Today's lecture focuses on changing perceptions of Khoisan people, the place of "bushmen" in modern society and the boundary between humanity and nature. Dr. Mitchell also focuses on 5 concepts and 5 skills that we should have gained from her lectures.
5 Concepts. Dr. Mitchell hopes that you have a working definition of history. History is a way of asking question and of making meaning of the past. At its core, history is about change over time. Historical materialism is the approach to history that treats the past as a collection of economic relationships (e.g., buyer/seller, producer/product). Time/place specificity means looking at the way certain ideas or events emerge in a specific time and place. Contingency is the notion that many conditions of our lives are beyond our control. Causality is how we explain the relationship between a cause and an effect.
5 Skills. First, one should be able to interpret source material. Second, you should be able to identity the steps of a historical argument. Third, you should be able to explain change over time or long-term continuity. Fourth, you should be able to identify and shift between different scales of analysis, meaning that sometimes we look at the big picture and sometimes we zoom in on a specific community or set of individuals. Different questions have different scales. Fifth, we should know how to pose humanities research questions.
Perceptions of Nature. Khoisan culture sees a constant interaction and exchange between humanity and nature. The European tradition has tended to emphasize the difference between humanity and nature as well as the hierarchy in which humanity stands above all non-human natural phenomena. In European art, science and descriptions of African landscapes, Africa has often been depicted as wild, savage and primitive. The humans living there were also treated as part of nature and as primitive. Scientists of the time categorized different races and put different people into a hierarchy where not only humans dominate non-humans, but as some people are de-humanized, humans dominate other humans.
Changing Perceptions of the San People. In 1925, Denver businessmen financed an expedition to South Africa. The images and film that came from Africa helped to change the image of "bushmen" from that of a lowly human being to a noble savage. Khoisan represented a time when humans had a simple existence in harmony with nature. This "tamer" image allowed settlers to feel safer from attack from locals. Ultimately, the image of a peaceful "savage" was used to garner positive publicity for South Africa. In the 1950s, Lawrence Marshall brought his family to Namibia in order to seek a more peaceful life. John Marshall, one of the sons, became a filmmaker and he documented the local people. The mother, Lorna, a schoolteacher, is credited with the advent of "Bushmen Studies". This family found new ways to present local African people to a Western audience. Sir Laurens van der Post, a writer and close friend to Prince Charles, claimed that the "noble savage" represents a kind of living that Western people should envy.
Casting Africans as "primitive" or "savage" depends on a certain notion of progress. If we only count a certain kind of technology as progress, then other cultures will appear "less evolved". This stereotype also relies on a notion about where humanity should be headed and/or is headed. If we think that all of humanity is going towards the same endpoint, then others will appear closer to this goal than others. Only with certain standards of progress and achievement can we judge ourselves as better or more advanced than others.
Dr. Mitchell notes that the Khoisan are not "people out of time", or people who are "less evolved" or "less advanced" than other humans. Nature, progress and advancement towards a goal are all ideas that we construct together.
Humanities Research Questions. One example of a humanities research question might be how the perceptions of Khoisan culture have changed over time. How have opinions of these people changed? How have our evaluations of them changed? How have we valued them differently? What has been positively valued and negatively valued at different times and how might we explain this in terms of other social or economic values in our own culture?
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