Bushman Letters

Interpreting |Xam Narrative

Michael Wessels, Michael Wessels

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781868145065
• eBook ISBN: 9781868146222
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

The Bleek and Lloyd Collection consists of the notebooks in which William 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 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. Bushman Letters addresses a curiously neglected area in the burgeoning literature on the Bleek and Lloyd Collection: the texts themselves. In doing so, the book makes a substantial contribution to the study of oral narratives in general and to the theoretical discourse that informs such studies.

SECTION 1

Text, Myth and Narrative

CHAPTER 1

READING NARRATIVE:
Some Theoretical Considerations

THEORIES OF MYTH AND FOLKLORE

As is only to be expected, the writers who have provided interpretation of the |Xam materials draw on theories of interpretation. This theory is generally implicit in their work and has to be extracted from it. |Xam studies have, for the most part, been characterised by an absence of direct theoretical debate, and categories such as the trickster, myth, literature and folklore are generally deployed without discussion or qualification, as though they were natural and uncontroversial. This is true despite the fact that the categories of literature and mythology served as potent ideological markers in Bleek’s theory of language and race, as Moran’s (2009: 119–27) analysis of this aspect of Bleek’s writing has shown. Interpreters of the |Xam narratives tend to draw liberally, eclectically and uncritically from different theories of mythology, a practice that frequently leads to inconsistencies in their contentions about the |Xam materials. This is not surprising when, as Strenski (1987: 3) observes, the different theorists propose ‘theories and concepts of myth [that] are so different that little can usefully be argued among them’.

Although there is little discussion of theory in the writing on the |Xam materials, certain writers and their theories recur quite often in this literature. In the first part of this chapter I will briefly introduce the theories of these writers as a prelude to the critique of these theories that is offered in the rest of the book. Hewitt and Guenther make use of both functionalist and structuralist analysis in their discussion of the |Xam materials. Hewitt draws explicitly on the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Vladimir Propp, while Guenther follows trends in Lévi-Strauss’s writing, as well as that of Bronislaw Malinowski, but is also critical of them. Lewis-Williams’s analysis of |Xam stories refers to Mircea Eliade and Lévi-Strauss. The writing of Paul Radin, Carl Jung and others on the trickster has also influenced the interpretation of the narratives and will be explored in some detail in chapter 4.

Malinowski based most of his conclusions about myth on the evidence of the Trobriand society in which he lived during the First World War and the distinctions that people there made between different genres of oral literature. The pragmatic functionalist position for which he is most well known, however, emerged more strongly later in his career, when he tried to convince colonial administrations about the importance of employing the findings of scientific anthropology in order to better understand their subjects. His motives seem to have aimed not so much at increasing the efficacy of colonial control as at enhancing sympathy for cultural diversity and the protection of indigenous institutions.

Malinowski (1926: 11) approaches myth chiefly in terms of the practical role it plays in a particular society: ‘an intimate connection exists between the word, the mythos, the sacred tales of a tribe, on the one hand, and their ritual acts, their moral deeds, their social organization, and even their practical activities, on the other.’ This means that he is not primarily concerned with what one might describe as the intrinsic meaning that a myth might contain outside its social context or with its relationship with mythology from different regions of the world — the focus of an earlier generation of anthropologists who were chiefly interested in comparison and synthesis. Malinowski takes some trouble to define the characteristics of myth, arguing that not all the oral literature of a society fulfils the same sort of function. Myths are of a serious and sacred character and contain a truth value for all the members of the society in which they occur (35–36). Myth is not simply a type of fiction: ‘Myth as it exists in a savage community, that is, in its living primitive form, is not merely a story told but a reality lived’ (21).

Malinowski argues that the different elements of a culture constitute an interpenetrating whole, and interference with one aspect undermines the others. Myth is a vital ingredient of a cultural system and is essential to the preservation of its institutions and the fulfilment of the needs of human individuals that have a biological basis. He accords myths of origin or charter myths a critical role in sanctioning the social order. A myth ‘comes into play when rite, ceremony, or a social or moral rule demands justification, warrant of antiquity, reality and sanctity’ (Malinowski 1926: 36). A myth provides more than an aetiological explanation; it is ‘a warrant, a charter, and often even a practical guide to the activities with which it is connected’ (38). Malinowski (2001: 326) imputes to myth a conservative function that is connected with his conception of the conservative nature of traditional societies: ‘The main social force governing all tribal life could be described as the inertia of custom, the love of uniformity of behaviour.’ Malinowski’s ideas about myth appear in different forms in the writing of the chief interpreters of the |Xam narratives, where they are generally reproduced without comment. Guenther, however, as I will show in chapter 6, is critical of aspects of Malinowski’s functionalism.

