The only person to have written as extensively about the |Xam narratives as Roger Hewitt has done is anthropologist Mathias Guenther. As I have noted often in this book, the writing that does contain analysis of the |Xam texts, including that produced by Guenther and Hewitt, has not itself been subjected to close critical scrutiny. An important exception, I will argue in this chapter, is Guenther's own criticism of functionalist and structuralist approaches to the narratives in Tricksters and Trancers: Bushman Religion and Society, the book that forms the chief focus of this chapter.

GUENTHER's VIEW OF THE |XAM ‘TRICKSTER’, CONTRASTED WITH HEWITT'S

Hewitt, as we saw in the previous chapter, divides the |Kaggen materials into two main groups and separates these from other materials such as animal and sidereal stories. When the overriding concern is classification and grouping, the details of individual stories, with some notable exceptions, become of secondary importance. While Guenther also chooses not to concentrate on the textual details of the stories, he is not preoccupied with ordering the materials so much as with pan-Bushman comparison. He emphasises the fluidity and openness of the texts and the ambiguity, variability and protean nature of |Kaggen, matching this reading of |Kaggen with the requirements of a foraging economy in which socialisation tends towards adaptability and a high degree of individual autonomy. He locates the figure of the trickster within a foraging ideology, which, he argues, characterises all Bushman societies, as well as other hunter-gathering cultures worldwide. Guenther also stresses the material's multivocality, attributing this feature to the ambiguity of the protagonist, |Kaggen, and to the nature of hunter-gatherer orality.

Although Hewitt employs a structuralist approach and Guenther positions himself as an anti-structuralist, even though he consciously employs a structuralist analysis at times, they both attribute characteristics of the universal figure of the trickster to |Kaggen. They also both acknowledge his uniqueness among trickster figures and attribute this to the extraordinary and incompatible range of his characteristics. However, they interpret the coexistence of these contradictory elements differently. Hewitt, as we have seen, regards the trickster of what he terms the group A narratives as functioning primarily as an opportunity for the articulation of socially conservative messages or as a safety valve for the transference and disposal of anti-social impulses.