CHAPTER THREE: THE UNIVERSAL AND THE LOCAL: THE TRICKSTER AND THE /XAM NARRATIVES
A. The work of Roger Hewitt on the /Xam narratives
i. Structuralism and functionalism in Hewitt's work
In his study of the Bleek and Lloyd collection, Roger Hewitt pursues the meaning of the stories with a pioneering ingenuity appropriate to the first systematic investigation of the materials. His approach is primarily structuralist, taxonomic and functionalist. He surveys the field. As he does so, he sorts the diverse materials into categories and delineates the structural principles that underlie the various narrative types he identifies. He provides an intricate breakdown of the /Kaggen materials in which he articulates the different types of narrative with different categories of trick, adversary and social message (145-233). The /Kaggen stories, he maintains, are particularly suited to this enterprise since they are the
"only large group of narratives which show a structural uniformity at the level of plot" among the /Xam materials (120). Hewitt's mapping procedure is
accompanied by a detailed investigation of the relationship between the narratives and /Xam culture in general and a consideration of the function of the /Kaggen stories, to which he accords a special social role, one which corresponds, I will show in the next section, in many respects with the role given the trickster in some of the writing on the trickster examined in the previous chapter. He briefly
discusses a great number of the "approximately one hundred narratives" he finds in
Solomon (forthcoming: 245) laments the paucity of "literary attention to San texts - in the sense of how they work(ed), then and now, as verbal art .... The most notable exception to this is Hewitt's structural study of/Xam narratives ... perhaps the most detailed and insightful study of them from a literary (albeit structural) perspective."
the notebooks in the course of his study and analyses a few of them in considerable detail (16).159
Hewitt's study is wide-ranging, complex and sometimes speculative. Almost every statement made in a critique of an aspect of his work has to be qualified when other aspects of his work are taken into account. I will argue below that much of this is attributable to unintended contradictions in Hewitt's work which flow from the deployment of incompatible theoretical approaches. His functionalist and structuralist approaches are not always mutually consistent. Nor does Hewitt's close and admirable attention to the specificity of /Xam life easily accord with some of his general and comparative observations regarding the trickster, which he derives from some of the wider anthropological literature that I described in the previous chapter.
More contradictions result from the sheer scope of Hewitt's work. He produces, for instance, an extensive structural breakdown of groups of narratives, a procedure which overrides the details of individual stories. Several of his statements,
accordingly, betray a bias towards plot at the expense of textual elements. Most of the sidereal narratives he claims, for example, were not "told with sufficient expansiveness or care to warrant much attention as verbal art" (91). He calls the details of texts "the verbal surface" and leaves a consideration of it to the end of his book (235). Nevertheless, he does, despite this position, examine certain stories closely. His detailed analysis of 'the story of the Dawn's Heart and his wife' is a case in point (94-103). He uses this story to demonstrate his contention that an
b9 Many of these hundred or so narratives are presented in several versions. Hewitt (1986: 213-234) devotes a chapter to discussing the phenomenon of different variations of a story. He emphasises the role of individual narrators in producing different versions of stories. I refer to the existence of multiple accounts of a narrative in several places in this thesis, especially in my discussion of aetiology in chapter 6 and 'the story of the moon and the hare' in chapter 8. I focus on the production of discursive plurivocity, however, rather than on the predilections of the narrators.
160 In my view these narratives do warrant attention as verbal art. I devote three chapters to them later in the thesis.
analysis must "deal with texts at several levels, if a plausible reconstruction of the meaning and resonance which those narratives may have had for their original audiences is to be made." In addition to the formal level, presumably the level his structuralist analysis delineates, he identifies also the "level of ethnographic detail"
as well as the level of "the social function and weight of whole motifs or whole narratives" and the level of "basic ways of conceiving of the world which declare themselves in narrative form" (94).
Another area of contradiction in his book concerns the role of the narrators. In the course of mapping the stories structurally, he reduces the contribution that the narrators make to the narrative structure to "entertainment" (183). Later in the book, however, Hewitt devotes a whole chapter to a description of how the narrators produced not only particular styles of narrative but even arranged dispersed narrative units in such a way as to form their own narratives (235-247).
