‘Elusive and allusive’: key characteristics of San expressive culture

I found the Ju|‘hoan San folklore I recorded in Botswana in 1971, when Ju|‘hoan people had a completely oral culture, very elusive. Recording many variants of stories, I learned that each storyteller told a given story differently, their performed versions ranging from full to fragmentary, often with vast differences in characters and details, yet always, intriguingly, ’the same’ story. Piecing together meanings of these elusive stories required my attention to the cloud of allusions surrounding every word and concept. I saw that studying San folklore was impossible without the information anthropologists gather as ethnography. I also became aware, through David Lewis-Williams’ seminal work Believing and Seeing and years of correspondence with him, that detailed ethnographic understanding and the study of many variants likewise supported interpretation of the rock art of the |Xam San. We agreed that San verbal and visual arts were ever-growing, highly social forms, cementing diverse individuals, through personal participation, into effective cultural understandings. I end by celebrating the recently published book of Lewis-Williams and his colleague David Witelson, The Language of Myth and Art. It importantly breaks new ground in understanding the performed nature of, and the ethnographic background to, ancient social processes underlying both expressive forms.