More on San Rock Art

Author(s): C. K. Cooke, A. R. Willcox and J. D. Lewis-Williams

Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Aug. - Oct., 1983), pp. 538-545
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research
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in their visible reflectance and ultraviolet fluorescence char-
acteristics, image detail, negativity, and three-dimensional re-
construction. DeSalvo proposes that lactic acid, one of the plant
acids involved in the formation of Volckringer patterns and
also present in human perspiration, may be responsible for the
cellulose degradation image on the Shroud.
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Cybernetics and Society, pp. 538-47.
More on San Rock Art
by C. K. COOKE
National Museum, P.O. Box 240, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. 28
II 83
Lewis-Williams (CA 23:429-49) starts with a premise which
cannot be substantiated: "This beautiful but enigmatic art is
the work of southern San (Bushman) groups that have been
extinct for about 100 years." The assumption that the San
occupied such widely separated areas as the Drakensberg, the
Western Cape, the Kalahari, Namibia, and possibly Zimbabwe
cannot be supported. Some of the painters could have been
Masarwa or Hukwe or some other group long extinct and for
us unnamed. Even if it could be assumed that the painters
were all San, the differing techniques and styles of the paintings
make it difficult to believe that there was any connection be-
tween these widely separated groups of people. It is almost as
logical to stretch the distances even farther than the thousands
of kilometres in Africa to the Palaeolithic art of Spain and the
Aboriginal art of Australia.
The earlier writers (Burkitt, Willcox, Battis, et al.) have all
agreed on the striking beauty of many of the rock paintings;
surely the views of these people cannot be cast aside as valueless
any more than Lewis-Williams's own.
Ecological considerations seem to have been rejected in the
discussion of the distribution of the animal species painted. It
is fairly obvious that the major large animals were painted in
or near the habitats in which they occurred. One would not
expect to find springbok in montane areas or eland in the
forests. In Zimbabwe, the area with which I am most familiar,
the animals depicted are with few exceptions those which occur
or have occurred in the locality (Cooke 1964).
The author's statement that much of the art is relatively
modern must be challenged, as there is good evidence to sup-
port dates as early as 10,000 years B.P. This makes it risky to
use evidence recorded from people who lived a century ago,
because they may well have been influenced by other ethnic
groups. As Lewis-Williams points out, we do not know how
the questions were framed and whether polite affirmative an-
swers were given to direct questions by the investigator. He
nevertheless accepts those answers that suit his arguments.
The cloak of Marxism in which Lewis-Williams has clothed
the Bushmen is an extraordinary assumption that cannot be
proven from the evidence. The survival of any hunter/gatherer
group is admittedly based on a small community interdepen-
dent with specialists for day-to-day requirements, but the fact
that the hunter in the Kalahari has first choice of meat from
the kill before distribution to others cannot be considered a
leaning towards Marxist doctrines.
Any new approach is to be welcomed rather than con-
demned. However, this paper denigrates in no uncertain terms
practically everything that has been written before.
Finally, one must always believe that some of the paintings
were "art for art's sake" whilst others were hunting or domestic
scenes and the "product of idle hours." Magical scenes are most
definitely in the minority. Therefore the thesis of the author,
although it contains some good ideas, is based on only a minor
part of the art. An enormous field of research remains to be
explored.
by A. R. WILLCOX
P.O. Box 26, Winterton 3340, Natal, South Africa. 10 XII
82
Lewis-Williams presents a case for the idea that "much of the
southern San rock art" can be related to "the social relations
of the production process." And it is a case, not an objective
examination, presenting evidence and arguments for his thesis
but dealing inadequately with or ignoring much of the evidence
538 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY
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for alternative explanations. In his reply to the criticisms printed
with his paper he agrees with Vastokas that what is needed is
a major debate on the questions raised. This is the more nec-
essary as none of the accompanying criticisms are by persons
who can be supposed to have intimate knowledge of the regions
from which Lewis-Williams draws his evidence.
A general objection is that Lewis-Williams works from the-
ory to evidence instead of vice versa. If one puts on "struc-
turalist," "historical materialist," or Marxist spectacles, he will
see the data accordingly and be greatly tempted to select-
even distort-the evidence. This was the method of Procrustes,
who, it will be remembered, had a guest bed and believed that
visitors should fit it, so stretched them or lopped off the surplus
accordingly.
Further, I think we should use Occam's razor and prefer the
fewest and simplest hypotheses which will make sense of the
data.
How far the recent studies of the folklore and customs of
the Kalahari Bushmen (who are not painters) can be used to
interpret the rock paintings of San of another tribe and lan-
guage living in an environment as different as can be imagined
is of course a crucial point. The examples of rock art for which
the author proposes interpretations are from the Drakensberg
of Natal and the northeastern Cape Province-an area of abun-
dant rainfall (50 to 60 inches, 1,250 to 1,500 mm), luxuriant
vegetation, and generally delightful climate (I live there!). With
the exception of a few stories picked up in adjoining Lesotho
(Orpen 1874), virtually nothing is known of the beliefs and
possible rituals of the Drakensberg/Maluti Bushmen. How far
the mass of lore recorded by the Bleek family from the San of
the southwestern Cape was shared by the Drakensberg Bush-
men is also unknown, although it is stated that they "shared
their ideology." That they must have had some beliefs and
practices in common can be granted, but it would be interesting
to see if Lewis-Williams's interpretations can be applied to the
painting region of the southern and southwestern Cape, nearer
to the homeland of Bleek's informant. It has been long accepted
that the art of the area differs in many respects both in content
and in techniques from that of the Drakensberg/Maluti region
(Bleek 1932, Van Riet Lowe 1941, Willcox 1963).
