Electronic Theses and Dissertations (Masters)
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10539/37948
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Item Landscape, Rock Art Recording, Narrative: A Biography of The Harald Pager Archive(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2019) Moodley, Lemishka; Wintjes, JustineIn the early days of the discipline of archaeology, the archaeologist Sir Charles Thomas Newton stated, in a lecture at Oxford University in June 1880, that “the subject-matter of Archaeology is threefold – the Oral, the Written and the Monumental” (Newton 1880, p.3–7). By ‘oral’, he meant expressions of spoken language as a form of patterned communication passed down from the past, which he considered to be as significant as written texts and traces of the built environment. Newton’s statement also resonates with ongoing attempts to make sense of the fragmentary remains of the past by including living sources with links to those remains, often referred to as ‘oral traditions’. I argue that the domain of ‘oral’ could be extended in the contemporary context to refer to the realm of the ‘spoken word’. The spoken word is mobilised in the telling of personal histories of researchers engaged in making sense of the past, consistent with a move towards the study of the production of archaeological knowledge, and the broader context of the history of science. The past, and the investigation of that past, can be easily lost or erased with time, unless it is documented in some form. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a keen interest in knowing about the world that preceded me. So naturally, movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), The Mummy (1999), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), 10 000 BC (2008), The Prince of Egypt (1998), Brother Bear (2003) and many others, fascinated and triggered my overactive imagination. These points of inspiration even prompted many crazy shenanigans and adventures that took place in my back yard. Needless to say, my mother was never impressed because her garden was in constant danger of being destroyed through micro-excavations (as I had to find the treasure I buried the previous evening!). However, it was a Pixar animated film — The Croods (2013) — that recently re-ignited my interest in deeper human history. Despite its status as a relatively mainstream commercial animated film, The Croods sparked my curiosity to find ways to visit the past and bring yesterday’s stories into our lives today. After their cave collapses, the first Crood family has to undertake a journey to find a new home. The father, provider and leader of his pack, recounts multiple stories that urge and caution his children to follow the rules described on the cave wall and to not try anything “new”, or generally be curious for that matter. He sees newness as dangerous, with potentially serious repercussions like death. He prefers for them to dwell in the “safe” compounds of the cave in which they live. He develops “cautionary” narratives through visual means by drawing pictures on the cave walls using pigment and dirt he scoops off the ground. The animated film highlights the ways in which a pictorial expression in the form of rock markings could be enlivened in its original context of performance and story-telling, and, also, the ways in which history is forged through personal experience. The film also prompted me to reconsider the academic realm in which rock art is primarily situated in southern Africa, which is archaeology, and the possible perspectives that other disciplines could bring to bear on these materials, such as art history. My understanding of the reasons why rock art (and its copies) can and should also be considered and studied as an art form, ultimately stems from my own experience in art education. The rock art works made by the San people are encoded with “the history and culture of a society” that is “thousands of years old” and “a testament of the displaced ancient African culture and the San presence in the world” (Solomon 2005). By studying these traces as artworks, researchers, historians and archaeologists are reminded to look at the visual features, but also beyond the physical aspects of the work. They begin to consider the processes that contributed to its making, and the various interpretations and meanings that the work had in its context of production, as well as in its subsequent readings. An examination of the process of knowledge production not only draws attention to the development of artmaking and the manner in which different materials were used to create artworks, but also demonstrates the precarious nature of the meaning of rupestrian imagery. An example of this instability of meaning is evidenced by a body of oral histories relevant to the San context, starting with Joseph Orpen’s documentation (1874) of a mountain Bushman called Qing’s account of the meaning behind particular rock art panels. Thereafter, in 1911, Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd produced Specimens of Bushmen Folklore, a book of 87 recorded legends, myths and other traditional stories of the |Xam Bushmen in their now-extinct language (Solomon 2005). These resources integrated the “spoken word” with Bushman ethnographic research and laid the foundation for how we read and write about the art today, and they also provide numerous different ways into the question of interpretation. I have utilised my previous first-hand experience as an intern at the Origins Centre, where Simone Opperman and myself worked under the guidance of Steven Sack and Lara Mallen. In working towards the exhibition titled, The Origins of Walter Battiss: “Another Curious Palimpsest”, we worked closely with the Rock Art Research Institute (RARI), and my interest in rock art and its archive grew immensely. Here, I learned of the Harald Pager archive, which is physically located at RARI. After speaking to my supervisor, Dr Justine Wintjes, and