The other theorist of myth who appears frequently in the writing on the |Xam narratives is, of course, Claude Lévi-Strauss. Although his ideas about mythology are entirely different from Malinowski’s, his conception of the conservative and unchanging nature of traditional societies is quite close to Malinowski’s. Nor does Lévi-Strauss altogether abjure functionalist explanation, despite his insistence that a myth is not a reflection of the social order, but gains its meaning from its relation to other myths. His remarks about the role of myth relate to intellectual and symbolic orders rather than to practical and social life, Malinowski’s focus. Myths function, in Lévi-Strauss’s view (1955: 443), to ‘provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction’.

Lévi-Strauss sought to challenge many of the ideas about ‘primitive’ cultures that served to position them at the bottom of the cultural evolutionary ladder by arguing that such cultures were different, not inferior. Indeed, in many respects, he implies, they are to be preferred to modern societies, since they are egalitarian and value social balance and harmony more than competition. Humans have always thought equally well, argues Lévi-Strauss, even though the content of thought might vary considerably, at least as far as external appearances are concerned.

People in pre-modern, small-scale societies are bricoleurs, using the sensory data that is at hand in their environment in order to elaborate signifying systems that enable them to think about the world in a fashion that might be described as concrete, as opposed to the abstract reflection that characterises scientific and philosophical thought (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 16–22). This ‘savage’ mentality does not seek to change the world or to interpret it in radically new ways so much as to reaffirm it through a process of transformation that re-orders an established and finite symbolic system. Myths, for example, display this process of transformation as they are told and reworked within the framework of a structure of finite possibilities.

Derrida (1976), as I describe in the next chapter, argues that Lévi-Strauss perpetuates a form of ethnocentrism, even as he challenges it, by positing a radical opposition between pre-colonial and modern societies and positioning the former as closer to pure presence. What Lévi-Strauss (1966) terms ‘cold societies’ are characterised not only by the sort of mythological and artistic bricolage to which I have referred, but by their resistance to history. Such societies, according to Lévi-Strauss, seek to maintain their character rather than develop in time. They are more orientated to an inaugural event that separates humans from animals than to history itself. One of the most striking characteristics of cold societies is the absence of writing. In Lévi-Strauss’s view, writing is a necessary condition of social stratification and the asymmetrical distribution of power. This contention famously provoked the criticism of Derrida, who argued that in effect no society exists without writing, even if it does not have a formal writing system. Both speech and writing display a tension and instability between signifier and signified that can be called textual and that characterises all human signifying systems. Foucault (1980) has argued that power is always present in human relations in myriad forms. It does not require the formal political structures whose absence from certain societies is invoked by Lévi-Strauss and linked to freedom from writing.

Much of the writing on the |Xam narratives, I will argue, reproduces Lévi-Strauss’s views about small-scale societies, power and writing. The reading of the narratives themselves also exhibits his influence, especially in relation to his contention that human thought is built on a system of binary oppositions: ‘all mythemes of whatever kind, must, generally speaking, lend themselves to binary operations, since such operations are an inherent feature of the means invented by nature to make possible the functioning of language and thought’ (Lévi-Strauss 1981: 559). Myth explores the contradictions that result from binary thinking through a process of analogical reproduction and dialectical synthesis.

Lévi-Strauss is more concerned with the synchronic aspects of myth than their location in history. In accordance with this bias, he focuses on the connections that link myths together at the deep structural level of mythemes, the basic units of myth that are combined or separated in various ways in order to make life’s contradictions intelligible. He is not as interested in the sequence of events of individual narratives as in the paradigmatic links among narratives that often occur in geographically different places. A narrative, he maintains, that does not make much sense on the syntagmatic level might be illuminated by a paradigmatic comparison with another myth form far afield.¹ Lévi-Strauss’s methodology is clear and his aims universal:

By dividing the myth into sequences not always clearly indicated by the plot, and by relating each sequence to paradigmatic sets capable of giving them a meaning, we eventually found ourselves in a position to define the fundamental characteristics of a myth (Lévi-Strauss 1979: 199).

The perspective that is gained from following this procedure is not available to the purveyors of myths themselves. Lévi-Strauss (1969: 12) claims to be able to show ‘how myths operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact’. The structuralist critic explicitly adopts a privileged position in relation to knowledge, enjoying an objective, external perspective — a stance that has been contested by post-structural and postcolonial critics.