The paper begins by attacking the views of other writers
who, Lewis-Williams says, have "adopted either an innatist or
a functionalist stance"-which, put simply, means that they
thought the artists painted because they had a built-in urge to
do so or that they did so to serve some purpose (e.g., to promote
successful hunting or to increase fertility in the animals they
preferred to hunt). These explanations are not really anti-
thetical as Lewis-Williams (and Vinnicombe 1972) seem to ac-
cept. The artist expressing his innate urge could still have
directed it to a social purpose, and the painter believing his
work to serve such a purpose could have enjoyed any of the
usual satisfactions of an artist. The theory Lewis-Williams ar-
rives at-that painting was part of the production process-is
itself a functionalist one.
"Innatism" by itself explains little. Artistic potential might
be (probably is) inborn, and pleasure in colour, but the rest is
cultural, learned from the practicing artists of the community
and, in turn, passed on to others.
There is little directly observable in Bushman art to support
a simple theory of sympathetic magic. Hunts showing slain or
dying animals are relatively rare. It is agreed that the animals
depicted do not represent statistically those commonest in
Bushmen diet, which were mostly small game such as rock-
rabbits, hares, tortoises, etc. (Willcox 1973). Nevertheless, the
animals preferred as art subjects and not so easy to hunt suc-
cessfully, chiefly antelope and in some areas giraffes and ele-
phants, are just those that any hungry big-game hunter would
go after in preference to the small game. It does not, however,
follow that painting them was believed to aid the hunter in
some magical way any more than a young man of our culture
believes that pinning up a picture of a beautiful girl will aid
his hunting of such an object. He simply likes to look at it. I
will return to this point.
Lewis-Williams supports his postulated social purpose by
pointing to the overrepresentation of certain animals and un-
derrepresentation of others as painting subjects. As an example
of the former he cites the eland in the southeastern area, which
was certainly given favoured treatment as regards both number
and elaboration of technique. The question is whether it is
necessary to infer an esoteric explanation for this or whether
there are good hunters' reasons for the animal's being their
favourite "pin-up." The eland is the largest of the antelope, the
bulls running to as much as 2,000 lb. (910 kg). Killing one
meant many carefree days. The eland has tender flesh and is
the only antelope (I think it can be said the only game animal)
with much fat on its body. This was greatly prized by the
Bushmen. As an old San woman told Lewis-Williams, "The
eland is a good thing and has much fat" (Lewis-Williams 1981a).
He gives other instances of the importance of fat to the Bush-
men in his valuable thesis and book. Moreover, the eland is
the slowest of the large game, easy to hunt, and the only large
antelope common in the art region concerned. These, I suggest,
are sufficient reasons for the San of the Southeast to have had
something of an obsession with Taurotragus oryx. Another fea-
ture sufficient in itself to account for its being a favourite art
object is that it is a noble-looking beast in its size and carriage
and fawn-coloured, with delicate shading of the darker colour
into the lighter hue of the belly, neck, and inside of the legs.
It required the evolution of the shaded polychrome technique
to do justice to this animal's looks, and these polychromes are,
with very few exceptions, restricted to the southeastern art
region, where they occur in hundreds (Willcox 1955).
As an example of underrepresentation, the black wildebeest
is cited. I have given reasons for the rarity of representations
of this beast; it is an animal of the plains, not of the moun-
tainous area coextensive with the southeastern art region (Will-
cox 1978). Nevertheless, there are reasons to infer an inhibition
on representing certain animals in other areas, for example,
the springbok (Willcox 1983). This, however, hardly justifies
the inference that "the artists . . . were responding to a widely
held cognitive system."
A partiality for eland is also observable in the rock paintings
of the southwestern Cape (Maggs 1967) and among the petro-
glyphs of the highveld, but in general large game animals are
represented roughly in the proportion in which they are known
to have existed in the areas concerned (Willcox 1983). Giraffes
are the commonest animal subject among the petroglyphs of
South-West Africa/Namibia, followed in frequency by zebra
(Scherz 1970). Comparative statistics for the paintings of that
region are lacking. Elephant, giraffe, zebra, kudu, and sable
antelope are the commonest in approximately that order in the
paintings of Zimbabwe (Cooke 1964).
Among the "substantive objections" with which Lewis-Wil-
liams claims "to refute the aesthetic explanation" is that the
observer today is inferring the state of mind of the artist and
his community, assuming from the pleasure he himself derives
from the art that the original viewers felt the same. As an
example of erroneous reasoning he quotes me as having written,
"The art gives strongly the impression of being art pour l'art
executed for the pleasure of the artist in the work and the
reciprocal pleasure of the beholder" (Willcox 1963:84). I do not
retract a word of that, but I was clearly describing the impres-
sion made upon me and not necessarily on the artists' contem-
poraries, although this seems to me more likely to be true than
not. My reason for supporting the art pour l'art theory as the
principal motive is that it is the most economical hypothesis.
Having claimed to "refute the aesthetic explanation," Lewis-
Williams appears to accept it-unless I fail to understand his
argument. After rightly calling attention to the delicacy of the
painting and the fine drawing, he says "The aesthetic imper-
Vol. 24 * No. 4 * August-October 1983 539
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ative explains nothing: it needs to be explained." This I dispute.
