Other theoretical debts

Although the work of Derrida supplies the chief theoretical impetus for this thesis, I

have also relied heavily on the work of other writers. I shall now describe the

aspects of these writers' work on which I have frequently drawn. In the chapters

that follow, I refer to many different thinkers and critics, but the three whose work I

shall discuss in the rest of this chapter have been particularly central to the way in

which I have approached my project. Their work, with Derrida's, forms the

backdrop to the thesis and informs its thinking, whereas I employ the work of other writers in specific contexts for particular purposes.

i. Foucault

Power, for Foucault, is enmeshed with knowledge. Knowledge always appears within the context of socially legitimated and institutional systems of thought (Appignanesi and Garratt 1995: 82). These systems of thought or epistemes consist of the possible discourses that dominate an era. Epistemes are demarcated by what they exclude as much as by what they include. The creation of categories of the abnormal such as the insane, sick or criminal served to delineate the European episteme that was dominant for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (1973; 1975; 1977). As the work of Edward Said (1991; 1993), Gayatri Spivak (1988; 1999) and others have shown, the ideological support for the enterprise of imperialism relied on a similar mechanisms of exclusion and demarcation. Spivak (1999) goes so far as to suggest that Foucault's "clinic, the asylum, the prison, the university - all seem to be screen-allegories that foreclose a reading of the broader narratives of imperialism" (278). The notion of the primitive, in particular, has been central to the construction of reason (as was a specific formulation of madness) and to the idea of civilisation.

Foucault investigates how specific individuals such as doctors gain the authority to produce particular kinds of discourse. Similar questions need to be asked

concerning the processes of academic legitimation whereby individuals become the source of truths and authoritative statements about the /Xam and their narratives.

Who is qualified to make such pronouncements? "[F]rom whom ... does he receive the presumption that what he says is true? What is the status of the individuals who

... have the right, sanctioned by law or tradition, juridically defined or

89 .The anthropometric photographic method mentioned in chapter 1, involving Bleek and /Xam prisoners, was used also, as Foucault describes, in studies of the criminal and the insane, for similar reasons.

spontaneously accepted, to proffer such a discourse?" (Foucault 1976: 50). Besides the institutional factors, which I will discuss in a consideration of Bourdieu's work in the next section of this chapter, part of the answer lies, Foucault's work suggests, within the operation of discourse itself.

Statements organised in particular ways gain their legitimation from their location within the discursive formation and from their adherence to particular relations.

They belong always to a series and play a role among other statements. There are established "procedures of intervention that may be legitimately applied to

statements" (58, emphasis in the original). These "rules of formation operate ... on all individuals who undertake to speak in this discursive field" (63). The

individual's adherence to these rules sanctions his discourse and consecrates the

"knowledge" it produces. This does not mean that a discourse is a static and rigid system. Although it possesses "its own rules of appearance", it has "also its own conditions of appropriation and operation" and these are "the object of a struggle, a political struggle" (120). Contradiction is not an anomaly in discourse but its necessary condition since it is in order "to overcome contradiction that discourse begins to speak" (151). A discursive formation is "a space of multiple dissensions"

(155) whose "purpose is to maintain discourse in all its many irregularities" (156).

The field of Bushman studies with its debates and tendencies displays, as would be expected, the qualities that characterise a discursive formation. All the work in the field, including this thesis, gains its legitimation from its place within this

formation, which also circumscribes what it may and may not do.

The /Xam narratives, too, I will argue, belong to a discursive field. They are not, timeless, archetypal artefacts, as their designation as folklore or myth suggests (see chapter 6), but discourse and thus, sites of ideological production and contestation.

