“The pleasure of reading Gordon’s wit and erudition never compromises the chilling account of western culpability for the manufacture of a vision of culture that has harmed those trapped in its gaze.”
Luise White, author of The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi
The Denver African Expedition of 1925 sought “the cradle of Humanity.” The explorers returned claiming to have found the “Missing Link” in the Heikum bushmen of the Kalahari—and they proceeded to market this image. As Robert J. Gordon shows in Picturing Bushmen, the impact of the expedition lay not simply in its slick merchandising of bushmen images but also in the fact that the pictures were exotic and aesthetically pleasing. Like all significant events, the expedition and its images had unanticipated consequences.
The Denver Expedition played a key role in romanticizing bushmen. Indeed, its image of bushmen has permeated Western mass culture. Before the expedition, bushmen commonly had been presented as impoverished savages. In its wake, the bushmen of South Africa have inspired commercial advertisements, art exhibitions, and novels. Bushmen are frequently the archetypal “other” to Western intellectual and popular thought. Explaining the impact of the expedition involves, in part, considering the culture of visualization that gave the expedition direction and in turn was influenced by it.
Although Rob Gordon is an anthropologist, this study ranges into questions of film theory, history, and popular culture. It offers a perspective on coffee-table books, ethnology, and the nature of research on those labeled “others.” While suggesting how “ethnographic photographs” might be appreciated, Picturing Bushmen is also a subtle analysis of the perennial issues that haunt field workers—especially what and how they “see” and how their perception is influenced by the mundane in their own societies.
Robert J. Gordon has worked for long periods in South Africa, Papua New Guinea, and Lesotho. His other books include Mines, Migrants and Masters: Life in a Namibian Mine Compound, The Bushmen Myth and the Making of a Namibian Underclass, and Law and Order in the New Guinea Highlands (with Mervyn Meggitt). He is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Vermont. More info →
Retail price:
$80.00 ·
Save 20% ($64)
US and Canada only
Share 
Permission to reprint
Permission
to photocopy or include in a course pack
via Copyright Clearance
Center
Paperback
978-0-8214-1188-9
Out-of-print
Hardcover
978-0-8214-1187-2
Retail price: $80.00,
S.
Release date: November 1997
62 illus.
·
325 pages
·
7 × 10 in.
Rights: World
Claim to the Country
The Archive of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd
By Pippa Skotnes
In the 1870s, facing cultural extinction and the death of their language, several San men and women told their stories to two pioneering colonial scholars in Cape Town, Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. The narratives of these San—or Bushmen—were of the land, the rain, the history of the first people, and the origin of the moon and stars.
Anthropology · Southern Africa · South Africa · 19th century · Victorian Era · Khoisan · History · African Studies · African History · Art · Africa
The Bushmen of Southern Africa
A Foraging Society in Transition
By Andy Smith, Candy Malherbe, Mat Gunther, and Penny Berens
This book, by an anthropologist, historian, social anthropologist, and schoolteacher, introduces the long history and current condition of the hunting people of southern Africa to students, teachers, and interested laypersons. It places the modern San in historical context and shows how they have continually adapted to outside pressures, which are forcing them to fit into the modern states of Namibia and Botswana.
Anthropology · Namibia · Southern Africa · Botswana · African Studies · Khoisan
Unconquerable Spirit
George Stow’s History Painting of the San
By Pippa Skotnes
George Stow was a Victorian man of many parts—poet, historian, ethnographer, artist, cartographer, and prolific writer. A geologist by profession, he became acquainted, through his work in the field, with the extraordinary wealth of rock paintings in the caves and shelters of the South African interior. Enchanted and absorbed by them, Stow set out to create a record of this creative work of the people who had tracked and marked the South African landscape decades and centuries before him.Un
African History · Southern Africa · South Africa · 19th century · Victorian Era · Khoisan · Anthropology · Art · History · African Studies · Africa
The Struggle for Meaning
Reflections on Philosophy, Culture, and Democracy in Africa
By Paulin J. Hountondji
·
Translation by John Conteh-Morgan
·
Foreword by K. Anthony Appiah
The Struggle for Meaning is a landmark publication by one of African philosophy’s leading figures, Paulin J. Hountondji, best known for his critique of ethnophilosophy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In this volume, he responds with autobiographical and philosophical reflection to the dialogue and controversy he has provoked.
