Poisoned, potent, painted arrows as an index of San personhood
Date
2021
Authors
Snow, Larissa Marie
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Abstract
This thesis takes an ontological approach to southern African Later Stone Age rock
art research and interpretation. Using modern Kalahari San ethnographies and
myths, as well as the nineteenth Century Bleek and Lloyd Archive of /Xam oral
narrative, the diverse beings that compromise the San world and peoples’
relationships to them are explored, with particular focus on how material objects
facilitate these relations. Following Alfred Gell’s writings, the technological aspects
of rock art production are investigated in order to demonstrate the action-oriented
nature of paintings and how rock art served as an important physical manifestation of
transient and transformative persons, both human and non-. Marking a break from
hermeneutics, the notion of symbolic images is replaced with agentive art works
whose materiality is infused with social significance. Following on from this, a
ubiquitous object in San life and rock art is examined, revealing how seemingly
mundane things can be significant, not in spite of, but because of the work they
accomplish. For the San, poison arrows used to hunt large game animals were
material objects par excellence; by procuring vital meat and potency they engendered
inter-person and interpersonal relationships and were consequently instrumental in
achieving full personhood. Poison arrows are examined in terms of how they
cemented relations between spouses, affines and trading partners; how they were
agentive and appropriate technology for interactions with game and rain animals;
how anti-social figures deployed sickening arrows, and how the San held colonists,
whose humanity was up for debate, in their sights. So salient are arrows, the San even
conceived of their interior life force in this objectified form. This thesis makes a wider
contribution towards understanding how personhood is constituted by and dispersed
through objects and the central role of material things in enmeshing people with the
vital elements of their environment.
Description
A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Faculty of Science, School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2021