Lévi-Strauss is a ubiquitous presence, not only in relation to the study of myth, but in his influence on a generation of thinkers in a variety of fields. What might broadly be called post-structuralist thought is critical of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, while also relying on many of his insights. My own study of |Xam narratives similarly owes much to aspects of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, but also engages in a critique of it, something that could be said, too, of Michel Foucault’s early work, an important source of the approach I adopt to reading the |Xam texts.

Roger Hewitt’s analysis of the |Xam materials relies quite heavily on Lévi-Strauss’s work, especially for his reading of the |Kaggen stories in terms of the nature–culture binary and also for his reading of |Kaggen as a mediator. His structural breakdown of these same stories, however, is based on Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale. Lévi-Strauss suggested that Propp’s method would have worked better with myths than with the Russian folktales that he actually used because of their stronger oppositions (Dundes 1997: 42). Hewitt might be seen to be adopting Lévi-Strauss’s advice by concentrating on |Xam myths — materials in which he finds the strong oppositions to which Lévi-Strauss refers. As I will argue in chapter 3, however, the |Xam narratives do not altogether conform to the traditional definitions of myth. Alan Dundes (1997: 42) has pointed out that Lévi-Strauss himself deals as often as not with what folklorists would describe as folklore rather than myth in the four volumes of Introduction to a Science of Mythology. Be this as it may, Hewitt reads the narratives in terms of a nature–culture opposition that is inspired by Lévi-Strauss, but adopts as his primary method of approach to the |Kaggen narratives a Proppian-style syntagmatic breakdown of their recurring functions. A function, in this context, ‘is understood as an act of a character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action’ (Propp 1968: 21). One of the defining characteristics of functions is that their ‘sequence’ is ‘always identical’. I shall deliver a critique of this method in relation to Hewitt’s work in chapter 5, arguing against its relegation of the textual detail of a narrative to mere ‘verbal surface’. It could be noted here, however, that one of the salutary effects of the adoption of this method in Hewitt’s work is the focus he maintains on the |Xam corpus itself, resisting the comparitist and universalising tendencies that are evident in some of the other writing on the narratives. This is consistent with Propp’s empiricist approach to the study of Russian folktales, which might be contrasted with Lévi-Strauss’s deductive approach. Lévi-Strauss’s method tends to ignore the sequence of events in individual narratives and to concentrate instead on discovering the underlying paradigmatic oppositions that characterise human thought. Propp (1984: 76) himself said of this difference: ‘My model corresponds to what was modeled and is based on a study of data, whereas the model Lévi-Strauss proposes does not correspond to reality and is based on logical operations not imposed by the data.’ My own approach to analysis, as will become evident in the course of the book, is to forego both Lévi-Strauss’s universalism and Propp’s focus on the plot elements that are common to all the narratives of a local genre and to concentrate instead on the discursive detail of the texts.

GENERAL THEORY

In this book, I deliver a critique of the existing body of writing that concerns itself with reading the |Xam texts, and also read some of these texts myself. Both of these tasks rely on the work of a number of theorists. The overarching framework for my study has been inspired by the work of Derrida, particularly his reading of the writings of Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss in Of Grammatology (1976). The conception of a pre-lapsarian world of pure presence, Derrida argues, has determined, to a considerable degree, the European view of its own history and its construction of the pre-modern. An obsession with a primordial state of unity, proclaimed or repressed, has provided the principal impetus for the study of ‘aboriginals’, as well as a perennial source of images for successive installations of the ‘primitive’ in the modern and postmodern imaginative galleries. A myth of a lost origin underlies Western thought and invests it with unacknowledged metaphysical premises. Derrida contends that the evidence incriminates the materialist and empiricist discourses and practices that claim to exclude a metaphysical dimension as much as it does those systems of thought that base themselves within one.

I will discuss in this book the influence that this ‘metaphysics of presence’ has exerted on the way the figure of the ‘Bushman’ has been constructed and viewed. In particular, I examine the impact of this ideological complex on the collection and interpretation of the |X...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Terminology
• Introduction
• SECTION 1: TEXT, MYTH AND NARRATIVE
• SECTION 2: INTERPRETING THE |XAM NARRATIVES: A DISCUSSION OF THREE BOOKS
• SECTION 3: READING THE NARRATIVES
• SECTION 4: CONTROVERSIES
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index