Helize van Vuuren   

Review

Keyan G Tomaselli. 2005. Where Global Contradictions are Sharpest.

Research Stories from the Kalahari. SAVUSA-

series. Amsterdam: Rozenberg.

Writing in 2001 on "African hunter-gatherers: survival, history, and the politics of identity" Lee and Hitchcock came to the following conclusion:

Cultural diversity old and new represented by the hunting and gathering peoples of Africa is part of the heritage of all humanity. It is important that members of these societies themselves be drawn into the task of  valorizing and preserving their own cultural heritage. Ultimately it is they who will carry forward this work. (2001:280)

Tomaselli's book concentrates for a large part on "drawing in" the San or Bushmen communities with which he and his team have been working since 1995. Three groups feature in Global Contradictions: the Ju/'hoansi (previously known as the !Kung) of the Omaheke area, as well as those of the Nyae Nyae conservancy in Namibia, the Ju/'hoan of Ngwatle in Botswana, and most prominently featured, the extended Kruiper family of the Kalahari (this against the acknowledged perception that the Kruipers are "being researched to death", 2005:108). The Omaheke and Nyae Nyae inhabitants were visited on a trip in 1995 and perhaps again in 1996 (it is not totally clear, and as there is no index to the book, it is difficult to ascertain). This community is the least profiled in Tomaselli's representation, perhaps for good reason, as this group is one of the more familiar from the published literature by many authors and films made through the decades by John Marshall and others. Furthermore, in 1999 Tomaselli was guest editor of a special edition of Visual Anthropology, "Encounters in the Kalahari", in which he contributed extensively on aspects of the Ju/'hoansi such as the Marshall family expedition films, aspects of "psychospiritual ecoscience" in cultural tourism, and "dancing with development".

The Marshall family's visits in 1951, 1952-3 and 1955 literally made inroads in the dunes which soon brought in their wake farmers looking for farm workers. It also heralded the start of intensive research involvement by North American and, later, other researchers, of the Ju/'hoan language, culture, religion, and life style. Marshall Thomas's introductory and slightly romanticising The Harmless People of 1959 was followed in 1976 by her mother's scientific study, Lorna Marshall's The !Kung of Nyae Nyae, Katz's Boiling Energy on trance dancing, Lee's study of The Dobe !Kung, Suzman's "Things from the Bush" and, most pertinent, leading scientific works by Biesele and Gordon. Lately there has been a spurt of popular, cultural tourist books such as Isaacson's The Healing Land and Gall's The Bushmen of Southern Africa. As these communities sink steadily deeper into more impoverished states, the New Ageist nature of the studies on them becomes increasingly alarming, not the least of these Keeney's Bushman Shaman (2005), which ends with this white American-become-Bushman shaman vowing, mystically, "never to leave the Kalahari Dreamtime".

Illustrious careers, spanning many publications, were and are still built on the lot of hunter-gatherers. Yet in spite of all the textual and filmic gestures or developmental intervention, the abject state of the Ju/'hoansi seems to increase unabated. This politically marginalised underclass serves as dark underside of the Western psyche: "Bushmen became the signifier; a romance with alterity. If Bushmen did not exist, we would surely have invented them" (Gordon and Douglas 2000: 250).

As Tomaselli's subtitle points out, Global Contradictions is an amalgam of research stories, originating in daily travel notes, compiled on the laptop, while driving along in the Sani 4x4, or waiting for the broken-down Sani to be fixed. The register is highly diverse, ranging from a daily journal about minutiae of everyday life, such as watching television, to incidents in the Jwaneng hotel bar in Botswana, while waiting to have the Sani fixed; from lyrical passages throughout the text on the nature of the desert wind, to sometimes stultifying theoretical sections pondering the correct methodology for auto-ethnography. The timeline is at times difficult to follow (veering between different trips in different years to the Kalahari), and the structure is loose and heterogeneous: a genre described by the author as "dialogical autoethnography", often revealing more about the researcher and his team than their object of study. There is for instance preoccupation with Tomaselli's Sani 4x4 (and other such vehicles). In colonial times a man on a horse was halfway to being a hero; in postcolonial times the horse has been usurped by the 4x4: a man and his 4x4, against the untamed desert: "If the hero is on a horse [or in a 4x4] he is half way towards convincing the reader of an irresistible manliness" (Calder, quoted in Haarhoff 1991:177). Admittedly the preoccupation with the desert vehicle of choice brings many humorous moments to the text, even allowing for astute media critique such as the comment "In the Kalahari, Toyotas are king" (68), and the analysis of the Himba woman with the gravity defying breasts in the wake of the new Land Rover Freelander in Time magazine of 2000 (66-7)!

