A performative encounter with artist Silikat van Wyk in the Kalahari

Abstract

Cultural tourism involving people who claim to be Bushman or San has seen some 'Bushman' performers becoming iconic through using performative visual and oral archetypes. The late Silikat van Wyk, to some extent, became the visual image of the Bushman of the Kalahari Desert. Alone or in a team, he performed at tourist resorts and in the Kalahari. I use a performative style of writing where my presence and identity as a researcher are declared and my unique ethnographic encounter with Silikat van Wyk and his small cast in the Kalahari are enunciated and theorised. The contradictions in the observed-observer/researcherresearched relations, and how these are nearly subverted/ inverted in this particular research encounter, are outlined. Performative writing here is a synthetic style of writing that borrows from imaginative literary writing, (auto)ethnography and critical academic writing.

Rethinking the researcher-researched relationship

“…He explained to Charlize that he'd got her in his "middlepoint", and because she was standing in it, she had taken it away. We found out what it was, his land, and because of this injustice Charlize owed him ten rand (see also Mhiripiri, 2012, on the nature of encounters).…”

Simulacral, genealogical, auratic and representational failure: Bushman authenticity as methodological collapse

“…16 The resolution of the 'problem' is to be found in an 'obsessive interest in self reflexivity' in which anthropologists are aware that they are 'intimately inhabiting and negotiating https://repository.uwc.ac.za/ discourse' in order to 'produce a non-hierarchical encounter with the other', and ultimately to make anthropological and all research 'engagement more accountable to the subaltern' (ibid). Examples of the methods used by the CCMS include auto-ethnographic work (see Tomaselli 2003Tomaselli , 2005Tomaselli , 2012Tomaselli et al 2013), 'campfire ethnography' (McLennan-Dodd 2003), and fieldwork friendships (Dyll 2003;Mhiripiri 2012).…”

Simulacral, genealogical, auratic and representational failure: Bushman authenticity as methodological collapse

“…16 The resolution of the 'problem' is to be found in an 'obsessive interest in self reflexivity' in which anthropologists are aware that they are 'intimately inhabiting and negotiating https://repository.uwc.ac.za/ discourse' in order to 'produce a non-hierarchical encounter with the other', and ultimately to make anthropological and all research 'engagement more accountable to the subaltern' (ibid). Examples of the methods used by the CCMS include auto-ethnographic work (see Tomaselli 2003Tomaselli , 2005Tomaselli , 2012Tomaselli et al 2013), 'campfire ethnography' (McLennan-Dodd 2003, and fieldwork friendships (Dyll 2003;Mhiripiri 2012).…”