In spite of its evident presence in Southern Africa’s rich cultural heritage, the bird metaphor has received surprisingly little attention. The cultural materials analysed in this article include children’s stories, songs, heroic poetry and ethnographic accounts of rites of passage. At first the data seems to suggest that bird symbolism could be interpreted in terms of a simple dual conception of gender identity. Some magical birds signify the prowess and authority of men. Others could be linked symbolically to the procreative powers of women. On further reflection, however, we identified a third category of more ambiguously gendered birds. It is contended that this additional bird type can be explained in terms of the female-male dialectic that shaped gender relations in small-scale societies. It is further proposed tentatively that the bird metaphor could have provided women with a symbolic means to negotiate their identity.
For more than three decades now, researchers supporting the mainstream theoretical orientation in the field of rock art studies, the shamanistic model, have largely ignored the possibility that the idiom of the hunt could contribute meaningfully to the task of deciphering the often complex and enigmatic masterpieces of the San hunter-gatherers. They may have been mistaken all along. This paper argues that a good deal of the art produced by the hunters related intimately to the hunt, even though this may seem, to some, too obvious or inconsequential an objective to pursue. Importantly, the alternative vantage point on the paintings of the San which is introduced here
aligns itself with the spiritual thinking of the creators of the art. While it is not the intention of the authors of this paper to present a systematic critique of the leading paradigm, they feel strongly that the discussion will benefit from a dialectical engagement with the latter. A selection of five rock art panels is first examined conventionally, i.e. in terms of the shamanistic model. The very same art works are revisited subsequently in order to explore them from an alternative, animistic
perspective. It is concluded, tentatively, that the artists’ visual language emphasized the
significance of the narrative focus of their work, namely the various manifestations of hunter-prey sociability, the spiritual grounding of which characterized, if not defined life in traditional hunting communities across the globe.
The purpose of this essay is to illustrate and explore the representation of women in a selection of eight African children’s stories from Vhembe, in the Limpopo Province. The discussion is shaped primarily by the shared knowledge of the female elders who provided the narratives and participated in their analysis. The argument put forward is plain and simple: storytelling is one of many stratagems by means of which rural women—far from being passive spectators, nor willing consumers of a patriarchal world view—have created an autonomous physical and symbolic space for themselves, in opposition to the “stronger sex”. By combining anthropological analysis with indigenous exegesis, it was established that some of the selected narratives reveal the voices of women’s “protest”, the nature of which is subtle and understated rather than rebellious or subversive.
Ever since the first artefacts and structures of Çatalhöyük were excavated by James Mellaart in the 1960s, researchers have debated why sedentary farmers, whose diet included domesticated plants, sheep and goat, displayed a myriad of aurochs bull and other hunting trophies inside some of their houses. Equally puzzling have been two parallel developments in the later habitation levels. On the one hand the excavators noted how the wild animal trophies gradually decreased in number and eventually faded away towards the final Neolithic occupation. On the other hand they established that the material and symbolic presence of women in this prehistoric town was growing stronger. It is proposed that these two processes were connected and that they can be elucidated in terms of the female–male dialectic which may have generated them.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.