90 Although the stories are retold by different narrators in different ways, there are,

90 In this regard, Barber (1991) observes that 'literary texts" are inherently discursive" (3). Oral texts are no exception. She notes the presence of struggle in the oriki texts she studies (5). Not much attention has been given to this aspect of the /Xam stories. Jeursen's study (1994) is a notable

I would argue, following Foucault, implicit rules which govern the "procedures of intervention that may be legitimately applied to (their) statements" (58, emphasis in original). The individuality of the narrators has been emphasised by some

commentators as an antidote, no doubt, to the generic, anonymous, archetypal figure of the Bushman informant. x //Kabbo, Bleek and Lloyd's most celebrated narrator, has been assumed into the South African literary canon and accorded the autobiography denied Spivak's ethnographic native informant. Nevertheless, the limits that apply to the enunciating subject in all discourse applies to the /Xam storyteller (but not to him alone as the designation of "traditional" narratives as myths often implies) who "brings into existence outside himself an object that belongs to a previously defined domain, whose laws of possibility have already been articulated, and whose characteristics precede the enunciation that posits it. ...

the subject of the statement ... is not in fact the cause, origin, or starting-point of the written or spoken articulation" (Foucault 1976: 95). Could //Kabbo have been enunciating something similar when he talks about "stories that float from afar?"

This is a question I shall explore in a later chapter.

The attributes Foucault accords to discursive practices are applicable, then, to both the interpretation of the narratives and to the narratives themselves. Discourse "is characterised not by privileged objects, but by the way in which it forms objects that are in fact highly dispersed" (Foucault 1976: 44). "These relations are established between institutions, economic and social processes, behavioural patterns, systems of norms, techniques, types of classification, modes of

exception. As indicated in chapter 1, section B, ii, c, Jeursen reads the stories related to female initiation rites, in particular, as a conflict between individual freedom and gender-biased traditions (1995: 40).

91 See Spivak's description of this figure in section c below. The Bleek and Lloyd informants have always been named, a consequence perhaps of the unusual ethnographic circumstances in which they delivered their stories. They were residents in the Bleek and Lloyd household for extended periods rather than anonymous informants encountered fleetingly on a Victorian field trip.

9~ //Kabbo receives autobiographical treatment, for instance, in Scheub (1990).

93 See chapter 6, section iii.

characterisation; and these relations are not present in the object" (45) but are formalised in discourse itself. The rules of discursive practice "define not the dumb existence of a reality... but the ordering of objects" (49). I attempt to show in the following chapters how the practice of hermeneutics itself brings together objects in accordance with the rules of particular analytical discourses rather than discovers meanings inherent in the interpreted materials. The narratives, too, arrange and bring together a great many dispersed objects. Women and meat, for instance, are often juxtaposed in the /Xam narratives, as they are in the Ju/'hoansi stories in which Biesele (1993) tracks this congruence.

4

A correspondence between certain stars and animals provides another example, as does the sympathetic complex surrounding the relationship between a hunter and a large game animal he has shot.

9

Accordingly, I attempt to pursue a line of enquiry in relation to the /Xam narratives that considers the ways in which the narratives form and order objects within the limits of their discursive spaces. Instead of trying to decode the

narratives in order to discover the silences they rend (Foucault 1976:112), the traces of the deeper meanings they carry from a world beyond themselves, I attempt to keep their surfaces in view and describe the field of their statements. Discourse, asserts Foucault, appears not as "a providence which has always spoken in

advance" but as "an asset - finite, limited, desirable, useful - that has its own rules of appearance ..." (120). Foucault's archaeology, therefore, "tries to define not the thoughts, representations, images, themes, preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses; but those discourses themselves, those discourses as practices obeying certain rules" (138).

Foucault claims that conventional histories of ideas ignore the qualities of

discourse. Instead they follow a linear narrative in which periods follow each other in necessary succession. Temporal dislocation and discontinuity disappear when

94 See chapter 1, section B, iii, a.

95 Many of the stars were animals. The pointers of the Milky Way were lions, for example, while the stars in Orion's belt were tortoises (Solomon forthcoming: 25-26).

