This new edition of Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives ofthe Southern San comes some 20 years after its initial printing and 30 after the text, with few differences, was presented as a doctoral thesis to the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Since then there has been a great deal of excellent scholarship that has explored the Bleek and Lloyd collection of ǀXam texts, housed mainly in the library of the University of Cape Town (UCT), or has added substantially to what we know of the historical context of that collection and its content. At the time of my thesis, however, not only was the location or, indeed, the continued existence of Lucy Lloyd's ǀXam transcriptions – the largest part of the collection – unknown, but the content of Bleek's own notebooks also remained unexplored and the notebooks themselves barely catalogued. Thus it was with something of a gamble that I embarked on a thesis designed to be based alone on those as yet ‘undiscovered’ notebooks. Luckily for me my optimistic digging was rewarded1 and the work that produced this book was able to commence. Naturally the existence of the notebooks did not remain a secret for long, and much useful scholarly work, largely by South African researchers, started to flow.

Much has changed in the intervening years. Even between the presentation of the thesis in 1976 and 1986, when editors from Helmut Buske publishers in Hamburg approached me to ask if they might publish the work, there had grown a greater sensitivity around nomenclature applied to peoples customarily studied by anthropologists. For many years the term ‘Bushmen’ had been used to describe the hunter-gatherers whose click language was closely related to that of the Khoi herders with whom they also shared much of the Cape. Both Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd referred to theirs as a collection of ‘Bushman folklore’. By the late 1970s, however, the Khoi word ‘San’ became widely adopted to describe the various language groups evident amongst the hunter-gatherers, as well as the people themselves. While anthropologists familiarised the reading public with the specific names of some of these – principally the !Kung, made internationally famous by the Marshall expeditions to the Kalahari desert in the 1950s – the term ‘San’ became preferred by many in seeming not to have the derogatory connotations that ‘Bushmen’ might be thought to possess.