Psychospiritual ecoscience: The Ju/'hoansi and cultural tourism

The relation between knowledge and the visual, on the one hand, and knowledge about peoples on the other, is a prime concern in visual anthropology. The impact of the visual on the everyday life of the Ju/'hoansi is my concern here. This paper is offered in two parts: this article and the one which follows. The results of a field‐trip in July 1996 to Otjozondjupa (previously known as Bush‐manland) in Namibia are discussed in terms of the question: How do subjects make sense of the anthropological?1 Our “subject community” was the Ju/'hoansi of Nyae Nyae. The “texts” we interrogated through Ju/'hoansi popular memory were those made of them by the documentary filmmaker John Marshall, a South African feature‐film director, Jamie Uys, and one by the Discovery Channel.