A normal child's response to colour (especially red, the com-
monest in San art) is direct and pleasurable, and as soon as he
can hold a pencil he will make marks and be pleased with
them: it is an act of creation at its simplest. This much is rightly
called innate. Increasing skill brings greater satisfaction. The
rest is learned behavior: the San child was brought up with
pictures before him as much as our children are, and with far
fewer distractions.
That the artistic skills once gained could be put to specific
purposes and that one of them was record there is no reason
to deny-a successful hunt, an enjoyable dance, the astonishing
sight of pale-skinned men with horses and guns, a ship seen
from the coast and drawn on the rock wall for the incredulous
stay-at-homes. An unquestionable example of a historical
painting is, I think, the picture of Captain Gardiner on trek
with wagon, cattle, and horses as found and published by
Vinnicombe (1976). Other purposes, it is reasonable to infer,
were the illustration of folktales (the rain animals, etc.) and
the instruction of the young. Some paintings might have sym-
bolic meanings of the kinds Lewis-Williams proposes, but this
is an unnecessary assumption. Further, even if it is granted
the aesthetic motive remains, as far more care went into the
paintings than was necessary to produce a merely symbolic
eland or whatever. Van Noten makes the point well with his
contribution. Certainly Lewis-Williams has not, as he says,
shown that "the art was part of a symbolic and ideological
practice which dealt with the reproduction of world order and
the social processes of production." This is far too large a claim.
I object to his assumption, shared by some of those who
contributed comments, that the animal paintings, or some of
them, must have "meanings." It is no more necessary to believe
this than to believe that Landseer's Monarch of the Glen had
an esoteric meaning. It was painted because the artist thought
the great stag to have majesty, and those who bought and hung
printed copies shared this opinion.
In replying to Bardill, Lewis-Williams states that his argu-
ments concern not "motivation," but meaning. However, the
intention to convey a meaning is itself a motive, and if "mean-
ing" in the paintings be not accepted as explaining most of
them, then other motivation must be sought.
Turning to the identity of the artists, Lewis-Williams ex-
presses his conviction that "the trancers and the artists were,
for the most part, one and the same." As far as historical
evidence is concerned, this belief rests solely on the account
by Dornan of what was told him by Masarwa Bushmen (ac-
tually a dark mixed people) of the Sansokwe River in northern
Botswana. This was that there were three painters among their
branch of the tribe and that one of them was a great rain doctor.
They also said that they did not know "if any of the pictures
had an allegorical signification" (Dornan's words, of course).
But as Lewis-Williams considers all males who are capable of
going into a trance "medicine men," it follows that if, as he
proposes, this would be half the Southern San males as in the
case of the !Kung, then it is certainly probable that these would
include painters. That the other half would include painters is
equally probable. That none were women is taken for granted,
and the evidence for children's art (Willcox 1963) is ignored.
In my opinion, the minimum hypotheses as the raisons d'etre
of the representational rock art of southern Africa (and see also
Willcox 1978) are the following: (1) to record important or
pleasant events in the life of the community or in the experience
of the artist; (2) to instruct the young or illustrate folktales; (3)
to give pleasure to the artist through his work and his recreation
on the rock, to be seen again, of what pleased him at first view,
coupled with the satisfaction of sharing the aesthetic experience
and receiving admiration for his skill. This motive I take to
account for the great bulk of the art, and it does not conflict
with, but would accompany, Reasons 1 and 2. Reason 1 would
include the arms-back/flying-buck figures from trance experi-
ence, which seems to me a plausible interpretation.
Lewis-Williams does not take into account the nonrepresen-
tational art, the geometrical and amorphous designs common
among the petroglyphs, rare among the paintings. Reasons 1
and 2 cannot apply here, and 3 can only in part (the pleasure
of the artist in creating diverse forms and showing them).
Inskeep points out that the paper casts little light on the
question "Why did they paint?" In all the record of encounters
of travellers with San of the painter tribes this question seems
to have been asked but once, on the occasion cited by Inskeep
and mentioned by Lewis-Williams in his reply. The place was
not far north of the Orange River in South-West Africa/Na-
mibia, the questioner Theophilus Hahn, scholar and trader,
and the answer, as translated by Sollas (1911), that the men
and women (my emphasis) teach their children and that they
exercise their art for the pure pleasure of representation. With
the qualifications stated above, this is my own view. The im-
portance of the pleasure principle can hardly be overstated.
Bronowski (1973), after a lifetime of penetrating study, wrote,
"The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure
in his own skill."
Reply
by J. D. LEWIS-WILLIAMS
Department of Archaeology, University of the Witwaters-
rand, Johannesburg, South Africa. 15 In 83
Willcox's comment is valuable because it represents a widely
and long held set of beliefs about San rock art and so provides
a first-hand account of views I argue are no longer tenable.
The effect of these views on the progress of the study has, I
believe, been deleterious. In an earlier review Willcox (1968)
himself rightly deplored the conspicuous absence of progress
without observing that it can be attributed not to a lack of
industry or resources on the part of researchers, but to a the-
oretical orientation characterised by faulty notions of "scientific
method" and "theory" and, more astonishingly, by a failure to
make extensive use of San ethnography. It is not possible in a
brief and hastily written reply to examine these two sources of
error in detail, though they stand in need of a final and defin-
itive rebuttal; I can merely point to some of the more serious
flaws.
