The study of the figure of |Kaggen, the Mantis, has been central to the project of interpreting the |Xam texts. Although critics differ about his role in |Xam narratives and |Xam culture, the characterisation of |Kaggen as the |Xam trickster is reproduced in nearly all the writing on him. This chapter seeks to question this reading of |Kaggen. I argue for an interpretive strategy that locates |Kaggen within |Xam discourse itself rather than one that identifies him as the local representative of a universal type. The arguments against the identification of |Kaggen with a universal trickster draw on arguments that have been elaborated by other writers in order to question the attribution of the term ‘trickster’ to specific characters in local literatures from across the world. The first part of my discussion is, therefore, general in nature. I examine the broader trickster literature and its influence on |Xam studies. This is followed by a consideration of some of the criticism that the trickster literature has elicited and the identification of this literature with a wider tendency towards universalising thought, a tendency that has elicited criticism from a range of contemporary thinkers. I conclude with an examination of the |Xam hunting observances in which |Kaggen appears in order to illustrate some of my earlier contentions about |Kaggen's place in |Xam discourse.

|KAGGEN, THE TRICKSTER

Stephen Watson (1991: 32) begins his poem ‘The nature of |Kaggen’ with a line that reads: ‘|Kaggen, old trickster, magician, also called Mantis’. Most of the poems in Watson's collection can be linked directly to specific texts in the Bleek and Lloyd materials. This poem, however, employs a different strategy. It assembles common elements from many of the stories that feature |Kaggen in order to provide an overall picture of |Kaggen's ‘nature.’ But the actual designation of |Kaggen as a trickster is not derived from the source materials at all. It is fair to assume, I think, that Watson's character - isation of |Kaggen as a trickster exhibits the influence on him of the writing on the |Xam narratives by Roger Hewitt and Mathias Guenther. Both these writers, drawing directly on the broad trickster literature, describe |Kaggen as a trickster. Watson (1991: 4) acknowledges both of them: ‘The books of Hewitt and Guenther were especially useful; in fact, they became my indispensable guides.’