Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Map
- Dedication
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Notes to the Reader
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Figures and Tables
- 1 Introduction
- 2 First Footsteps
- 3 Time’s Arrow
- 4 Mountain Refuge
- 5 Elephants and Rain
- 6 Desert Garden
- 7 The Family Herd
- 8 The Black Swan
- 9 Men in Hats
- 10 The Death of Memory
- Epilogue
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Map
- Dedication
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Notes to the Reader
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Figures and Tables
- 1 Introduction
- 2 First Footsteps
- 3 Time’s Arrow
- 4 Mountain Refuge
- 5 Elephants and Rain
- 6 Desert Garden
- 7 The Family Herd
- 8 The Black Swan
- 9 Men in Hats
- 10 The Death of Memory
- Epilogue
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Comparison of archaeological and palaeoclimatic evidence is useful and illuminating, but it evades the question of cosmology, of how people understood the world in which they lived. It may seem paradoxical that hunter-gatherers, as adept and practical survivors, also subscribed to notions of supernatural causality, but such precepts refer to a framework of higher-order explanations, rather than everyday reality. The natural and the supernatural do not necessarily refer to separate, parallel bodies of knowledge. Instead, the glimpses of hunter-gatherer cosmology which rock art and related evidence afford, point to an ideology in which visions and dreams are as valid a reflection of the world as observed reality. It is within this milieu that the shaman is able to intervene in the workings of nature by moving back and forth between the concrete world and the supernatural, mediating contradictions of experience and perception.
The previous chapter laid out such a polyphase structure of shamanic ritual performance and supernatural experience, with an occultation, or hidden phase, preceding revelation, the phase of ritual action. Now, following an extended discussion of palaeoclimatic evidence relating to shifting patterns of rainfall in the Namib Desert in the first part of this chapter, we address the ritual mediation of nature to make rain, in the second part of the chapter, where the polyphase nature of ritual activity explored in the previous chapter is extended to the performance setting of rain-making. Then, in the last part of the chapter, we explore two further examples of the same phenomenon in the context of specialized ritual initiation sites. The development of specialized ritual performance is linked to interaction with pastoral communities during the last two millennia, and rituals of initiation in particular show an increasing degree of panarchial integration between hunter-gatherer and pastoral economies in the Namib Desert.
The onset of the Holocene brought relatively stable climatic conditions to most of southern Africa, with higher rainfall in the more tropical eastern parts of the subcontinent and a more predictable rainfall regime in the semi-arid interior.
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- NamibThe Archaeology of an African Desert, pp. 175 - 214Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2022