Professional Documents
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MICHAEL WESSELS
The Bleek and lloyd collection consists of the notebooks in which Wilhelm
Bleek and lucy lloyd transcribed and translated the narratives, cultural
information and personal histories told to them in the 1870s by a number
of |Xam informants. it represents a rare and rich record of an indigenous
language and culture that no longer exists, and has exerted a fascination
for anthropologists and poets alike. Yet how does one begin reading texts
that are at once so compromised and so unique?
Bushman Letters is an important book for it examines not only the |Xam
archive, but also the critical tradition that has grown up around it and the
hermeneutic principles that inform that tradition. Wessels critiques these
BUSHMA N L ETTERS
principles and offers alternative modes of reading. He shows the problems
with the approaches employed by previous critics and, in the course of his
own detailed and poetic readings of a number of narratives, suggests what
their interpretations have left out. The book must be described as metacritical:
it is criticism about the critical tradition that has grown up around the |Xam
archive and in the fields of folklore and mythology more widely.
MICHAEL WESSELS
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BUSHMAN LETTERS
Interpreting |Xam Narrative
MICHAEL WESSELS
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BUSHMAN LETTERS
Interpreting |Xam Narrative
MICHAEL WESSELS
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ISBN 978-1-86814-506-5
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the
provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
The original cover images are San (the 'dancing' Kudu) and Khoekhoen (the abstract figures)
art at Twyfelfontein, Namibia accessed on http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:San_-
_Khoekhoen_rock_art_-_Namibia.jpg#file. The cover art for Bushman Letters has been
reworked by Arlene Mahler-Raviv.
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CONTENTS
FOREWORD viii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xi
INTRODUCTION 1
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CHAPTER 10: THE STORY OF ‘THE GIRL OF THE EARLY RACE 241
WHO MADE STARS’:
The Discursive Character of the |Xam Texts
CONCLUSION 309
BIBLIOGRAPHY 312
INDEX 323
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FOREWORD
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approach has also assumed that ‘oral literature’ should be regarded as being
linked to the past and not fully part of contemporary literary discourse.
Wessels, however, wants an understanding of ‘the signifying practices of the
|Xam discursive tradition itself ’. He argues most convincingly that earlier
hermeneutic practices have been most interested in overarching patterns
and structures, and not in the essence of ‘the thing itself ’. He brings to bear
on the productive world of the |Xam narratives and their mediators the
work of key contemporary thinkers such as Spivak, Foucault and Bourdieu.
He sees the texts themselves as sites of creativity and contestation, which
critics and readers have to keep in mind as they engage with the narratives
– and, indeed, with similar cultural forms and traditions across the region.
Like all fine scholars, Wessels does not see his own work in isolation, but
situates it in a wider critical tradition, in his case one that has grown up
around the |Xam archive and the hermeneutic principles that inform that
tradition. He draws illuminatingly on the classic seminal work of scholars
such as Hewitt and Guenther, and interrogates their positions. Finely,
carefully and generously, he critiques these interpretations through
offering alternative modes of reading, thus providing a kind of
metacriticism of what has gone before. He asks us to assume that there may
perhaps not have been a social function to the narratives. Neither, he
argues, can we assume that the narratives fit into patterns of universal
storytelling – this particularly for the stories around the ‘trickster’ figure,
/Kaggen, and his family. And neither, he assures us, can we assume that the
narratives mesh in some way with the archives of rock painting or sit
comfortably with the narratives of other San people. Examine their
textuality, he tells us, and do not always see them as the representation of
something else – particularly as a representation of lost origins. In
connection with the idea of the myth of origins, he engages in particular
with the deconstructionist ideas of Derrida, who is one of the main
influences on his work. Observe also the narratives’ intertextuality within
the broader context of |Xam discourse, he urges.
Startlingly, Wessels argues that the stories on which he focuses from the
huge Bleek and Lloyd corpus, now digitised, belong not to the past, but to
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Liz Gunner
WISER,
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY
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My decision to use the term ‘Bushman’ has been influenced by the fact
that it is the term used in my primary source, the archive known as the
Bleek and Lloyd Collection. In addition, this book explores the ideological
component of the category of person to which the words ‘Bushman’ and
‘San’ refer. Both terms have the ability to carry the idealised version of the
figure of the southern African hunter-gatherer that is examined in the
book, but the term ‘Bushman’, in my view, is more appropriate a term to
employ in the discussion, also conducted in the book, of earlier views of the
‘Bushman’ — views that were either explicitly racist or were coloured by
Darwinian evolutionary ideas
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