In the first place, Willcox and others hold a concept of science
now dismissed. They believe that scientists objectively assem-
ble all data, analyse these data, and then, again objectively,
infer or induce explanations. However, philosophers of science
(see, amongst many others, Popper 1959, Hempel 1966, Copi
1968, and Chalmers 1978) have shown repeatedly, first, that
data cannot be assembled without some guiding hypothesis
and, secondly, that it is not possible to move by logical steps
from data to explanations. One must, of course, be familiar
with the field of study and not ignore contrary instances, as
Willcox accuses me of doing, but it is a hypothesis which dis-
criminates between relevant and irrelevant data and so makes
research possible. Though Willcox claims to work from "evi-
dence" to "theory," his "evidence" is as skewed by his cryptic,
unformulated "theory" as is evidence assembled by a researcher
who clearly states his position, and, furthermore, there are no
grounds for supposing he can logically "work from" data to
theory. Willcox believes that "if one puts on 'structuralist,''his-
torical materialist,' or Marxist spectacles, he will see the data
accordingly." But no vision of a problem is possible without
some theoretical framework; failure to develop explicit theory
leads to the ethnocentric empiricism we find in Willcox's com-
ment.
Moreover, the most important stage of scientific method,
540 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY
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hypothesis evaluation, is reduced by Willcox to a single cri-
terion: simplicity. Simplicity is, however, a very difficult term
to define, and it is consequently not always as easy to decide
which is the simpler of two competing hypotheses as it was in
the classic case of the Ptolemaic-Copernican controversy. Will-
cox does not demonstrate the simplicity of his hypothesis; he
merely asserts it. But how can simplicity be demonstrated?
The basic concepts required and the empirically verifiable de-
ductions or predictions made possible by competing hypotheses
may be so different as to render comparison impossible. If the
assumptions required are to be counted, we have the further
problem of deciding just how many assumptions are involved,
let alone their relative importance or complexity, for assump-
tions can be combined or divided in many ways. It is, in any
case, quite wrong to assume that the "exercise [of] art for the
pure pleasure of representation" is in any sense a "simple"
explanation; it presupposes a whole range of interests and val-
ues which look suspiciously Western. Finally, there is no rea-
son, especially in the sort of study with which we are concerned,
always to judge the "simpler" hypothesis (supposing its greater
simplicity could be demonstrated) more correct than a complex
one. It is therefore not surprising that Copi (1968:386) lists
simplicity last among his five criteria for evaluating scientific
explanations and adds, "it is vague and not always easy to
apply."
A single example of supposed "simplicity" must suffice. Will-
cox's explanation for the numerical emphasis on eland in San
art is based on many of that antelope's characteristics. I have
myself noted all these features and others besides (Lewis-Wil-
liams and Biesele 1978:117-19; Lewis-Williams 1981a) but have
gone on to argue that they appear sufficient to account for the
animal's frequent depiction only if the ethnography is ignored.
The eland was a symbol in girls' puberty and boys' first-kill
rituals, marriage ceremonies, and trance rituals. These ritual
contexts are more likely to account for its repeated depiction
than its physical features or behaviour, and this conclusion is
borne out by many of the painted compositions which point to
ritual. As I have argued elsewhere (Lewis-Williams 198 1a:7 1-
72), some of the eland's features, such as its great fatness, may
be the reasons it was selected by the San as a polysemic symbol,
but the reasons for a symbol's selection must be distinguished
from the meaning or meanings it conveys. In accounting for
the San interest in painting eland a semblance of "simplicity"
can thus be achieved only by disregarding the ethnographic
data.
In evaluating hypotheses we should more usefully note (1)
testability, (2) compatibility with well-established hypotheses
and theory, (3) heuristic potential, (4) the quantity of data ex-
plained, and (5) the diversity of data explained. I shall take
each of these criteria very briefly in turn. First, I can conceive
of no way of testing Willcox's three-point explanation other
than to continue to infer the same explanation for the art; no
empirically verifiable implications can be deduced from it. My
trance hypothesis, by drawing attention to specific details in
the art and the various ways metaphors are depicted, may be
more precisely tested; it is also testable against the ethnography,
which Willcox's explanation is not. Secondly, the explanation
can hardly be said to be compatible with well-established an-
thropological theory; on the contrary, Willcox explicitly es-
chews all theory. Thirdly, the explanation has no heuristic
potential, for it cannot lead to further discoveries; once stated
it covers all the art so far discovered or yet to be discovered.
In contrast, the hypothesis I advocate has led to the discovery
of further metaphors in both the art and the ethnography. The
fourth criterion, the quantity of data explained, may appear
to be handsomely fulfilled by Willcox's explanation because it
can be applied to any painting. The fulfilment of the criterion
is, however, illusory because it is achieved merely by definition
and circularity. The quantity of paintings explained by the
trance hypothesis is, as I have said in a previous reply, difficult
to determine numerically. As work progresses I am increasingly
persuaded that far more of the art than I originally suspected
is associated with trance. Willcox rightly remarks that I do not
attempt to explain all types of painting; I am aware of this and
therefore cautiously wrote that "much of the southern San rock
art" is explained by the trance hypothesis. In the same way
that dances do not always lead to trance performance and
children are not discouraged from imitating trance dancers,
some paintings may have been done outside of a ritual context;
nevertheless, both the dance and, I believe, the art were es-
sentially religious activities. The last criterion, the diversity of
the data explained, is perhaps even more damaging to Willcox's
explanation because he refers to the art only. An alternative
explanation which refers to San myth and ritual as well is
obviously superior. I have shown that the trance hypothesis
points to metaphors common to San art, myth, and ritual (Lewis-
Williams 1981a, 1983a; Lewis-Williams and Loubser n.d.).
