Ninety percent of university students in Malaysia experienced symptoms related to CVS, which was seen more often in those who used computer for more than 2 hours continuously per day.

In this paper I draw on my findings and those of historical and recent Khoisan ethnography to attempt to explain how these southern African ‘Khoi’ and San peoples relate to wind and how the environmental phenomenon has informed their epistemology and ontology. I begin by fleshing out the knowledge and experience of wind among these past and recent hunter‐gatherers and, pointing to continuity in wind relationships and the ideas that stem from them, I go on to demonstrate how wind weaves into Khoisan understandings of the body and illness. Despite extensive interest in Bushman healing, anthropologists have overwhelmingly concentrated on the ‘trance’ healing dance. My findings suggest this partiality has obscured the wider healing context in which the dance operates. Exploring the wider context, including massage, ‘medicinal cuts’, and witchcraft, reveals that the ‘potency’ conceived as central to the healing dance is, in certain contexts, equivalent to overlapping ideas of wind, arrows, and smell. Examination of the ethnography reveals that a number of the associations I make between wind and potency have been partially recognized in specific Khoisan contexts but, because comparative studies of Khoisan are difficult and unpopular, these similarities have gone largely unnoticed.

The snake is a potent entity in many cultures across the world, and is a noticeable global theme in rock art and inscribed landscapes. We mobilise our long-term ethnographic research with southern African KhoeSan peoples to situate and interpret the presence of snake motifs in the region's rock art. We contextualise the snake as a transformative ontological mediator between everyday and "entranced" KhoeSan worlds (those associated with "altered states of consciousness"), to weave together both mythological and shamanistic interpretations of southern African rock art. Ethnographic explorations of experiences of snakes as both an aspect of natural history and the physical environment, and as embodiments of multiplicitous and mythical meaning by which to live and understand life, shed light on the presence of snakes and associated snake-themes in southern African rock art. By drawing on ethnographic material, and in conjunction with review of literature, we highlight a dynamic assemblage of extant associations between snakes, rain, water, fertility, blood, fat, transformation, dance and healing. We suggest that these extant associations have explanatory potential for understanding the meaning of these themes in the rock art created by the ancestors of contemporary KhoeSan peoples. Our paper contributes to a live debate regarding the interpretive relevance of ethnography for understanding rock art representations from the past.

Reminiscent of other recent ethno-ornithologies, the following account considers bird naming, birds in folklore and birds as portentous messengers (Tidemann and Gosler 2010;Le Roux and Sellato 2006). Less typically, however, I locate these themes within a more fundamental interest in how bird encounter moves into meaning and use. The movement begins with KhoeSān recognizing certain powerful characteristics or associations in particular birds. These powerful characteristics are then worked into everyday contexts of KhoeSān life, ranging from village gossip to hunting plans to the use of potent bird parts in healing. My focus is on how living in particular ways in particular environments lends itself to certain forms of knowledge and praxis. I reflect on ways of being in 'nature' and understanding the nature of potency in KhoeSān life.Potency is a phenomenon frequently written about in contexts of Bushman spirituality, shamanism, rock art and healing dances. 1 It nevertheless remains poorly defined. Understanding potency is important not only in academic contexts but also because ideas of potency play a considerable role in KhoeSān understandings of illness and use of animal-and plant-based remedies. Although Khoe speakers use far more animals in their medicine than Ju/'hoansi, which may indicate the influence of African neighbours, animals are important to all, and the thinking behind animal use and around issues of potency reveals strong continuities across the KhoeSān. 2 Scholars writing on Bushman spirit and potency frequently work across a range of sources including anthropology, rock art and the late nineteenth-century Bleek and Lloyd archive of /Xam Bushmen. To engage with this research and better understand potency, I similarly supplement my findings with this wider material. My analysis covers Khoekhoe herders and San (or Bushman) hunter-gatherers of Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, and stems from over two years of Following academic training in archaeology and the history of medicine, in 1999 Chris Low undertook his interdisciplinary DPhil at Oxford, where currently he is based within the African Studies Centre as a post-doctoral researcher working on African medicine and KhoeSān environmental relationships, epistemology, ontology and (most recently) heritage.

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