Some of the apparent contradictions in Hewitt's work are consciously produced, for he offers many of his insights in an exploratory spirit, noting that there are limits to the extent of the knowledge we can claim of the /Xam and their narratives. These limits, for Hewitt, are attributable not to the unintelligibility of the world
(Baudrillard 2001: 275) or to the self-referentiality of logocentric thought but to the absence of a lived context for the narratives and limited ethnographic data (Hewitt 1986: 19).
Hewitt concentrates on structural typologies rather than on textual analysis (Brown 1995: 79). These "context free structural typologies", according to Brown (1998:
36), omit considerations of the "symbolic resonance of the communication."
Brown's statement is accurate with regard to Hewitt's mapping of the typologies of the narratives. Elsewhere in his book, though, Hewitt does offer detailed
ethnographic contexts for the narratives. Hewitt (19) himself describes his project as follows: "The collection is described in groups distinguished by content; plots, themes and motifs being related to their ethnographic context and situated as deeply with /Xam culture as the data allows."
Hewitt consistently locates storytelling within the realm of the social.
Storytelling, he maintains, is a type of speech. Among the /Xam, speech "was almost a continual social activity" (47). At first reading, this phrase does not invite further inspection. It is self-evident and unsurprising. But what does it, in fact, signify? Is Hewitt simply asserting the point that a great deal of the surplus time that attends a foraging economy is devoted to conversation and storytelling? He quotes Dorothea Bleek to this effect: "Half or more than half of each day was spent lounging about watching bird and beast, and talking - always talking" (47, quoting Bleek, D. and Stow, G 1930: xxxiiif). Closer investigation of the statement, I would argue, reveals its relationship with the myth of the lost origin and the idea of the fullness of presence. /Xam speech, Hewitt stresses, is a constant, timeless medium without beginning or end. Storytelling occurs within this kind of speech.
It belongs to a continual speaking that retains a purity that more self-conscious speech has lost. It has qualities of spontaneity and naturalness. It is continual (like breathing and as artless), social (not the private mutterings of the divided self of modern man) and retains a particular unity and presence that precedes the division of experience and the fracturing of speech into truth and fiction, the ordinary and extraordinary. Hewitt points out that the /Xam used the term "kukummi" for all kinds of speech: stories, conversation and news (47).161 In the seamless movement from conversation and news to story, the textual is held in abeyance. As Derrida (1976) emphasises, the suppressed binary that gives speech its power in logocentric thought is writing. Writing, in this framework, is more than a technique of
inscribing words. It describes the process of the production of meaning through artifice. It always occurs at a remove. Speech, on the other hand, is the direct manifestation of consciousness and truth. Hewitt, I would argue, is referring to this pure kind of speech, untainted by writing. The "voice is the centre"; "writing is derivative" (Collins and Mayblin 2000: 41). Hewitt himself separates speech from writing when he notes that narrative formed "part of daily living to an extent
161 He does qualify this observation, though, by noting that narratives "constituted a distinct mode of expression" (48).
unknown in literate societies where leisure time is limited" (Hewitt 1986: 47). By bringing this opposition into play, the opposition essential to the metaphysics of presence, Hewitt signals his approach to the materials he will examine. This
approach relies heavily on the nature/culture binary that follows from the division between speech and writing.
I would argue also that the use of the term "social" in this context refers to a pre- institutional community of presence that transcends the sum of its individual parts (55). This is consistent with Hewitt's functionalist interpretation of stories.
Functionalist explanations, in the context of anthropology, are based on the view that societies are healthy organisms whose parts all contribute to the satisfactory working of the whole. They are actually nearer to natural than to social configurations. Such societies remain close to the wholeness of the origin.
Storytelling functions to preserve the wholesome cohesiveness of these pristine social formations.