The aim of Tomaselli's auto-ethnography of various Bushmen groups and individuals is ostensibly "to reinsert the dialectic into ethically based, politically charged, applied cultural studies, in which we get our hands dirty" (2005:48). And he has quite a few axes, or axles, to grind in the process. His main target is the postmodern literary critic, later called the "post-LitCrit strand" (65) and the "Post-LitCrit paradigm" (71), who suffers from "a debilitating theoreticism", takes no social action, and never get his hands dirty. Whereas he and his group "hang out" around the fireside, camping with the Kruipers, and thus become integrated and accepted by the group, other researchers are in such a rush and stay so distant in their hotels that there is hardly a chance for interaction between researcher and subject group. Yet at times this very close interaction makes it seem as if Tomaselli were so buffeted by the feed-back from (a) his informants and (b) his peer reviewers that the end result is a somewhat vague, seemingly pointless and directionless discourse:

We take our informants' comments and criticisms seriously, and write about them as distinct personalities who have their own agendas, needs and hopes [....] In being buffeted by the angry wind of peer criticism in the writing of an earlier version of this chapter, I have to balance these agendas in one way or another. I therefore take the risk of only one party being satisfied with the way the scale eventually ends up. (97)

This dilemma is somewhat similar to that of Katz, Biesele and St Denis's publication, Healing Makes our Hearts Happy, which aimed to let Ju/'hoan voices be heard and which facilitated "representation so that local voices reach the venues where decisions affecting those communities are made" (1997:194). Tomaselli defines his practice as follows:

We are partly doing "autoethnography", defined by Mary Louise Pratt

(1999) as "a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in

ways that engage with representations others have made of them". At the Blinkwater campfire, Vetkat and Klein Dawid, backed up by Silikat, spontaneously composed songs about us, about research and researchers and about their condition, to the accompaniment of a guitar, a drum [...]

We want to return to listen to, and learn from these melodious

representations of our work and ourselves [...] What can we learn from

them about what they have learned from their encounters with us?

(2005:94; my italics)

Tomaselli here is caught in a solipsistic framework: the study object, the San, seems to have been awarded the place of the knowledgeable ones. Researcher becomes autobiographical subject. His text is informative and reads fairly easily, but it has now become an autobiography of the researcher and his team. What are needed are the unmediated "voices of the San". In Kalahari RainSong Belinda Kruiper's original Afrikaans-orientated world is mediated through a ghost writer or co-writer, Elana Bregin, and translated into English. Bregin's unfamiliarity with either Afrikaans or the Kalahari undermines an autobiography in which, I suggest, the mediation, limits our access to Kruiper's own world view.

Tomaselli addresses the ethical question of intervention in the last section of Global Contradictions: "do we have the capacity to decentre the field's whiteness, its Eurocentricism and its growing textualist hegemony?" He mentions the Bregin & Kuiper text as example of "their own record-in-themaking", which proves that "they have learned to play the scripto-centric game" (149). But would the ethical step not be to facilitate these voices fully, to allow them to speak unencumbered by intervention, rather than to look for "representations of our work and ourselves" and to stop looking for "what we can learn from them"?

References

Bregin, Elana and Belinda Kruiper. 2004. Kalahari RainSong. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Gall, Sandy. 2001. The Bushmen of Southern Africa: Slaughter of the Innocent. London: Chatto & Windus.

Gordon, Robert J and Stuart Sholto Douglas. 2000. The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass. Colorado: Westview Press.

Haarhoff, Dorian. 1991. The Wild South-West: Frontier Myths and Metaphorsin Literature Set in Namibia, 1760-1988. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

Isaacson, Rupert. 2001. The Healing Land: A Kalahari Journey. London: Fourth Estate Foundation.

Katz, Richard. 1982. Boiling Energy: Community Healing among the Kalahari Kung. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Katz, Richard, Megan Biesele, Verna St Denis. 1997. Healing Makes our Hearts Happy: Spirituality and Cultural Transformation among the Kalahari Ju/'hoansi. Rochester: Inner Traditions International.

Keeney, Bradford. 2005. Bushman Shaman: Awakening the Spirit through Ecstatic Dance. Vermont: Destiny Books.

Lee, Richard B. 1984. The Dobe !Kung. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Lee, RB and D Hitchcock. 2001. "African Hunter-gatherers: Survival, History, and the Politics of Identity". In: African Study Monographs 26: 280-7.

Marshall, Lorna. 1976. The !Kung of Nyae Nyae. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Suzman, James. 2000. "Things from the Bush": A Contemporary History of the Omaheke Bushmen. Basel Namibia Studies Series 5. Klosterberg: P. Schlettwein.

Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall. 1959. The Harmless People. London: Secker & Warburg.

Tomaselli, Keyan G (guest editor). 1999. "Encounters in the Kalahari". In: Visual Anthropology 12(2-3):131-64 (edited by Paul Hockings). Newark: Routledge.