King, R; (2021) Salvage ethnography and the imagination of deep time in southern Africa, 1930-present. Presented at: Returns and Reconnections.

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Abstract

For at least three centuries, foraging peoples in southern Africa have been foregrounded as key to understanding Homo sapiens’ movement from tradition to modernity, egalitarianism to inequality, even while genocidal campaigns and subtler (no less destructive) programmes of violence precipitated the attrition that was disclaimed as inevitable. Scholarship critical of the reification of ‘the hunter-gatherer’ has scrutinized the far-reaching epistemic and physical consequences of this anthropological category. Here, I am interested in examining how individual ethnographers in the early twentieth century crafted visions of deep time and human creativity through the micropolitics of fieldwork with interlocutors of foraging cultures. I want to consider where localized practices of salvage ethnography – including how this articulated with contemporary scientific currents – informed particular understandings of how the residues of the deep past could be accessed, the relative importance of intervening historical events, and how art practices connected past and present. I go on to trace how these visions of the past have been incorporated into archaeological canon – where they have been challenged and where they demand further query. I argue that a fine-grained focus on intimate field encounters, the knowledge they produced and obscured, and the intellectual routes this knowledge traversed is essential to the work of re-definition and restitution in deep time study.

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