The overall thrust of Hewitt's work and the ideological basis of much of the work in Bushman studies, outlined in chapter 1, justifies, I feel, this reading of Hewitt's statement regarding speech and /Xam society. Nevertheless, as I pointed out earlier, my critique of Hewitt's thinking often has to be qualified. While Hewitt's work inevitably contains logocentric foundations, which Derrida, as we saw, finds unavoidable in western thought, including his own, and Hewitt refers favourably,
Functionalism depends on the objective nature of a social world which can be described with particular methods. The investigator is seen as a neutral, unbiased observer. Societies are
considered as organic wholes comparable to biological organisms. Social practices and institutions serve to maintain the equilibrium of the society in the same way that different parts of the body maintain the body's overall health, even if the way they do this is not immediately obvious.
Individual socialisation into the norms and values of the society and ensuing conformance with them is critical to the preservation of social stability. In the course of this chapter, I will show how Hewitt's analysis of the narrative fits these broad features of functionalism.
but not uncritically, to the ideas of writers like Levi-Strauss and Radin who exemplify such thinking, there are several characteristics of Hewitt's work that mitigate the presence of the complex of the lost origin in his work. His writing is restrained and exploratory. He is not given, for instance, to overtly idealistic pronouncements about the purity of hunter-gatherer societies and their proximity to the origin. Statements such as "some /Xam at least also felt an attunement to their environment which almost reached mystical proportions" (51) are exceptions in his generally sober text. He notes the presence of power and social tensions in /Xam society (115). His structuralist and functionalist tendencies are balanced by a historical and ethnographic grounding of the /Xam materials that runs counter to the universalising tendencies of logocentric thought that I described in the last chapter.
Although he identifies /Kaggen as a trickster who shares attributes with other figures from around the world as they appear in the work of writers like Paul Radin (131) and Ruth Finnegan (160), Hewitt always insists that /Kaggen's "role qua trickster [be] elucidated within a very specific ethnographic context" (19-20).
Hewitt accepts the universal category but insists on its local contextualization: "The trickster may be found throughout the world but the way in which a trickster is integrated with the ideas and world-view of any society is likely to be specific to that society" (Hewitt 1986: 210).
Hewitt's hermeneutic strategy, as I have noted, contains structuralist and
functionalist elements. Functionalism, as I have already argued, participates in the metaphysical ideology of the origin. Structuralism, too, can be linked with this complex. Structuralist schemes, of the kind Hewitt employs in his classifications of the narratives, presuppose the existence of a "perfectly rational language that perfectly represents the real world. Such a language of reason would absolutely guarantee that the presence of the world - the essence of everything in the world - would be transparently (re)present(ed) to an observing subject who could speak of it with complete certainty " (Appignanesi and Garratt 1995: 78, emphases in the original). While retaining the central structuralist insight that meaning is produced from the relationships between signs, Derrida, according to Appignanesi and
Garratt, would claim that observers are always implicated in the production of meaning: "To observe is to interact, so the 'scientific' detachment of structuralists or of any other rationalist position is untenable" (79). The sort of framework within which Hewitt positions the various narratives masks the subjective and historical nature of his critique and lends credence to the view that structuralism is based on the supposition "that anything reasoned is ... universal, timeless and stable" (79).
Hewitt's use of structuralism is signalled in his title and in his references. His equal reliance on functionalism, though, is never overtly stated although he several times refers to the function of narratives. In relation, for example, to stories dealing with menarcheal girls he states that "there is no doubt that these narratives primarily functioned to support the practices" connected to the puberty rites (Hewitt 1986:
76). Elsewhere he writes that the recurring motifs in legends "generally function to recommend types of behaviour" (71). Regarding the /Kaggen narratives, he argues that "the family functions ... mainly in the contrast between the approved morality and social norms of/Kaggen's world and his ignorance and violation of them ..."
(149). But Hewitt never clearly sets out the theoretical foundations of his
functionalist analysis or defends them. By concealing his own ideology and the political principles related to it, the historically situated critic disappears. Instead of a complicit fashioner of text, he becomes a neutral scientist of the "real." The relativity and historicity of the interpreter's analysis is obscured. It is assumed that reason is a timeless, neutral investigative instrument rather than a particular cultural product whose attempt to tell the truth about other cultures is more illuminating of its own tradition and practices than it is of the cultures it scrutinises. The /Xam narratives, I maintain, have an uncanny ability to unravel this certainty when investigated with attention to their detail rather than with the purpose of reducing
The closest he comes perhaps is when he states that his "book examines the narratives at several levels, analysing the ways in which the organisation of narrative materials (plots, themes, motifs, etc.) together with the values and norms expressed through them, was frequently influenced by conceptual templates traceable in other aspects of culture, including belief and ritual" (Hewitt 1986:
19).
them to simple social functions or forcing them to conform to a structure that supposedly underlies them, but that is actually extrinsic to them.