(For more detailed consideration of hypothesis evaluation in
rock art studies, see Lewis-Williams 1983b and Lewis-Williams
and Loubser n.d.)
In summary, the erroneous belief that one's data are neutral,
that one's inferences are reliable, and that the "simplest" hy-
pothesis is always the best leads to an ethnocentric view of the
art. An example of this ethnocentrism is Willcox's comparison
of Landseer's Monarch of the Glen with rock paintings of an-
imals. Having denied that Landseer's painting has any "mean-
ing," he contradicts himself by writing: "It was painted because
the artist thought the great stag to have majesty." "Majesty"
is, however, a culturally determined value; it is not inherent
in the stag. Indeed, Willcox could not interpret the painting
at all without some understanding of the artist's system of
values and the way in which those values are expressed in
symbols. Similarly, it is impossible to interpret San paintings
without some understanding of San values and beliefs.
Ethnocentrism can be combatted only by ethnography. It is
therefore significant that Willcox questions the relevance of
Kalahari San ethnography to the art of the southeastern moun-
tains. This was formerly my view too (Lewis-Williams 1975:414),
but close study of the southern materials in the Bleek collection
and Orpen's (1874) brief but highly important contribution
from the southeastern mountains (Lewis-Williams 1980) and
then work with the Kalahari people themselves (Lewis-Wil-
liams 198 la) showed that my reservations were unfounded: the
San groups (it is not correct to refer to them as "tribes") I have
mentioned all shared many beliefs and, for our purposes most
significantly, the rituals with which the art was associated. In
considerable detail, I have compared hunting rituals (Lewis-
Williams and Biesele 1978), girls' puberty rituals, marriage
observances, and trance rituals (Lewis-Williams 198 la): in each
case the parallels between the groups are remarkable and show
that it is legitimate to use the northern material cautiously to
amplify the sometimes elliptical southern collections in those
areas where basic similarities can be demonstrated. Willcox
writes as if all this work had never been published and refers
to the well-known, though exaggerated, differences in the en-
vironment rather than to the ethnography itself. If there are
indeed ethnographic differences and anomalies which in some
way vitiate my explanation, it is hard to understand why he
does not cite them.
Also dealing with regional distinctions, Willcox points out
that different animals are emphasised in different regions, as
Vinnicombe (1972) demonstrated over a decade ago. This re-
mark illustrates Willcox's failure to distinguish between prin-
ciples and content. The interpretation I advocate is not tied to
any specific antelope. Because most of my fieldwork was done
in the southeastern mountains I naturally refer time and again
to eland, the most frequently depicted antelope in that region.
Elsewhere, as one may expect, other animals are emphasised,
Vol. 24 * No. 4 * August-October 1983 541
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but the same key metaphors are depicted and these show that
we are dealing with the same fundamental beliefs. Once the
principles are recognised, the supposed differences in content
between the western Cape art and that of the southeastern
mountains assume less importance. The unfortunate fact of the
matter is that rock art researchers have failed to notice the key
metaphors which are depicted by a variety of easily overlooked
animal and human postures and by other features such as
therianthropes, sinuous lines (Lewis-Williams 1981b), red lines
on white faces, and so-called infibulation. The essential unity
of San rock art is, however, now being recognised. Maggs and
Sealy (1983) have shown that many paintings in the western
Cape are products of trance experience, and Huffman (1983)
has detected key trance metaphors in the rock art of Zimbabwe,
over 1,500 miles to the north. Protestations that the art of these
two regions is fundamentally different from that of the south-
eastern mountains must in future be muted.
Still referring to geographical differences but on a smaller
scale, Willcox argues that wildebeest were seldom painted be-
cause they did not inhabit the mountains. By this reasoning
we should expect to find wildebeest depicted on the plains,
but, unfortunately for Willcox's argument, we do not. Para-
doxically, the empiricist position fails to take adequate cogni-
zance of the data.
To illustrate this failure and to show how essential a thorough
and detailed understanding of the ethnography is, I comment
briefly on the paintings in figures 1 and 2. If we take Willcox's
injunction to infer only the "simplest" hypothesis and follow
his example in largely ignoring the ethnography, we could well
conclude that these paintings record "important or pleasant"
events and that they merely gave "pleasure to the artist" in
allowing him to re-see "what pleased him at first view"-in
this case a dance and a successful hunt. The inadequacy of
this explanation is suggested first by the hand-to-nose posture
of one of the dancers, a feature which could, but for the eth-
nography, easily be overlooked. This posture, a variation of
which shows a man with a hand held out to an antelope's nose,
is repeated throughout southern Africa and has been illus-
trated, though not commented on, by many writers.' An un-
published portion of the Bleek collection contains the clue to
the significance of the posture. An informant told Lloyd about
a medicine woman who believed that other medicine people
"intended to take away my snoring power" (W. H. I. Bleek
and L. C. Lloyd MS L.V.4.4810, Jagger Library, Capetown).
"Snoring" was, probably following Campbell (1815:316) and
popular usage, used by Bleek and Lloyd to denote a medicine
man's supposed ability to sniff sickness out of a patient. The
word translated "snoring power" (Infunue) means, in literal con-
texts, "nose" (Bleek 1956:352), and Lloyd at first translated it
I
Cursory perusal of the literature uncovered the following examples
of the hand-to-nose posture: Lee and Woodhouse (1970:D37), Lewis-
Williams (1981a:fig. 1), Pager (1975:10, 41, 82), Summers (1959:pls 7,
16, 20, 40; fig. 21), Vinnicombe (1976:figs. 103, 192), Willcox (1956:pls.
