The role of ritual in Southern African hunter-gatherer environmental adaptation
Date
2022
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Twentieth-century Southern African San hunter-gatherer communities
are often depicted as a people who are environmentally fluid, adapting to climatic
variability through mobility so as to ensure their survival. However, based on environmental
psychology and phenomenology of place we also know that all humans possess
the propensity to have a deep embodied attachment to place, and that change in place
can cause a range of emotions between mild nostalgia to severe psychological and
social crisis. Research has also demonstrated the centrality of ritual practices such as the
trance dance in San culture and cosmology. This article aims to explore the phenomenological
role rituals played in ensuring adaptability in the face of change, as well as
providing the fundamental need for existential and psychological emplacement. Using
literature from both environmental adaptation and ritual in San communities, as well as
cultural neurophenomenology and embodiment as theoretical frameworks, the article
will discuss how San rituals mediated people/place relationships as a means of coping
with highly variable environments and change.
Description
emotional trauma due to change in place is; ‘symbolic of a deep desire to find the
balance between anomie and rootedness in the flux of change’ (Brislin 2012:9)
There is a considerable amount of archaeological and anthropological literature
demonstrating a time when human communities have had a close relationship
to their environments (Ingold 2000). Of particular interest are studies of
Southern African hunter-gatherers commonly referred to as the Bushmen or
San. This article will be drawing on literature of the Ju|’hoan of Southern Africa