Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San

Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San PDF Author: Roger Hewitt
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1776141261
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Analyses texts drawn from the Bleek and Lloyd Archive, arguably one of the most important collections for the understanding of South African cultural heritage and in particular the traditions of the /Xam, South Africas first people. Initially appearing in a now rare 1986 edition and here re-issued for the first time, the doctoral thesis on which the book is based became the catalyst for much scholarly research. The book offers an analysis of the entire corpus of /Xam narratives found in the Bleek and Lloyd collection, focusing particularly on the cycle of narratives concerning the trickster /Kaggen (Mantis). These are examined on three levels from the 'deep structures' with resonances in other areas of /Xam culture and supernatural belief, through the recurring patterns of narrative composition apparent across the cycle and finally touching on the observable differences in the performances by the various /Xam collaborators. Hewitt's text remains the only comprehensive and detailed study of /Xam narrative, and it has become itself the object of study by researchers and PhD candidates in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Canada and elsewhere. This new edition at last makes Hewitt's important work more widely available. It will be a welcome addition to the recently burgeoning literature on the place of the /Xam hunter-gatherers in the complex history of South African culture and society.

Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San

Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San PDF Author: Roger Hewitt
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1776141261
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Get Book Here

Book Description
Analyses texts drawn from the Bleek and Lloyd Archive, arguably one of the most important collections for the understanding of South African cultural heritage and in particular the traditions of the /Xam, South Africas first people. Initially appearing in a now rare 1986 edition and here re-issued for the first time, the doctoral thesis on which the book is based became the catalyst for much scholarly research. The book offers an analysis of the entire corpus of /Xam narratives found in the Bleek and Lloyd collection, focusing particularly on the cycle of narratives concerning the trickster /Kaggen (Mantis). These are examined on three levels from the 'deep structures' with resonances in other areas of /Xam culture and supernatural belief, through the recurring patterns of narrative composition apparent across the cycle and finally touching on the observable differences in the performances by the various /Xam collaborators. Hewitt's text remains the only comprehensive and detailed study of /Xam narrative, and it has become itself the object of study by researchers and PhD candidates in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Canada and elsewhere. This new edition at last makes Hewitt's important work more widely available. It will be a welcome addition to the recently burgeoning literature on the place of the /Xam hunter-gatherers in the complex history of South African culture and society.

San Representation

San Representation PDF Author: Keyan Tomaselli
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317483278
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
The San or Bushmen of southern Africa have exerted a fascination over generations of writers and scholars, from novelists and anarchists to ethnologists and geneticists, and also occupy a special place in the popular imagination as the First People and the contemporary remnant of spiritual and natural man. The ways in which particular groups of people from southern Africa have been traditionally categorised and positioned as objects of scrutiny by a range of academic disciplines is increasingly being contested and questioned. There is a growing awareness of the cultural, economic and genetic entanglement of the peoples of the region. This book examines how San and Khoe people are represented, by others, as well as by those who identify as San or Khoe. The book interrogates the ways in which disciplines, through their methodologies and ways of authorising knowledge, not only "discover" or "reveal" knowledge but produce it in ways that involve complex and often ambiguous relationships with power structures and forms of intellectual, symbolic and cultural capital. One major trend that emerges is that the San and Khoe can no longer be seen as people of the past but have to be acknowledged as contemporary and socially situated individuals and communities who are increasingly contesting the representations which others have imposed on them. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Arts: A Journal of South-North Cultural and Media Studies.

The Evolution of Language

The Evolution of Language PDF Author: Andrew D. M. Smith
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9814295221
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 553

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Book Description
Balancing arbitrariness and systematicity in language evolution / Padraic Monaghan, Morten H. Christiansen, Stanka Fitneva -- Speaker-independent perception of human speech by zebra finches / Verena R. Ohms [und weitere] -- An avian model for language evolution / Irene Pepperberg -- Grooming gestures of chimpanzees in the wild : first insights into meaning and function / Simone Pika, Chris Knight -- The relevance ofthe developmental stress hypothesis to the evolution of language / Anne Pritchard -- Co-evolution of language and social network structure through cultural transmission / Justin Quillinan, Simon Kirby, Kenny Smith -- The origins of sociolinguistic marking and its role in language divergence : an experimental study / Gareth Roberts -- Considering language evolution from birdsong development / Kazutoshi Sasahara [und weitere] -- Semantic bootstrapping of grammar in embodied robots / Yo Sato, Joe Saunders -- Why do wild chimpanzees produce food-associated calls : a case of vocal grooming? / Anne Schel, Klaus Zuberbühler, Katie E. Slocombe -- The importance of exploring non-linguistic functions of human brain language areas for explaining language evolution / P. Thomas Schoenemann -- Language evolution : the view from adult second language learners / Marieke Schouwstra -- The evolution of communication and relevance / Thomas Scoff-Phillips -- Pragmatics not semantics as the basis for clause structure / Thomas Scoff-Phillips [und weitere]

