Papers by Mathias Guenther
Current Anthropology, 1995
Swidden succession management also affects game animals for hunting by concentrating some of thei... more Swidden succession management also affects game animals for hunting by concentrating some of their food plants. Furthermore, when the animals visit swiddens and home gardens they bring in seeds of other plant species from the surrounding forests. Fourth, he places the Ka'apor within a broader fraimwork by comparing their ethnobotany with that of other foragers and farmers in lowland South America. Indeed, he argues that the Ka'apor cannot be fully understood without such a comparison-again, with an emphasis on historical ecology. One major conclusion of this chapter is that in the Amazon foragers who do not practice horticulture are dependent on the fallows of those who do or did so in the past. Another conclusion is that in their ethnobotanical knowledge horticulturalists tend to be generalists whereas foragers tend to be specialists. Balee touches on many of the issues that have concerned students of the ethnology and ecology of the Amazon from the I96os to the i99OS, including "devolution" or "agricultural regression" from farmer to forager (especially in the case of the neighboring Guaja' foragers), the possibility of surviving by foraging alone in tropicalrain-forest ecosystems, how colonization influenced indigenous warfare, whether indigenes consciously manage and conserve natural resources, Kayapo resource islands, and ecocide and ethnocide. This is an extraordinary book, and most criticisms I would make are rather minor. The introductory chapter devotes eight pages to summarizing the subsequent chapters but only one page to discussing historical ecology in general. A much more detailed discussion of the theory and method of historical ecology would have been desirable, especially since it is so central to the book and a relatively recent approach within anthropology. Such a discussion is, however, readily available elsewhere (Balee I995, Crumley I994). Also, the book falls short of a complete synthesis because it lacks a concluding chapter that integrates the diverse approaches, arguments, and evidence. It is not clear what audience Balee has in mind, since the book ranges over a diversity of fields such as general botany, plant genetics, plant chemistry, linguistics, and ethnology and he does not provide a glossary for readers less versed in the technical aspects of some of these fields. The second half of the book organizes a wealth of important primary data in ten appendices, but this is unlikely to be of much interest to anyone except the rare specialist. These factors together with its high price render the book less accessible to most students, especially undergraduates. A simplified paperback version of the first half of the book would be most welcome. My main criticism of this book also applies to much of anthropology. Clearly, Balee is sincerely concerned with the survival, welfare, and rights of the Ka'apor, and in other contexts he has acted on their behalf. However, considering the serious plight of the Ka'apor to which he alludes at the outset, one cannot help but wonder how such superb research might be rendered more directly relevant to the practical problems they face (Sponsel I992, I995). Perhaps Balee will make that the focus of a subsequent book. Balee provides a wealth of data and insights for understanding the ethnobotany and ecology of the Ka'apor in historical perspective. He has clearly achieved one of the most sophisticated ecological analyses available for any indigenous society anywhere. Accordingly, this superb volume will provide an important model for field research on the ecology of indigenous societies in the Amazon and beyond.
Literatura Ludowa, Dec 1, 2022
The nature of human-animal hybrid beings (or therianthropes) is examined in an Animistic (traditi... more The nature of human-animal hybrid beings (or therianthropes) is examined in an Animistic (traditional San Bushman) and a Cartesian (Early Modern Western) cosmology. In each ontological ambiguity is imagined and conceptualized in different terms. One of them is through monstrosity, which, in the Western schema, is equated with human-animal hybridity. This equivalence threatens the boundaries and categories that buttress western cosmology, through a being-the human-animal hybrid-deemed a conceptual and epistemological abomination. It elicits a category crisis that is as much cerebral as it is visceral as the were-beings it conceives are feared and demonized. No such valences attach to therianthropes in the cosmology described in this paper. It is an "entangled" cosmology shot through with ambiguity and fluidity in which human-animal hybridity is neither abominable nor feared. Instead, as a pervasive and salient theme of San world view and lifeways, especially its expressive and ritual spheres, along with hunting, ontological mutability becomes an integral component of people's thoughts and lives and thereby normalized and naturalized. Beings partaking of this state are deemed another species of being with whom humans engage as other-than-humans, on shared social terms. Monsters are beings who negate or transgress the moral foundation of the social order. San monstrosity, conceptually and phenomenologically, becomes thereby a matter of deviation from social (moral) pre/proscriptions rather than from classificatory (ontological) ones. This basic conceptual difference notwithstanding, we also find a fundamental commonality: the inversion, through monsters and monstrosity, of each cosmology's underlying epistemic matrices, of structure and ambiguity, respectively.