96 See chapter 4, A, iv.

viewed against the vast unified backdrop of a "civilisation." Each generation of ideas is understood as giving birth inevitably to its successor. Foucault maintains, however, that abrupt interruptions of, and peremptory ruptures with, what has gone before are the characteristic properties of epistemes (8). The sort of history of ideas, he charges, which charts a gradual, seemingly inevitable progression of thought through the ages is an example of the proclivity to distinguish the unifying categories of a field of study as the prelude to their apparent discovery in the analysis which follows (25). The grand narrative of ideas, Foucault asserts, fabricates unities and relationships through time whereas the sort of archaeological excavation he offers exposes ruptures within seemingly homogeneous fields of study at the same time as it reveals synchronic relationships between apparently quite different contemporaneous discourses. Seemingly similar epistemological complexes from different periods can belong to very different structures of meaning. Only a retrospective assembly of dispersed elements unites these diverse phenomena into a history.

The work that has been produced within the field of Bushman studies over the past century and a half possesses an appearance of continuity. Ideas and theories seem to have been revised and displaced according to the internal dynamics of the field.

Foucault would argue, though, that this kind of unity is a fabrication that has

resulted from the quest for a single origin. The recourse to a continuous tradition of thought "allows a reduction of the difference proper to every beginning, in order to pursue without discontinuity the endless search for the origin ..." (21). The "theme of the origin, that promise of the return," is the mechanism "by which we avoid the

no

difference of our present ..." (204).

97 An example of this contention would be his assertion that the ascetic philosophy of stoics like Seneca and that of the early Christian desert fathers entailed variant views of sexuality, the body and the self, although they employed an apparently related discourse and elaborated a similar technology of the self (Foucault, 1986).

9 To a considerable degree, the ideas of Derrida and Foucault converge with regards to the complex of the origin in western thought. Their well-publicised differences (Miller 1993: 118-121) do not affect the use I have made of their work in this study.

Both the /Xam narratives and the analytical approaches which seek to apprehend them occur within particular epistemes, creating a state of affairs in which several different modalities and bodies of knowledge from each of two traditions are juxtaposed through the practice of the researcher's hermeneutics, a situation that

demands, I would contend, a great deal of self-reflexivity on the part of the researcher. The epistemic contexts in which the interpretations have occurred determine, or strongly influence, what appears within the field and which claims can be made, validated and invalidated in relation to it. Conscious of the pull and the relativity of the episteme, this thesis does not attempt to replace the

interpretations that have emerged in the course of the history of engagement with the Bleek and Lloyd collection with other, "truer" ones so much as to explore how different regimes of truth have produced particular kinds of knowledge about the /Xam narratives and to describe the contours of that knowledge." It also seeks to explore the types of knowledge about the /Xam narratives that beckon the

contemporary researcher. An episteme functions, maintains Foucault, not to distinguish the true from the false so much as to demarcate what can or cannot be authorised as knowledge. Inevitably, in the era of the globalisation of capital and postmodern and post-colonial thought, present-day scholars view the narratives from a different vantage point from the one offered by the Victorian milieu in which they were collected or the modern one in which much of their interpretation has been framed.1 Foucault's work suggests that the "knowledge" concerning the /Xam should be seen not as having resulted from an ever closer and more accurate understanding of the field so much as from the different epistemes that have

produced intellectual knowledge over the course of the last hundred and twenty five

I do, nevertheless, argue for a particular approach to the /Xam texts and illustrate it in my own interpretative practice. I attempt, though, at all times to foreground the limitations of the tools at my disposal (the result of their cultural, linguistic and historical specificity) and the temporary status of the statements I can make about the narratives.

1001 would locate the functionalism and structuralism that I detect in Hewitt as a product of the modern period while my own analysis is, to a large degree, a product of the postmodern.

years. It becomes important to locate ideas, interpretations and theories within these broader regimes of truth and relations of power rather than simply within the history of ideas and theories that seems to constitute Bushman Studies itself.

Foucault's writing on epistemes has consequences, too, for the way the narratives themselves are considered. It cannot be presumed that the materials in the Bleek and Lloyd collection all belong to a single /Xam episteme.

