Writing in the San/d

Autoethnography among Indigenous Southern Africans

Contributions by Lauren Dyll, Belinda Jeursen, Belinda Kruiper, Mary Lange, Vanessa McLennan-Dodd, Sonja Narunsky-Laden, Nasseema Taleb, Charlize Tomaselli Edited by Keyan G. Tomaselli

Publication date:

16 April 2007

Length of book:

190 pages

Publisher

AltaMira Press

Dimensions:

239x161mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780759109506

The San/Bushmen are one of the most studied people in anthropology, subjects of research going back one hundred years, of documentaries, and even of popular movies (The Gods Must Be Crazy). This intriguing new work on the San is a team-based ethnography, collaborative (one of the writers is married to a member of the community), reflexive (the authors become characters in the book themselves), and literary (with poetry, dialogue, interviews, photography, and first person accounts, as well as traditional ethnographic description). In this book, South Africans are studying other South Africans, in a new environment in which many San are no longer hunter gatherers, but are activist and engaged in cultural tourism. It will be an exciting counterpoint to traditional ethnographies and stories about the San people, for anthropologists and Africanists.

0 Introduction: Setting the Scene
Chapter 1 Representing Representation
Chapter 2 Romancing the Kalihari: Personal Journeys of Methodological Discovery
Chapter 3 'Op die Grond': Writing in the San/d, Surviving Crime
Chapter 4 A Letter to Myself—My Trip to Ngwatle
Chapter 5 Voices from the Kalahari: Methodology and the Absurd
Chapter 6 Meeting Points: Symbiotic Spaces
7 Wit Meisie /Morning Star: Encounters in the Desert
8 In the Sun with Silikat
9 Orality, Rhythmography and Visual Representation

Renowned international scholar Keyan Tomaselli has long been an advocate for forcing cultural studies outside of the confines of academia and into real life situations. Through the essays collected in Writing in the San/d, we witness the practice and evolution of a "reverse cultural studies" as Tomaselli and his colleagues immerse themselves in actual fieldwork situations in Southern Africa with revealing and often unexpected consequences. The dual awareness of self and subject explored through writing presents a model for students and academics to develop fieldwork practices for cultural studies in a variety of settings. As such the collection makes an excellent companion to contemporary cultural studies of indigenous populations in South Africa and the surrounding region.