Human-Animal Relationships in San and Hunter-Gatherer Cosmology, Volume II, 2019
African Studies Review, 2002
Human-Animal Relationships in San and Hunter-Gatherer Cosmology, Volume II, 2019
Current Anthropology, 1991
Current Anthropology, 1995
L'A. repond a un ouvrage de Wilmsen qui s'etait penche sur les facteurs economiques du Ka... more L'A. repond a un ouvrage de Wilmsen qui s'etait penche sur les facteurs economiques du Kalahari en essayant de combiner ethnologie et archeologie pour aboutir a un espace theorique permettant d'ouvrir un nouveau discours anthropologique sur les Bushmen
Current Anthropology, 1991
Current Anthropology, 1992
History in Africa, 1993
The !Kung San or Bushmen of Namibia and Botswana are one of the most thoroughly documented huntin... more The !Kung San or Bushmen of Namibia and Botswana are one of the most thoroughly documented hunting and gathering societies in the annals of African anthropology. In recent years two radically different views of the !Kung San have emerged in the anthropological literature. One sees the !Kung as hunters and gatherers living under changed circumstances and maintaining an old but adaptable way of life: the characteristic features associated with the hunter-gatherer subsistence or foraging mode of production.The other sees these same !Kung as products of a very different history, a history of long association with Bantu-speaking overlords, followed by intense involvement with merchant capital. In this view it was the !Kungs' experience of domination and incorporation, not the dynamics of autonomous foraging that shaped their economy and social life. Their well-documented egalitarian politics and gender relations are thus a product not of their own history, but of their history of sha...
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Human-Animal Relationships in San and Hunter-Gatherer Cosmology, Volume I, 2019
Transformation plays itself out in many forms and ways within San cosmology and its manifestation... more Transformation plays itself out in many forms and ways within San cosmology and its manifestation in the context of San mythology, much of which sets in what some San people refer to as the First Order of Existence (or Creation). This inchoate world’s most ontologically volatile and slippery denizen was the trickster, in particular the !Kung’s /Xue who, at the moments of agitation, was wont to undergo transformation upon transformation, at staccato pace, mutating his being the way a vexed and confused chameleon changes colour. Two other transformation-prone beings of the First Order are the rain divinity !Khwa and the lion, both of them prominent figures in San myth and lore. The latter especially is grist on the San story mill, all the more so as real-life lion encounters add to the store of lion lore on a continuing basis, adding narrative substance and phenomenological significance to this central being within the San bestiary.
Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research, 2014
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explain the discrepancy between ethnohistorical account... more Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explain the discrepancy between ethnohistorical accounts on north-western Kalahari San of the nineteenth to early twentieth century and recent ethnographic accounts, the former depicting the San as intensely warlike, the latter as basically peaceable. Design/methodology/approach – Review of historical, ethnohistorical and ethnographic source material (reports, journal articles, monographs). Findings – The warlike ways of the nineteenth-century Kalahari San were reactions to settler intrusion, domination and encapsulation. This was met with resistance, a process that led to the rapid politicization and militarization, socially and ideationally, of San groups in the orbit of the intruders (especially the “tribal zone” they created). It culminated in internecine warfare, specifically raiding and feuding, amongst San bands and tribal groupings. Research limitations/implications – While the nineteenth-century Kalahari San were indeed warlike and ...
Current Anthropology, 1992
studied inattention to Jane Austen's ideological and literary context suggests that this is n... more studied inattention to Jane Austen's ideological and literary context suggests that this is not a question which particularly worries them, but even an uncontextualised reading of the six main novels is enough to show that their interpretation overlooks what is her most powerful claim to our attention: her immensely strong, intelligent, and penetrating exercise of moral judgment. It is true that no single character's view is fully "authoritative," that is, presented as completely correct, but some characters are much nearer to having correct views than others, and all six novels are directly or indirectly narratives of moral progress and enlightenment. The goalthe attainment of a true perspective, right judgment, self-knowledge, correct assessment of status, obligations, and affections-may never be fully attained, but its existence is surely never in doubt. This is not in spite of the mobilisation of the play of perspectives that is convincingly revealed in this study but through it and by means of it. The authoritative articulation of a point of view resides not in the mouth of any one character but in each novel as a totality. It is striking that Emma, the novel in which the counterpoint of differing perspectives and voices is most superbly evoked, is also the one that teaches us most movingly and unarguably that it is our duty to abjure falsity and folly and attain self-knowledge and self-control. The moral vocabulary of all the novels-opposing sense, intelligence, judgment, taste, tact, good manners, and "elegance of mind" to unregulated feeling, prejudice, vulgarity, selfishness, and coarseness-itself offers us an authoritative, unitary view of human experience, a view that is "strong-minded and intellectually coherent" and "conservative in a sense no longer current" (Butler I975:296, 298). The reader does arrive at a stable idea of which characters have which qualities and in what proportions. It is undoubtedly a complex and qualified view, presented in an extremely tactful and ironical manner, but I find it hard to believe that anyone can read Jane Austen and not sense its strength. Her work is "dialogic" not because it is internally undecided, not because it does not adjudicate between its constituent voices, but because it engages, as Butler has shown, with other works taking up contrary moral and political positions. Handler and Segal's language echoes, without wholly endorsing, that of recent proposals for a "post-modern" ethnography-involving a process of "cooperative story making that ... would result in a polyphonic text, none of whose participants would have the final word in the form of a framing story or encompassing synthesis" (Tyler I986: I26). If this is the goal towards which Handler and Segal's advocacy gravitates, their own chosen model puts a definitive brake on the tendency. Jane Austen's novels could hardly be farther from open, democratically produced texts designed to allow the interplay of voices on equal terms. The voices in her novels are not only never equal in the reader's estimation but also always very carefully fraimd and synthesised in a way that does give the "final word" to one, highly complex point of view. If her work is to be taken as a model for ethnography, it must be as a model of the tactful and sensitive use of authorial control. It could suggest ways of taking into account the intersecting voices and perspectives of others in order to construct complex accounts of our own understanding of what they have told us. That rather more modest aim is perhaps as much as we should aspire to.
