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Rock Art In Crisis

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Previous literature: the creation of a category
Paintings produced by San peoples (Bushmen) of southern Africa constitute one the best-understood rock art traditions in the world, owing to five decades of research into the symbolic context of their production. Erstwhile discussions of the art were that it was unlikely produced by the Bushmen at all (Breuil 1948: 11), or that it was produced as art-for art's-sake (Willcox 1978). These statements were largely prosaic and mercurial, vacillating to reflect various colonial perspectives and prejudices. Quantitative studies conducted in the Drakensberg mountains in the late 1960s and early 1970s (e.g. Vinnicombe 1967, 1972, 1976; Pager 1971, 1973; Lewis-Williams 1972, 1974, 1981), in conjunction …show more content…

Rock art interpretation was a vehicle to critique and deconstruct Eurocentric metanarratives and concepts of magic realism. Colin Campbell (1987) charged previous interpretations of rock art of being guilty of the colonial gaze adhering to Western ideology that "denigrates the Bushmen and reduces them to helpless victims of an immutable process" (Campbell 1987: 4). 'Art in Crisis: contact period rock art in the south-eastern mountains of South Africa' (Campbell 1987) used so-called contact imagery to re-imagine Bushman experiences in history. Influenced by Guenther's (1975a, 1975b, 1986) work on the Ghanzi Bushmen in Botswana, Campbell argued that contact rock art images reflected an overarching process of social negotiation between Bushmen and Bantu-speaking farmers. Far from being helpless victims of the whims of more powerful groups, he argued that ritual specialists employed their 'spiritual labour' (healing, rain-making and game control) (Lewis-Williams 1982) as a means to gain influence and material goods. Campbell (1987: 22) believed that "changes in the social and economic life of the artists must have influenced their ideology and therefore their art". Consequently, the history he produced was a structural Marxist one, one of power and prestige, but power and prestige couched in terms of process and group, rather than agency and

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