The Myth of Ritual Origins? Ethnography, Mythology and Interpretation of San Rock Art

The Story of “!Khwe // na ssho !kui who Brought Home a Young Lion to Use as a Dog”: Character, Identity and Knowledge in a /Xam Narrative

“…He interprets them in terms of the resolution of social contradictions and also finds in the stories a vertical meaning related to the trance experience of /Xam shamans. This contrasts with the work of Anne Solomon (1997Solomon ( , 2008Solomon ( , 2009, whose work on the /Xam materials suggests that the phenomenon of the sorcerer (or shaman) may have, in many cases, been mistakenly interpreted as referring to living practitioners rather than to ancestral spirits. Michael Wessels (2010) has also provided commentaries on a number of narratives relating to the sun, moon and stars and to the /Kaggen stories.…”

Smoking Around the Campfire: A San Encounter with the Colonial

“…Nevertheless, in Mitchell's view, the art is essentially San and has to be understood primarily in terms of San belief systems and cultural practices, a view that is supported by the dominant shamanistic interpretation of the same images by David Lewis-Williams and his collaborators (see for example, Lewis-Williams 1981Lewis-Williams & Dowson 1989), which hinges on a distinctively San spirituality and collates Qing and Dia!kwain's comments on Orpen's copies with San ethnography from the Kalahari and material from the Bleek and Lloyd archive. Anne Solomon's (1997Solomon's ( : 199, 2007 contention that much of the rock art depicts the world of the dead rather than trance practice and visions is also based on her reading of the mythology that appears in Orpen's article and in the Bleek-Lloyd collection rather than on the influence of Bantu culture on the art. Mitchell (2009) points out that for much of the precolonial period Bantu-speaking agropastoralists were confined to warmer areas of the country because their crops were intolerant of cold conditions.…”

The death of trance: recent perspectives on San ethnographies and rock arts

“…Skotnes voiced doubts about /Xam trance ritual in 1996. In 1997 I first proposed that the evidence for shamanism rested on Lewis-Williams mistaking accounts of spirits and/or mythological beings for accounts of trance (Solomon 1997). Literary scholars too have questioned shamanistic readings (notably, for example, Wessels 2010).…”