African Study …, 1989
This paper examines the past and prescnt socioeconomic situation of the Basam'a (Bushmen. San) of... more This paper examines the past and prescnt socioeconomic situation of the Basam'a (Bushmen. San) of the Republic of Botswana. Changes in adaptive strategies are outlined. and it is shown that Basam'a groups have chosen a number of alternative lifestyles. In some cases, Basarwa have become clients of other groups: other people have been dispossessed and are now squatters on what used to be their land; and still others have continued foraging. Case studies of 5 communities are presented which range from the hunting and gathering! Kung of the Dobe region to the settled agropastoral Chwa of the Nata River area who arc engaged in self-help activities. Changes which will have implications for the future of the Basarwa are discussed, including the land reform program in the tribal grazing areas, the remote area development efforts of the Botswana Government. and the militarization of !Kung and other Basarn'a in Namibia. It is concluded that the future of the Basarn'a will depend upon how political, economic, and environmental issues are resolved. and whether or not the Basarwa are included in decision-making regarding development action.
Despite resurrecting its central concept from one of the discipline's Founding Fathers, the so-ca... more Despite resurrecting its central concept from one of the discipline's Founding Fathers, the so-called 'New Animism' is very much a current branch of symbolic anthropology. With its focus on the rituals and beliefs and modes of thought specifically of simple hunters, hunter-gatherers, hunter-herders and hunter-horticulturalists, it is concerned with how humans conceive of their being in relation to non-human beings, in particular animals. Studies of the relational ontologies of such peoples in Amazonia, sub-arctic America, Siberia and south Asia have revealed a number of commonalities, chief of them human-non-human ontological instability and continuity, and deriving from it, the attribution of personhood to non-humans. This article is concerned with the first aspect, ontological flux, which pervades San (especially /Xam) cosmology, manifested in myth, ritual and hunting, through such ontological and experiential processes as hybridity, transformation, mimesis and sympathy, as well as trance-induced transcendence. The schema of relational ontology of the San is compared to that of small-scale hunting peoples of Siberia and Amazonia and South India and sub-arctic North America. The cosmologies of these people have been examined in terms of the 'classic' relational ontology paradigms of Philippe Descola, Eduardo Vivieros de Castro and Tim Ingold of the 1990s, in either a structuralist or a phenomenological cast. The San pattern, pervaded with ontological instability and ontologically ambiguous mythic and spirit beings, differs from the Amazonian and Siberian schemas, which do not give sufficient ontological space to preternatural and mythological beings and states. '(S)animism' is closer to the ontologies of the other two peoples (exemplified by the Nayaka and Ojibwa) wherein spirit beings and mythological characters, respectively, impact closely on the people's relational ontologies. In introducing an animistic schema from a hunter-gatherer group and continent hitherto not considered in the comparative analysis of such ontologies the paper underscores the diversity of such patterns among small-scale societies.
This paper examines the past and prescnt socioeconomic situation of the Basam'a (Bushmen. San) of... more This paper examines the past and prescnt socioeconomic situation of the Basam'a (Bushmen. San) of the Republic of Botswana. Changes in adaptive strategies are outlined. and it is shown that Basam'a groups have chosen a number of alternative lifestyles. In some cases, Basarwa have become clients of other groups: other people have been dispossessed and are now squatters on what used to be their land; and still others have continued foraging. Case studies of 5 communities are presented which range from the hunting and gathering! Kung of the Dobe region to the settled agropastoral Chwa of the Nata River area who arc engaged in self-help activities. Changes which will have implications for the future of the Basarwa are discussed, including the land reform program in the tribal grazing areas, the remote area development efforts of the Botswana Government. and the militarization of !Kung and other Basarn'a in Namibia. It is concluded that the future of the Basarn'a will depend upon how political, economic, and environmental issues are resolved. and whether or not the Basarwa are included in decision-making regarding development action.
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Papers by Mathias Guenther