive identity analysis (Ndlela 2002) to comparative identity analysis (Simões 2001a), the psychospiritual (Sehume 2002), and so on.
[vi] I had not been able to secure a copy of this book prior to publication, but the website blurb from New Age Eric Utne of The UTNE Reader states: ‘Keeney’s vision is leading the vanguard in defining and articulating the territory between psychology and the spirit’.
[vii] Danie Jacobs’ association with the Kruiper family goes back many years; a relationship he built up as a youngster during his frequent family holiday visits to the Kalahari. A stint as a tour guide on the Kagga Kama private game farm in the northeastern Cape, where the Kruiper family were ensconced as tourist attractions – cemented the relationship. He still maintained the connection with his old friends the Kruipers, however, most of whom subsequently left Kagga Kama to move onto government-allocated land, where, with no income, infrastructure or development prospects, they were fighting a losing battle for survival in conditions of extreme poverty, degradation, and despair. When the opportunity came to join forces with André Coetzee and his commercial Ostrich Farming enterprise, Danie immediately saw the potential for involving the Bushmen in a sustainable income-generating venture (Bregin).

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This list relates to the first formal interviews conducted. Supplementary interviews were obtained throughout the ten-year study period. The dates of these comments are provided in the text.

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Filmography
Foster, C. and Foster, D. (2000), The great dance, Earthrise Productions.
Lange, M., and Nxumalo, X. (2003), Kalahari fires (edited from footage shot by D. Roome, S. Manhando and KG Tomaselli (1995)).
Liebenberg, L. (1996), The art of tracking, Discovery Channel (54 mins).
Mangels, A. (1993), Adventure bound, Down Under Motion Pictures Inc. (30×60 mins).
Marshall, J. and Gardner, R. (1958) The hunters, Film Study Centre, Harvard University, Peabody Museum (80 mins, 16 mm).
Marshall, J. (1978), N!ai: Story of a !Kung woman, A. (59 mins, 16 mm).
Myburgh, P.J. (1985), People of the Great Sandface, Anglia TV Survival Series.
Pollak, S. (1985), Out of Africa, USA.
Reinhardt, T. and Sætre, M. (2002), The fire dance, CCMS, University of Natal.
Sætre, M. (2003), I am, you are? CCMS, University of Natal.
Stander, F. (1996), Dancing at the future.
Uys, J. (1980). The Gods must be crazy, New Realm, Mimosa, CAT Films (109 mins).
Uys, J. (1983) The Gods must be crazy II.
Waldron, R. (2001), Hunt or die, Wild Dog Productions (7 mins).
Wells, S. (2003), A journey of man, National Geographic.
Wawman, R. and Derrick, W. (1995), Hunters of the Kalahari, Namibian Tribes Series, Discovery Channel (58 mins).
Young, R. (1974), Bushmen of the Kalahari, National Geographic Specials.

TV Series
The bold and the beautiful.
Star trek.
Suburban bliss, Penguin Films, SABC.
Tropical heat.
Rouch in reverse (1995), Diawara, M. Formation Films (52 mins).
Uit en tuis (aka At home and around) (1984), SABC.

Charles Forrest Palmer (December 29, 1892 – June 16, 1973) was an Atlanta real estate developer who became an expert on public housing and organized the building of Techwood Homes, the first public housing project in the United States. He would later head up both the newly created Atlanta Housing Authority and the Chamber of Commerce.

About this book – By Beardsley
ONE OF THE most glaring obstructions to a better
life for millions of our people is the obsolete design and
structure of our cities. Already we are acutely aware that the
conditions of our metropolitan schools, hospitals, transport
and recreation facilities are intolerable. And worst of all are
the slums.

That’s why this book interests me so much. It’s the author’s
adventures in wiping out slums. These are facts, not theories,
because as a practical real-estate man he has done what he
writes about. Reading like a novel, this book proves that
slums cost us taxpayers more to keep than to clear; that the
battle against child delinquency, disease, and vice is the battle
against the slum.

The response to these ills of our cities has been wholesale
flight from the city itself, but not from the city as such. The
city remains “la source” as it has been since time immemorial.
Accordingly, the cities will not wither away; they will be
rebuilt.

The rebuilding of our cities is, therefore, one of the grand
projects for the years immediately ahead. The programs will
be varied creative and imitative. The emphasis will be here
on one objective, there on another.

Where better to start than with the slums! This book of a
businessman’s adventures tells what other countries have
been doing for years, of the little we have done, and of the
big job ahead for all of us.

The book: https://archive.org/adventuresofslum.txt

Democracy in Africa ~ In response to requests from colleagues and friends, we have assembled a reading list on African Politics. This reading list is collated in solidarity with those who are currently attempting to decolonise the university across Africa, and beyond. We welcome your recommendations of outstanding scholarship to add to this bibliography.

NB: Currently, this list focuses on English translations and texts but we are in the midst of developing lists in other languages and would welcome your suggestions below.

Go to: http://democracyinafrica.org/decolonising-the-university-the-african-politics-reading-list/