Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T03:29:16.413Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The uncreated man. A story of archaeology and imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 November 2012

Nick Shepherd
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

What is the place of imagination in archaeology? This paper works with a set of materials from the deep archive of the South African archaeologist John Goodwin (1900–59) to explore the relationship between archaeology and imagination. The first half of the paper focuses on a short story written by Goodwin, describing the accidental creation and subsequent ‘uncreation’ of an indigenous person of the Cape (described in the story as a ‘Hottentot’) by the gods on Olympus. The second half of the paper describes two encounters in life between Goodwin and indigenous people of the Cape (the first with the so-called ‘Tweerivieren Bushmen’, exhibited in life at the Empire Exhibition of 1936; the second with the human remains from Oakhurst Cave). Encounters in life, in death and in imagination, the terms of these three episodes double and repeat one another in the different forms of writing to which they give rise (the imagined world of the short story, and the ‘bare description’ of Goodwin's archaeological texts). At the centre of each is the haunted figure of the ‘Bushman’/‘Hottentot’, a being whose status is figured as a kind of ‘death-in-life’. In my telling, forms of actual and epistemic violence are never far from these events. Looking, showing and telling are described as activities which range across a set of characteristic sites: the body, the archive and the grave. In so doing, they summon their counterparts, the categories of the unspeakable and the untellable.

Keywords

archaeologyimaginationthe archiveepistemic violencespectresthe gazeexhibition-in-life‘Bushmen’‘Hottentots’
Type
Articles
Information
Archaeological Dialogues , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , December 2012 , pp. 171 - 194
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Barnard, A., 2007: Anthropology and the Bushman, Oxford and New York.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biesele, M., 1993: Women like meat. The folklore and foraging ideology of the Kalahari Ju/‘hoan, Johannesburg.Google Scholar
Campbell, R., 1982: The selected poems of Roy Campbell, Oxford.Google Scholar
Coetzee, J.M., 1988: White writing. On the culture of letters in South Africa, New Haven and London.Google Scholar
Dart, R.A., 1937a: The hut distribution genealogy and homogeneity of the /?Auni- =Khomani Bushmen, Bantu studies 11, 157–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dart, R.A., 1937b: The physical characters of the /?Auni- =Khomani Bushmen, Bantu studies 11, 175–235.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Doke, C.M., 1936a: Games, plays and dances of the =Khomani Bushmen, Bantu studies 10, 461–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Doke, C.M., 1936b: An outline of =Khomani Bushman phonetics, Bantu studies 10, 433–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Drennan, M.R., 1937a: The cave dwellers (Archaeology of the Oakhurst Shelter, George), Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa 25, 259–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Drennan, M.R., 1937b: The children of the cave dwellers (Arcaeology of the Oakhurst Shelter, George), Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa 25, 281–84.Google Scholar
Drury, J., and Drennan, M.R., 1926: The pudendal parts of the South African Bush race, Medical journal of South Africa 22, 113–17.Google Scholar
Dubow, S., 2006: A commonwealth of knowledge. Science, sensibility, and white South Africa 1820–2000, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodwin, A.J.H. (ed.), 1935: This Africa, Cape Town.Google Scholar
Goodwin, A.J.H., 1937: Archaeology of Oakhurst Shelter, George, Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa 25, 229–324.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodwin, A.J.H., 1945: Method in prehistory. An introduction to the discipline of prehistoric archaeology with special reference to South African conditions, Cape Town.Google Scholar
Goodwin, A.J.H., 1947: The bored stones of South Africa, Annals of the South African Museum 37, 1–210.Google Scholar
Goodwin, A.J.H., and van Riet Lowe, P., 1929: The Stone Age culture of South Africa, Cape Town.Google Scholar
Gordon, R.J., 1992: The Bushman myth. The making of a Namibian underclass. Boulder.Google Scholar
Gordon, R.J., 1997: Picturing Bushmen. The Denver African Expedition of 1925, Cape Town and Johannesburg.Google Scholar
Gordon, R.J., 1999: ‘Bain's Bushmen’. Scenes at the Empire Exhibition, 1936, in Lindfors, B. (ed.), Africans on stage. Studies in ethnological show business, Bloomington, 266–89.Google Scholar
Kirby, P.R., 1936: The musical practices of the /?Auni and =Khomani Bushmen, Bantu studies 10, 373–432.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pearson, M., and Shanks, M., 2001: Theatre/archaeology, New York.Google Scholar
Price, S., and Kearns, E. (eds), 2003: The Oxford dictionary of classical myth and religion, Oxford.Google Scholar
Rassool, C., and Hayes, P., 2002: Science and the spectacle. /Khanako's South Africa, 1936–1937, in Woodward, W., Hayes, P. and Minkley, G. (eds), Deep histories. Gender and colonialism in Southern Africa, New York, 117–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Said, E., 1978: Orientalism. Western conceptions of the orient, London.Google Scholar
Schofield, J.F., 1937: The pottery (Archaeology of the Oakhurst Shelter, George), Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa 25, 295–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schrire, C., 1995: Digging through darkness. Chronicles of an archaeologist, Charlottesville.Google Scholar
Shanks, M., 1992: Experiencing the past. On the character of archaeology, London.Google Scholar
Shepherd, N., 2002: Disciplining archaeology. The invention of South African prehistory, 1923–1953, Kronos 28, 127–45.Google Scholar
Shepherd, N., 2003: ‘When the hand that holds the trowel is black . . .’. Disciplinary practices of self-representation and the issue of ‘native’ labour in archaeology, Journal of social archaeology 3, 334–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skotnes, P., 1996: Miscast. Negotiating the presence of the Bushmen, Cape Town.Google Scholar
Smuts, J.C., 1925: South Africa in science, South African journal of science 22, 111–25.Google Scholar