1

Even if it could be shown that the narratives had remained the same over long periods of time, it could not be assumed that they produced the same kinds of meaning at different times in /Xam history. It is probable that the narratives would have contained different

01 Foucault does not discuss the operation of epistemes in cultures outside Europe. It is notable that almost all European thinkers, including Derrida and Bourdieu, discussed in this chapter, and Baudrillard, discussed in a later chapter, largely confine their investigations to Europe and her intellectual and political history, even when the scope of their statements, as is the case with Foucault's statements about the episteme, claim a wider applicability. The pan-cultural discourse that is applied to cultures like the /Xam, examined particularly in chapter 3 and 6, largely excludes the European cultural sphere while the sorts of discourse explored here includes only it. Admittedly these thinkers are engaged in a critique of western thought but, as Gayatri Spivak has suggested, it is Eurocentric to claim a western monopoly of particular forms of political and philosophical

chauvinism (Spivak, 1999: 37). Her own work, drawing, as it does, partly on Indian examples such as the text of the Bhagavad Gita, goes some way towards countering this tendency. I attempt to simultaneously reject the discourse that is generally reserved for the colonised and anthropologised in my discussions of the narratives and to test the effect of applying to them concepts like the episteme that are usually applied chiefly to the western cultural sphere. To suggest that the /Xam are exempt from the operation of epistemes would, in my view, be to locate their systems of thought outside history and outside power. The effect of this is to fix the /Xam as just the sort of idealised community of presence discussed earlier in the chapter, in the section on Derrida. In chapter 7,1 apply some of Bourdieu's concepts to 'the story of the sun's armpit' and in chapter 8 I invoke Bauman in my discussion of the moon and hare story. My reasons for doing so are closely related to an attempt to problematise the operation of the dual discourse identified in this footnote.

102 In relation to rock art, Solomon (forthcoming: 114) writes that "Hunter-gatherers looking at the paintings made by their own forebears may have assigned them a different significance to their predecessors." She also conjectures that "some of the late art of the Drakensberg may belong to a very different political, economic and social world- even if some of its time-honoured concerned persisted" (191).

discursive possibilities for the recently released prisoners who narrated the stories in the alien setting of Mowbray, with the dispossession of the /Xam already far

advanced, than those they would have borne for members of an intact /Xam band (if such a thing ever existed) following a way of life close to that described in the stories. It is difficult to discern epistemic ruptures in a corpus of narratives like those collected by Bleek and Lloyd although some of the readings of the narratives which detect the influence of history in them might point in such a direction. A comprehensive knowledge of/Xam history and culture over a significant length of time would be necessary in order to detect breaks of the kind Foucault (1970) discovers between the Renaissance concern with taxonomy and the birth of

humanism, for example. Such an exercise might be conducted with materials from a linguistic group with an extant oral literary tradition which has also been recorded over the necessary period of time. It is difficult to see how Foucault's method could work without these kinds of records.

The relationship of the /Xam narratives with knowledge has been discussed at some length in the literature. The stories do not seem to me to offer knowledge in the sense of information. Although the /Xam had an intricate empirical knowledge of plants and animals,

104

this knowledge, for the most part, is not directly transmitted through the narratives. Nor is the information the narratives provide about the origin of things regarded as absolute. There are multiple explanations for the same phenomenon and multiple versions of the same story, sometimes told, at different times, by the same storyteller. Nor, in my view, are the stories didactic fables with

an overt moral purpose. Although some of the characters express value judgements

103 See, for example, Guenther (1989: 150), Hewitt (1986: 225-227; 231-232) and, especially, Bank (2006: 154-177; 228-301; 354-371). See chapter 6, section iii for more discussion of this approach to analysis.

104 Bank (2006: 347-351) describes the visits of Lloyd and /Han#kass'o to the South African Museum. /Han#kass'o was able to identify and provide detailed information about a range of animals, birds, insects and plants. //Kabbo invokes his knowledge of the plants and animals of his place in order to argue his claim to the land around his ancestral waterhole at Bitterpits. "The land is his because he knows it as no-one else does" (Brown 2006: 17).