Hewitt's simultaneous deployment of functionalist and structuralist approaches, as I noted earlier, sometimes produces inconsistencies in his work as a whole.164 But even his structuralist and functionalist readings themselves contain contradictions.
In his attempts to locate both the patterns behind the individual stories and the formal principles by which they are generated, Hewitt sometimes appeals to a grammar of the story that reaches beyond the /Xam 5 and sometimes to the relationship between elements within the /Xam stories themselves. This results in an uneasy relationship in his critique between the universal and the particular.
Similarly, his functionalist explanations, as I have indicated, imply that the
meanings conveyed in the stories reflect the need for social cohesion. He seeks to expose the social imperatives and values in the stories that are peculiar to /Xam society and asserts that the reinforcement of these values is critical to the maintenance of the social order. A recurrent example would be the norms surrounding food-sharing (114). While the values being reinforced might be characteristic /Xam ones, their reinforcement is always in the interest of social cohesion, that functionalist universal. At times, too, the actual values that are being strengthened seem to belong to a timeless prototypical hunter-gathering society rather than to a peculiarly /Xam social patterning. The value of the importance of a
"consistent relationship with nature", for instance, which Hewitt identifies as being reproduced in the /Kaggen narratives, is of so general a character that it belongs, in my opinion, to a universal discourse about the importance of nature for the hunter- gatherer rather than to the singularity of/Xam praxis (134). In both his
functionalist and structuralist keys, Hewitt goes beyond or behind the contingency of the text and emerges with a higher truth, in one case the ideal patterning to which the individual stories conform, in the other, the "real" reason for the stories, their
1 4 This is partly the result, in my view, of the fact that structuralism is related to rationalist philosophical tendencies and functionalism to empirical ones (Palmer: 27-29).
165 An example of this occurs when he cites Propp (1986: 179-180).
function. Even though structuralism and functionalism are often combined, they imply, in my opinion, different views of society and knowledge. They provide different kinds of analysis. They participate equally, though, in the "metaphysics of presence" discussed in the section on Derrida in chapter 2.
Hewitt's structural and functionalist analyses both rely on a nature/culture binary.
He reads the stories as the assertion of the socio-cultural over nature and distinguishes a "basic opposition between elemental nature and /Xam culture"
(Hewitt 1986: 88). "Many of the magico-religious ideas of the /Xam," he argues, related to the "broader opposition, nature/culture ..." (136). Hewitt sometimes equates nature with disorder and chaos and sometimes with an order that is different from but linked to the human order. He frequently qualifies the
dichotomy between nature and culture by including "the order of the /Xam's daily interaction with amenable nature" along with the "order of social life itself as part of culture (134). The "orderliness of nature was essentially bound up with the orderliness of society" (113). In this way part of nature is claimed for the human sphere and is separated from "malevolent wildness" (101).
Culture is linked to stability and order but is also susceptible to lapsing back into the natural, as in the many stories in which artefacts return to the raw materials from which they originated.167 The stories flirt with chaos but always end with the re-establishment of conservative social values. The threat of danger and
disorganisation provide the incentive to preserve the social order: "The social aspect of order was, to some extent, shaped by its own dangerous elements" (134).
This dynamic, he claims, is reproduced in the stories. Although Hewitt concedes
166 Levi-Strauss seems to have strongly influenced this aspect of Hewitt's work. Hewitt does not use Levi-Strauss uncritically, however. In his discussion of a story concerning the Dawn's Heart Star and the Lynx, for example, he claims that the binaries in the narrative are mediated differently from the way Levi-Strauss claims they are in myth (1986: 102). Hewitt's bibliography cites five of Levi- Strauss's works.
167 An example would be the reversion of the belongings of the family members of a girl who violates the puberty observances "into their natural constituents" (79).