listening to the way in which she briefly recounted the story of Harald Pager, who was an active rock art recorder and researcher during the 1960s and 1970s, I wanted to learn more about the man who seemingly died for his craft. Wintjes mentioned that Pager recorded San rock art in the Drakensberg area along with his wife for many years. The Pagers relied heavily on their personal resources in order to keep the recording and documentation process going, and ended up incurring financial debt. Harald Pager was passionate about archaeology and sought to understand the rock paintings he discovered in his travels across the region, which also included what was then South West Africa (now Namibia). In one of the conversations held in the course of my Masters research, Neil Lee explained that Pager dwelled for months on end in a shelter in order to finish the copies of rock paintings he sought to record. Pager’s adamance and determination, and even his belief that he could change his metabolism, apparently led to ill health while recording rock art in the Brandberg in 1985. He died a short time later in Windhoek (Neil Lee 2018, pers. comm.). 7 Given the scale and meticulousness of Pager’s archive, and in light of the conversations I had about him, it seemed strange that his work and story are engaged with so seldom within academia. Nevertheless, Pager’s vast archive lives on in the storerooms of RARI, and now also in the digital world. His recordings were recently digitised during the course of the South African Rock Art Digital Archive (SARADA) project, which sought to scan and make more accessible the content related to southern African rock art at RARI and other institutional and private archives. With the rapid rate at which technology is developing and progressing, physical archives are being turned into digital databases, while also being supplemented by newly created digital materials. However, like all archives, digital archives are not ‘permanent’. They have their own kind of media-specific fragility. The digital archive also has the potential to become obsolete and demonstrates a different kind of limited lifespan. Although digital files are also not physically present in the same way that a physical copy or photograph is, and “lose” a particular kind of materiality and stability, they gain a virtual presence and potentially greater accessibility. As with the ‘original’ archive of rock art that exists in the landscape, the traditional paper archive and the digital archive represent different kinds of longevity and fragility, and have a complex relationship with each other. While being subject to changes and deteriorations of various kinds, the archive is important as a record of archaeological materials in the landscape, but is also a site where knowledge is produced, and the practice of science is conducted. Thus, I set out to devise a project that would address some of these interests and problems, to find connections between the present and the past, and to focus on ‘process’ across the rock art archive in the broad sense of the term. I also wanted my project to address absences and silences within the archive, embedded within the documents and copies as well as the rock art itself. I approached the archive as a layered domain that extends beyond the strictly ‘documentary’ archive, and adopted a ‘personal histories’ approach as a way of forging connections across that archive. I explain this working strategy in more detail in the ‘Methodology’ section below, but first I explore some of the conceptual elements that frame the project.Item The Case of Analytic Philosophy as ‘the Philosophy’ and Its Problem for the Decolonization of the Curriculum(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2018) Ramaphala, Dorcus; Etieyibo, EdwinIn this research, I shall be examining two related issues. The first issue is about whether the presentation of analytic philosophy as the proper and only method of doing philosophy is justified. The second concerns the problems posed for the decolonization of the philosophy curriculum by this hegemonic and triumphant position of analytic philosophy as “the philosophy.” My motivation for engaging with these issues is to try and make the case for other philosophical traditions and methods, including African philosophy as legitimate and proper philosophical enterprises even when they do not share all or some of the traits and features of analytic philosophy. Success in making this case seems crucial to the project of decolonizing the philosophy curriculum.Item Men, Masculinity, Aggression and Dominance: An Exploration of How Young Men are Socialized to Deal with Situations of Man-on-Man Aggression and Dominance(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2019) Vilakazi, Zinhle; Davies, NickThere is a considerable body of research placing young South African men at the core of interpersonal violence. Within these studies they are frequently positioned as both perpetrators and victims of extreme and homicidal modes of aggression. In light of this gendered nature of interpersonal violence, this study was directed at exploring how young men’s responses to a situation of man-on-man aggression and dominance might be linked to how society encourages or expects a certain masculine performance from men in such situations. This study’s secondary goal was to offer some ideas about how young men might establish a masculine identity through aggression and dominance. In the pursuing research aims, a total of 14 young adult men attending university participated in this qualitative study. From the analysis what became evident was the continuous pressure that young adult men experience in society, through various social institutions, to somehow fit into dominant or hegemonic constructions of masculinity. Within the context of this study, the proximal cause of aggression and dominance was attributed to broader concerns regarding presentation of a masculine identity, self-worth and social status.