7, 67; 1963:pl. 6), Woodhouse (1979:75).
FIG. 1. Group painted in dark red; portions of the rock have flaked off. Eastern Orange Free State
FIG. 2. Group painted in dark red. Eastern Orange Free State.
542 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY
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thus but then, no doubt after further unrecorded explanation
by the informant, deleted "nose" and entered "snoring power."
As I have explained in my paper and elsewhere, "snoring" or
curing was accomplished in trance and was, furthermore, often
accompanied by a nasal hemorrhage, a second important in-
dicative feature also depicted in figure 1. In a published passage
about "snoring" an informant explained: "His nose goes into
the man's body to the place underneath. It is his nose which
works the spot underneath. . . His nose sews up the mouth
of the man's wound" (Bleek 1935:34). This and other passages
(e.g., Bleek 1935:21) suggest very strongly that the nose was
closely associated with trance performance and that the word
was used metaphorically to mean the ability or power to enter
trance.
According to Arbousset (1846:246-47), a dance such as that
depicted in figure 1 was known as "the dance of blood." He
saw the San of the southeastern mountains falling into trance
"covered with blood, which pours from the nostrils." Orpen's
(1874:10) San informant described the dance thus: "It is a cir-
cular dance of men and women, following each other. . . . Some
fall down; some become as if mad and sick; blood runs from
the noses of others whose charms are weak. . . When a man
is sick, this dance is danced round him." One of Bleek's (1935:12)
informants gave a similar account: "He dances first because he
wants the people who are learning sorcery [i.e., to enter trance]
to dance after him. . . . When a sorceror is teaching us, when
his nose bleeds, he sneezes the blood from his nose into his
hand, he makes us smell the blood from his nose."
The hand-to-nose posture does not, however, appear only in
paintings of trance dances. The artists used the posture to point
to trance in other contexts such as hunting. In figure 2, which
comes from the same site as figure 1, a hunter equipped with
a bow (the string is not shown) and a handful of arrows appears
to have surprised a small antelope, while another is still re-
cumbent. Without an understanding of the hunter's posture
this painting could be mistaken for a straightforward record
of a hunt, but it goes farther and depicts an aspect of trance
performance. One of the tasks of medicine men was to "control"
animals (see my paper), and it is this concept rather than an
event which is important in this painting.
Trance is the San's transcendental religious experience, and
the ritual dance during which it occurs is their chief religious
ritual; nothing in San culture can compare with the over-
whelming importance of trance performance. Detection of trance
in figures 1 and 2, and in many other paintings as well, therefore
transforms what might otherwise be no more than simple and
rather charming records of "pleasant" events into religious
statements about the efficacy of San religion and the role of
medicine men. A pictorial statement of religious beliefs is of
altogether a different order from a prosaic statement about a
dance or a hunt: the religious statement is symbolic, not iconic,
because it signifies by an association of ideas rather than by
likeness or similarity (Lewis-Williams 1981a:3-7).
These brief examples show that we cannot interpret San rock
art without recourse to the ethnography and that the status of
paintings as either icons or symbols can be established only
after the meaning has been clarified. Common sense, ethno-
centric observations about "pin-ups" and the behaviour of chil-
dren, and supposed inductions are inadequate and misleading.
It is, indeed, the inadequacy of Willcox's position that I
emphasise, for I do not deny, as he implies, that the artists
took great care with and delighted in their work. On the con-
trary, I insist that this is so, but to end there is, as Hammond-
Tooke (1983) has argued, reductionist and residual. At this
point we are confronted by the distinction between motivation
and meaning.
Many writers confuse meaning with motivation. By "moti-
vation" they understand, first, the state of mind which led an
individual artist to paint a particular painting. Such states of
mind must have been diverse and could have changed even
during the execution of a single depiction; it is entirely profitless
and obfuscatory to speculate what they might have been in
any given instance. Individual psychological states are not part
of culture, whereas meaning is culturally controlled and there-
fore more accessible. Over and above these individual moti-
vations there was also no doubt a culturally determined,
generally accepted reason for painting on the walls of rock-
shelters which was closely allied to the meaning of the depic-
tions rather than to the feelings, moods, or beliefs of individ-
uals. The ethnography has not yielded a conclusive indication
of what the conscious, cultural motivation or intention may
have been, but it may yet do so; I suggested in my paper (p.
435) that the communication and pooling of trance experience
may have been part of this cultural motivation, but I am not
persuaded that we have unequivocal clarity on this point.
An example from Western art illustrates the distinctions I
have drawn between meaning, personal motivation, and cul-
tural motivation. Whether Michelangelo was personally mo-
tivated by an artistic impulse to decorate the Sistine Chapel or
whether he did it for money or because he could not refuse so
august and powerful a patron as the Pope or whether he was
variously moved by a changing blend of these diverse moti-
vations is of little consequence: the meaning of his work, "read"
in the light of Christian mythology, matters far more and is far
more accessible. The generally accepted cultural motivation
for decorating churches was probably to glorify God, but
whether we are right in this supposition, or even whether Mi-
chelangelo subscribed to this view or not, does not aid or impair
attempts to decode the meaning of the depictions.
