Rock Art, the Art of Tracking, and Cybertracking: Demystifying the “Bushmen” in the Information Age

1. What they did

This is a review essay in the journal Visual Anthropology. The author, a cultural and media studies scholar at the University of Natal, reviews four books published by David Philip in Cape Town, aimed mainly at lay readers and tourists:

• Louis Liebenberg’s A Field Guide to the Animal Tracks of Southern Africa (1990).
• Louis Liebenberg’s A Concise Guide to Animal Tracks of Southern Africa.
• Louis Liebenberg’s The Art of Tracking: The Origins of Science (1995).
• J. D. Lewis-Williams’s Discovering Southern African Rock Art (2000).

The author sets these books beside films and media reports about the San (“Bushmen”), including The Hunters (1958), Hunters of the Kalahari (1995), The Great Dance: A Hunter’s Story (2000), the film The Art of Tracking (1996), and CNN reports on the CyberTracker. The essay asks how these books and media shape popular Western ideas about the San, and the author adds experience of accompanying San hunters in the Central Kalahari.

2. What they found

Rock art

• Lewis-Williams’s book explains the history of San rock art research and its debates, which coffee-table books rarely do. Rock art is now understood as linked to shamanistic practices and trance, and the shamanistic approach has brought scholars closer to the San artists.
• The book ends with a plea not to damage rock art (for example, by wetting paintings to bring out their colour).

Tracking

• Unlike rock art, tracking continues into the present, but it has been much less studied by scholars. San tracking skills have been taken up by military, security and conservation agencies to fight communism, stock theft and poaching.
• Liebenberg’s The Art of Tracking discusses San tracking and hunting and develops a theory of tracking from Liebenberg’s own experience. Ted Chamberlin builds on Liebenberg to argue that tracking is like reading. Liebenberg’s idea of “intermittent attention” is a constant refocusing between the fine detail of a track and the whole pattern of the environment.
• A zoologist who joined the Marshall expedition in 1952, Charlie Handley, recalled that San trackers could think like the animal, took shortcuts to meet the trail ahead, and did not just follow track to track, while Handley never got beyond that stage.
• The author finds the key point of Liebenberg’s book, and of Handley’s comments, is that tracking is a learned skill: not a genetic trait and not a mystical cultural attribute, as the South African Defence Force suggested when it enlisted “Bushmen” as trackers in the late 1980s.
• Films, from The Hunters to The Great Dance, stress the mystical side of tracking (“Tracking is like dancing”, in the words of !Nqate Xqamxebe). The Great Dance revisits the idea that tracking is an inborn skill.

CyberTracker

• Liebenberg linked the “oldest science” with computer technology in the CyberTracker field computer. A handheld Palm Pilot lets people who cannot read or write record complex information by choosing icons, with an optional Global Positioning System (GPS), maps and data tables.
• Media reports (for example CNN’s “Ancient tracking takes a modern twist”) still describe San trackers as living in the “past”, and wrap the device in the mystique of indigenous knowledge. The author argues this risks reviving the “noble savage” idea and misrepresents how the San actually learn their tracking skills.
• The CyberTracker is less useful to San hunters than to wildlife and conservation authorities, safari companies and tourists; most current use is by conservation authorities. The author planned to interview San game rangers about it in July 2000, but a vehicle breakdown prevented this.

Track guides and hunting today

• A Concise Guide is a useful introduction to identifying the more common tracks, with distribution maps, descriptions, sketches and photographs, but its two-page introduction on spoor identification is brief; the Field Guide covers the topic more fully. It does not help readers “think” their way to the animal.
• In the author’s experience in the Central Kalahari, San tracking and track identification skills remain sharp, but hunters now use dogs to smell out and corner the animal, which the hunter, following on a donkey, then spears. Game is dispersed and hunting is controlled through quotas. The Great Dance ends with the news that hunting has been banned in its area: “Now, the San are criminals.”

3. What they concluded

• Overall, the David Philip books on tracking and rock art help to demystify popular, tourist and Western ideas about the San, and also hold insights for scholars.
• San game rangers using the CyberTracker boosts the mapping of animal locations and movements in national parks, creates jobs, improves population management, and encodes indigenous knowledge in modern technology. The author has no quibble with this.
• The problem is how the media report such work. The author sees it as the task of visual anthropologists to criticize reports that place people in “science versus priest-craft”, “past versus present” and “ancient versus contemporary” categories.

4. How tracking was or was not used

No tracking was done for the study. Tracking is the subject: how it is learned, how it is described in books and film, and how it is linked with the CyberTracker. The author also reports first-hand observations of San hunters tracking in the Central Kalahari.

6. Other technologies, skills or innovations

• The CyberTracker field computer: icon-based software on a handheld Palm Pilot, usable by people who cannot read or write, with field notes, an optional integrated GPS, map data, and tables sorted by date, name or number, which can be transferred to a PC.

7. Implications for conservation (from the paper)

• San game rangers using the CyberTracker helps map animal locations and movement patterns in national parks, creates employment, and improves population management.