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Dorothea Bleek (1873-1948) devoted her life to completing the 'bushman researches' that her father and aunt had begun in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. This research was partly a labour of familial loyalty to Wilhelm, the acclaimed linguist and language scholar of nineteenth-century Germany and later of the Cape Colony, and to Lucy Lloyd, a self-taught linguist and scholar of bushman languages and folklore; but it was also an expression of Dorothea's commitment to a particular kind of scholarship and an intellectual milieu that saw her spending her entire adult life in the study of the people she called'bushmen'. How has history treated Dorothea Bleek? Has she been recognised as a scholar in her own right, or as someone who merely followed in the footsteps of her famous father and aunt? Was she an adventurer, a woman who travelled across southern Africa driven by intellectual curiosity to learn all she could about the bushmen? Or was she conservative, a researcher who belittled the people she studied and dismissed them as lazy and improvident? These are some of the questions with which Jill Weintroub starts her thoughtful biography of Dorothea Bleek. The book examines Dorothea Bleek's life story and family legacy, her rock art research and her fieldwork in southern Africa, and, in light of these, evaluates her scholarship and contribution to the history of ideas in South Africa. The compelling and surprising narrative reveals an intellectual inheritance intertwined with the story of a woman's life, and argues that Dorothea's life work - her study of the bushmen - was also a sometimes surprising emotional quest.

Women ethnologists --- Art, San --- San (African people) --- Art, San (African people) --- San art --- Basarwa (African people) --- Bushmen --- Bushmen (African people) --- /Xam (African people) --- Ethnology --- Khoisan (African people) --- Ethnologists --- Women social scientists --- Research --- Bleek, D. F. --- Bleek, Dorothea Frances,

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Rock art images around the world are often difficult for us to decipher as modern viewers. Based on authentic records of the beliefs, rituals and daily life of the nineteenth-century San peoples, and of those who still inhabit the Kalahari Desert, this book adopts a new approach to hunter-gatherer rock art by placing the process of image-making within the social framework of production. Lewis-Williams shows how the San used this imagery not simply to record hunts and the animals that they saw, but rather to sustain the social network and status of those who made them. By drawing on such rich and complex records, the book reveals specific, repeated features of hunter-gatherer imagery and allows us insight into social relations as if through the eyes of the San themselves.

Art, Prehistoric. --- Rock paintings --- Paintings, Rock --- Pictured rocks --- Rock drawings --- Archaeology --- Art, Prehistoric --- Painting, Prehistoric --- Picture-writing --- Petroglyphs --- Prehistoric art --- Art, Primitive --- Research --- Documentation --- Art, San --- San (African people) --- Africa, Southern --- Antiquities. --- Basarwa (African people) --- Bushmen --- Bushmen (African people) --- /Xam (African people) --- Ethnology --- Khoisan (African people) --- Art, San (African people) --- San art --- Southern Africa

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Why were depictions of animals a crucial trigger for the birth of art? And why did animals dominate that art for so long? In order to answer these questions, Renaud Ego examined some of the world's finest rock art, that of the San of southern Africa. For thousands of years, these nomadic hunter-gatherers assigned a fundamental role to the visualization of the animals who shared their lives. Some, such as the Cape eland, the largest of antelopes, were the object of a fascinated gaze, as though the graceful markings and shapes of their bodies were the key to secret knowledge safeguarded by the animals' unsettling silence. The artists sought to steal the animals' secret through an act of rendering visible a vitality that remained hidden beneath appearances. In this process, the San themselves became the visionary animal who, possessing the gift of making pictures, would acquire far-seeing powers. Thanks to the singular effectiveness of their visual art, they could make intellectual contact with the world in order better to think and, ultimately, to act. They gained access to the full dimension of their human condition through painting scenes that functioned like visual contracts with spiritual and ancestral powers. Their art is an act that seeks to preserve the wholeness of existence through a respect for the relationships linking all beings, both real and imaginary, who partake of it. The fundamentally ecological dimension of this message confers on San art its universality and contemporary relevance. Visionary Animal is a translation of L'Animal voyant, published in France in 2015. This rich collection of essays is beautifully illustrated with the author's photographs of rock art from across southern Africa.

Rock paintings --- Petroglyphs --- Art, Prehistoric --- Prehistoric art --- Art, Primitive --- Carvings, Rock --- Engravings, Rock --- Rock carvings --- Rock engravings --- Rock inscriptions --- Stone inscriptions --- Inscriptions --- Picture-writing --- Paintings, Rock --- Pictured rocks --- Rock drawings --- Archaeology --- Painting, Prehistoric --- Africa, Southern --- Southern Africa --- Antiquities. --- San (African people) --- Rock paintings. --- Petroglyphs. --- Art, San. --- ART / History / General. --- Southern Africa. --- Basarwa (African people) --- Bushmen --- Bushmen (African people) --- /Xam (African people) --- Ethnology --- Khoisan (African people) --- Art, San (African people) --- San art