This book is the latest in a decade of offerings from its editor, Keyan Tomaselli, and his students in the Centre for Communication, Media, and Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa. Tomaselli is the author of five of the chapters and both prefaces, while all but one of the remaining eight papers is by current or former graduate students in the Centre. Tomaselli introduces ‘three interrelated themes: researching the San …, reflections on cultural tourism …, and practical thoughts for cultural tourism ventures’. While these themes inform the papers in varying degree, each is engaged more strongly in a species of autoethnography ambivalently linked to postmodernism. The reflections are almost exclusively about personal and/or group identity and the status of indigeneity.
At the outset, Tomaselli sets the postmodernist tone by denying it: ‘postmodernism was forgotten as students walked [and talked] with the locals’ (p. 14). But Tomaselli had begun by asserting that ‘Postmodern archaeology was another discourse we developed to explain how “we” researchers related to “them”, the researched’ (p. 4). This ambivalence is odd, for as Reed-Danahay insisted, autoethnography is a postmodernist construct. Nyasha Mboti in Chapter Four passionately defends autoethnography and self-reflexive research without saying just what he means by these terms. Nevertheless, self-reflexive these chapters all are: the authors cite each other with such needless frequency that at one point I wrote in the book's margin ‘we-reflexive’. They would do well to heed Coffey, who recognized that the ethnographic self is often self-indulgent and narcissistic.
Identity is considered in terms of indigenous claims to land that is part of the Kalahari Transfrontier Park. In 1999, a group of people calling themselves #Khomani were granted 36,000 hectares in the western section of the Park, at the same time another, adjacent, 30,000 hectares were granted to the Mier community. In 2002, the South African Department of Tourism, Environment, and Conservation allocated R6·5 million (then about US $1.3 million) for the construction of a tourist lodge on the boundary of these grants. The Mier people are Nama speakers who in the 1930s had been granted a reserve in the area. Tomaselli notes that ‘In securing the allocation, the #Khomani constituted itself out of divergent clans and a dispersed Bushman population to claim indigeneity and political/ethnic legitimacy over others with equally historic purchase.’ Tomaselli elaborates that ‘we examined whether indigeneity could be reconceived as a contemporary performance of self that enacts a restoration of relations to one's past’ (p. 48). All the authors discuss identity and indigeneity solely in relation to #Khomani enactment as Bushman, although we are told almost nothing of the grounds on which this identity is based.
However readers need to know at least something of those grounds, that is of #Khomani history, if they are to acquire a full picture of what they are ‘shown’ rather than ‘told’ (to paraphrase a frequent autoethnographic mantra) in this book. In 1910, Dorothea Bleek found #Khomani, |‘Auni, |Namani, and |Nu'ci (that is, San-speakers) and Nama (that is, Khoekhoe-speakers) in the Park, but by 1973, Anthony Traill found only a single |Nu'ci speaker and no #Khomani or other San language speaker there; all spoke Nama and many spoke Afrikaans. Further studies attributed many common words in these languages to longstanding intermarriage, and H. P. Steyn found that the parents of Dawid Kruiper, the #Khomani leader at the time of Tomaselli's study, identified themselves as |Namani, not #Khomani.
This is not a remarkable history in southern Africa, but its omission renders a ‘theorized’ current #Khomani identity unintelligible. All the authors focus almost exclusively on this theorized ‘Bushman’ #Khomani indigeneity to the near disregard of the equal, and less inflected, identity-indigeneity of the Nama Mier community. Indeed, we are never told that this community is Nama-speaking. Thus, the authors ‘show’ by implication but never ‘tell’ empirically that indigeneity is a political construct manipulatable to any purpose by the self-indigeneitized, although Tomaselli does recognize that ‘the concept of “indigenous” is an entirely modern one’ (p. 31).
Tomaselli cites the Botswana High Court's judgment partially in favor of Kua ‘Bushmen’ in a Central Kalahari Game Reserve land rights case as exemplifying the utility of indigeneity claims. But he is unaware that the judgment applies only to the specific litigants and not Kua as a whole; furthermore, paragraph 169·1 states that ‘this judgment does not finally resolve the dispute between the parties but merely refers them back to the negotiating table’. Despite Tomaselli's approval of intervention by Survival International, the High Court opined that this had damaged Kua credibility, while a Kua author, Kuela Kiema, reports that SI's involvement led to the collapse of the legal team, leaving the Kua without qualified representation in court. The case is in fact a cautionary tale about the limits of autoethnography when peoples' lives and livelihoods take precedence over the enactment of self.
The book is poorly edited with many incorrect or omitted citations and references. There are also many misspellings (Berdenkamp rather than Bredekamp, p. 80) and errors, among the more egregious of which is attributing the Herero place name, Otjozondjupa, to Jhu|‘hoansi (p. 20).