We mustfirst ascertain the meaning of the depictions; then
we can speculate on possible cultural motivations. Because the
meaning can be obtained only from the ethnography and not
from inferences from the art alone, it is with the ethnography
that we must start. Perhaps the San did teach through art (I
speculated on something very similar in my paper [p. 435]):
but what did they teach? Perhaps they did wish to re-see certain
things: but what did they wish to re-see? I have shown that,
without the ethnography, we could easily confuse the depiction
of trance activity in figure 2 with a straightforward hunt; many
other paintings have been similarly misunderstood. The "what"
questions are therefore the crucial questions.
It is also the answers to these questions that are important
in identifying the artists. I find Willcox's remarks on this point
puzzling. In my paper (p. 434) and in the other publications
to which I referred I argue that the depictions of things seen
in trance "suggest very strongly that they were painted by those
who experienced the hallucinations of trance rather than by
others to whom these experiences were described." Dornan's
observation tends to support my suggestion, but my suggestion
is certainly not based on it. I added: "This evidence does not,
of course, mean that every medicine man was a painter or that
every painter was a medicine man. . . it is more probable
that anyone [man or woman] who chose to acquire the skill
could become a painter." Perhaps Willcox missed these sen-
tences.
Once the meaning of the art is clarified by ethnographic
argument we can move on to the larger question of the social
and economic role of the art, and it was, of course, this issue
that was the subject of my paper. Such a question can be
addressed only within an explicit theoretical framework. If we
accept, as I argue, that much of the art is associated in one
way or another with medicine men (or medicine people), we
can certainly go on to enquire, within our theoretical frame-
work and without deluding ourselves that we are working
objectively from "evidence" to "theory," about the social and
economic role of trance performance and so of much of the
art. The theoretical framework is, at this point, itself a hy-
pothesis which we are to test against the evidence: we ask,
"Does the theoretical framework make sense of the data?" I
submit that it does. Willcox believes that I have not succeeded
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in arguing that "the art was part of a symbolic and ideological
practice which dealt with the reproduction of world order and
the social processes of production," but he does not show where
my argument goes wrong. Because he merely states and does
not argue his belief beyond the preliminary points with which
I have already dealt, I can only refer him again to the detailed,
ethnographically based arguments I set forth in my paper.
The criticisms expressed in this reply, though trenchant, re-
late strictly to views and not to people. Alex Willcox has long
been respected for the sobriety of his views and for his will-
ingness to enter into debate without acrimony. His early book
Rock Paintings of the Drakensberg (1956) did much to foster
my own interest in southern African rock art, and I should be
dismayed if anything I have written were thought to diminish
his reputation. His contribution to the study has been enormous
and will stand for many years to come.
Cooke's comment is similar to Willcox's because it too ex-
presses the point of view that has long dominated San rock art
studies. Much of what I have said in reply to Willcox can
therefore be taken to apply to Cooke's comment. Before dealing
in more detail with points raised or implied by Cooke, I must
clear away four misunderstandings.
I certainly do not "cast aside as valueless" the pioneering
work of Burkitt, Willcox, Battiss, Breuil, and many others,
including Cooke himself. They recorded innumerable sites,
published valuable copies and photographs, and brought the
art to the attention of a wider audience. I do, however, believe
their explanations for the art to be, by and large, demonstrably
wrong. Cooke puts it well when he writes of "the views" of
earlier writers, because their "explanations" are often no more
than views or arguments by authority. The Abbe Breuil, for
one, was notorious for his authoritative pronouncements, and
Cooke himself exhibits a little of the same attitude in his final
paragraph: "one must always believe. . . Magical scenes are
most definitely in the minority." Yet he does not say how he
distinguishes "magical" from other scenes, nor does he show
why the scenes I identify as being associated with the work of
medicine men are not, as I argue, much more than "art for
art's sake."
Secondly, Cooke questions San authorship of the art, but it
is no "assumption" that the San occupied the areas he names;
there is ample historical and archaeological evidence that they
did. In further support of his belief in multiple authorship
Cooke argues that "the differing techniques and styles of the
paintings make it difficult to believe that there was any con-
nection between these widely separated groups of people." San
groups are distinguished principally by linguistic criteria, and
the two groups Cooke mentions (Masarwa and Hukwe) are,
in fact, both San. "Masarwa" is the Tswana word for "Bush-
men" and is used to cover all groups. The Hukwe (more cor-
rectly, Xfikhoe or Kxoe) are the most northerly of the central
(or so-called Hottentot) speakers. All these groups are also
"culturally" San. I do not claim that there was a "connection"
between the San of, say, Namibia and the Drakensberg in the
sense that they visited each other's areas, but, as I have pointed
out in my reply to Willcox, there is every reason to believe that
these widely separated groups shared many beliefs and rituals;
this uniformity may be unexpected, but it is empirically veri-
fiable (Lewis-Williams 1981a, Lewis-Williams and Biesele 1978).
Like Willcox, Cooke ignores all the detailed published material
in favour of an unsubstantiated assertion.
Thirdly, I do not deny the antiquity of some of the art. On
the contrary, I drew attention to its antiquity in my first reply
(p. 447) and added, "The passage of time, however, merely
makes change possible: it does not cause change. Moreover,
there are certain details in the portable art of high antiquity
which suggest that much of what I have had to say in this
paper and elsewhere is applicable to the art of those remote
periods." As we are surprised by the wide geographical extent
of the concepts depicted in the art, we shall, I suspect, be
surprised by the time depth of those concepts.