Hunters and Herders of Southern Africa

Hunters and Herders of Southern Africa PDF Author: Alan Barnard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521428651
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
A study of the influence of environment on culture and social organization among the Khoisan, a cluster of southern African peoples, comprised of the Bushmen or San "hunters," the Khoekhoe "herders", and the Damara, (also herders).

The Broken String

The Broken String PDF Author: Neil Bennun
Publisher: Neil Bennun
ISBN: 9780670912506
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
The San people were a South African tribe who lived in the scrubland and communicated in a distinct click language. During the nineteenth century they were labelled as sub-human and hunted as animals by the Boers and the British. sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd, befriended some San bushmen and gradually began to document their language, resulting in an extraordinary archive of material. beautiful rock art and powerful fables. The fables will run throughout the book.

Dorothea Bleek

Dorothea Bleek PDF Author: Jill Weintroub
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1868148807
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
Dorothea Bleek (1873–1948) devoted her life to completing the ‘bushman researches’ that her father and aunt had begun in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. This research was partly a labour of familial loyalty to Wilhelm, the acclaimed linguist and language scholar of nineteenth-century Germany and later of the Cape Colony, and to Lucy Lloyd, a self-taught linguist and scholar of bushman languages and folklore; but it was also an expression of Dorothea’s commitment to a particular kind of scholarship and an intellectual milieu that saw her spending her entire adult life in the study of the people she called‘bushmen’. How has history treated Dorothea Bleek? Has she been recognised as a scholar in her own right, or as someone who merely followed in the footsteps of her famous father and aunt? Was she an adventurer, a woman who travelled across southern Africa driven by intellectual curiosity to learn all she could about the bushmen? Or was she conservative, a researcher who belittled the people she studied and dismissed them as lazy and improvident? These are some of the questions with which Jill Weintroub starts her thoughtful biography of Dorothea Bleek. The book examines Dorothea Bleek’s life story and family legacy, her rock art research and her fieldwork in southern Africa, and, in light of these, evaluates her scholarship and contribution to the history of ideas in South Africa. The compelling and surprising narrative reveals an intellectual inheritance intertwined with the story of a woman’s life, and argues that Dorothea’s life work – her study of the bushmen – was also a sometimes surprising emotional quest.

Human Origins

Human Origins PDF Author: Camilla Power
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785333798
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Human Origins brings together new thinking by social anthropologists and other scholars on the evolution of human culture and society. No other discipline has more relevant expertise to consider the emergence of humans as the symbolic species. Yet, social anthropologists have been conspicuously absent from debates about the origins of modern humans. These contributions explore why that is, and how social anthropology can shed light on early kinship and economic relations, gender politics, ritual, cosmology, ethnobiology, medicine, and the evolution of language.

The Archaeology of Rock-Art

The Archaeology of Rock-Art PDF Author: Christopher Chippindale
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521576192
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
Pictures, painted and carved in caves and on open rock surfaces, are amongst our loveliest relics from prehistory. This pioneering set of sparkling essays goes beyond guesses as to what the pictures mean, instead exploring how we can reliably learn from rock-art as a material record of distant times: in short, rock-art as archaeology. Sometimes contact-period records offer some direct insight about indigenous meaning, so we can learn in that informed way. More often, we have no direct record, and instead have to use formal methods to learn from the evidence of the pictures themselves. The book's eighteen papers range wide in space and time, from the Palaeolithic of Europe to nineteenth-century Australia. Using varied approaches within the consistent framework of informed and proven methods, they make key advances in using the striking and reticent evidence of rock-art to archaeological benefit.

The Archaeology of Southern Africa

The Archaeology of Southern Africa PDF Author: Peter Mitchell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 100932473X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 585

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Book Description
This revised and updated edition provides a comprehensive synthesis of Southern Africa's archaeology over more than 3 million years.

Claim to the Country

Claim to the Country PDF Author: Pippa Skotnes
Publisher: Jacana Media
ISBN: 1770093370
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
Consists of all the notebook pages, watercolours and drawings that comprise the bulk of the Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek /Xam and !Kun (Bushmen) archive, with photographs, documents, letters and notes, as well as contextualizing essays and an index for the included narratives and contributors.