Lastly, I am well aware that different animals are empha-
sised in different regions, and I do not reject ecological factors.
Like Willcox, Cooke has confused the principles of my expla-
nation with the identification of certain species; I therefore refer
the reader to my reply to Willcox.
I take up in more detail Cooke's emphasis on "differing
techniques and styles" because it is a major component of the
empiricists' stock-in-trade. As has long been recognised, the
art in the widely separated regions is stylistically different, but
stylistic variations certainly do not, as Cooke supposes, imply
conceptual differences. Indeed, Cooke's and many other writ-
ers) concern with style and technique has obscured the repe-
tition of key trance metaphors. Huffman (1983) has shown that
these distinctive metaphors are abundant in the Zimbabwean
art with which Cooke claims to be most familiar. The repetition
of the metaphors over the whole of southern Africa shows that
the art is the product of a single cognitive system, and the
detailed way in which those enigmatic and easily overlooked
metaphors are explained by 19th- and 20th-century San eth-
nography shows that that the San were indeed the principal
authors.
There are, in general, two types of San ethnography. Cooke's
failure to distinguish between them leads to his accusation that
I accept only statements which suit my arguments. The first
category of ethnography is that collected incidentally by early
travellers, missionaries, and explorers such as Hahn (Inskeep,
CA 23:442). Whilst these sources may well contain useful snip-
pets, they are generally unreliable; the much quoted G. W.
Stow, for example, must unfortunately be placed in this cat-
egory because most of his material seems to be secondhand.
The second category comprises material collected in recent
decades by trained anthropologists from Kalahari San and the
remarkable 19th-century Bleek collection, which embraces no
fewer than about 12,000 verbatim pages in the /Xam language
together with a very literal English translation (Lewis-Williams
1981a:25-31). The ethnography of this second category must
be taken seriously; it contains the concepts which gave rise to
the art. I should go so far as to say that, as a rule of thumb,
we should regard with the gravest reservation any rock art
study that does not make extensive and detailed use of this
ethnography.
The reason so few southern African rock art researchers have
exploited this ethnography is that most of them have not been
equipped theoretically to cope with it. Cooke's suggestion that
"the fact that the hunter in the Kalahari has first choice of
meat from the kill before distribution to others cannot be con-
sidered a leaning towards Marxist doctrines" is, of course, a
misunderstanding of the ethnography as well as of anthropo-
logical theory. My materialist argument does not imply that
the San (or I, for that matter) are Marxists as Cooke appears
to understand the term. I recommend to him the references I
cited in my paper and those Davis added in his comment (pp.
440-41).
A discipline comes of age only when it becomes theoretically
self-conscious. For decades the study of one of the most dazzling
expressions of so-called primitive art has been in the hands of
people lacking the theory to make sense of it. One cannot
imagine physicists explaining their data without molecular the-
ory, the laws of thermodynamics, and relativity or biologists
producing an explanatory synthesis without evolutionary the-
ory. Yet rock art workers have cherished the misguided notions
that the art speaks directly to the modern viewer and that
theory merely complicates the issues unnecessarily. The poverty
and vagueness of their explanations are evidence of the failure
of their atheoretical position. Only when rock art research
develops a sound body of theory will it become a reputable
discipline. The strains within the scientific community which
544 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY
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this process precipitates have been described by Kuhn (1970)
and are illustrated by Cooke's comment.
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Wanted
* Information and advice with regard to a projected review
paper on indigenous methods of pest control. The review will
focus on conscious strategies for the control of microbes, ar-
thropods, vertebrates, and plants that interfere with agricul-
tural production-strategies that arise from peasant interactions
with their environment rather than from contact with the mod-
ern West. Strategies that are obviously for the purpose of con-
trolling pests even though this may not be the conscious intent
are also of interest. Since data of this type are difficult to gather
and to confirm, I am also soliciting opinions as to what would
constitute good data and suggestions as to how to go about
collecting them. Please write: Stephen J. Risch, Section of Ecol-
ogy and Systematics, Division of Biological Sciences, Cornell
University, Ithaca, N.Y. 14853-0239, U.S.A.
* Copies of unpublished papers on Melanesian ethnography in
any field, for an archive that will maintain both physical and
computer files of contributed papers, generate periodic com-
prehensive and specialized topical bibliographies, and provide
both bibliographies and microfiche copies of holdings to the
academic institutions of Melanesia (gratis) and to subscribers
to the archive (at nominal cost). Please write: Melanesian Ar-
chive, Department of Anthropology C-001, University of Cal-
ifornia at San Diego, La Jolla, Calif. 92093, U.S.A.
* References for a bibliography being compiled by Leonard
Plotnicov and Gilbert Kushner as the first step in a study of
writing about Jews by anthropologists of Jewish origin in the
period 1910-70. Contributions need not be limited to books
and professional journal articles. Reprints will be especially
appreciated, and the cost of photocopying will be paid on re-
quest. Please write: Leonard Plotnicov, Department of An-
thropology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15260,
U.S.A.
* Basic data on the lives and careers of the following Filipino
and American anthropologists, in connection with a project
entitled "Pioneers in Philippine Anthropology: 1900-83": Mar-
celo Tangco, E. A. Manuel, Marcelino N. Maceda, T. S. Ora-
cion, Fred Eggan, H. C. Conklin, Robert Fox, Frank Lynch,
and others. Please write: Mario D. Zamora, Department of
Anthropology, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg,
Va. 23185, U.S.A.
Vol. 24 * No. 4 * August-October 1983
545
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