The narratives discussed in this chapter concern skin clothing in particular. I present summaries, extracts and analyses of five different stories and story complexes. The first two stories are /Kaggen stories followed by a story about how the present material world of people and animals came to be. The parts of the stories that I focus on underline and amplify two points about human and animal relations in the /Xam narratives, exemplified particularly through the material culture of dress: 1) Clothing is what makes humans different from animals. This is emphasised in the material world in that humans make clothing out of animals; and 2) Qualities of the living animal are continuously present in the made clothing. They form part of the embedded properties of the clothing and maintain and create links and relations between humans and animals.

These points are also significant for my analyses in chapter 9. The notion of embedded properties following the items of dress through the different stages of their ‘use life’ is exemplified throughout the narratives in a number of ways, and is essential to the understanding of dress as a meaningful and important part of social relations in a /Xam world view. The last two stories in this chapter add to this argument, but also emphasise that certain people had a special relationship to some animals in particular – a relationship that was also mediated through particular items of dress.

Becoming human, becoming animal

‘ /Kaggen and the Eland’

/Kaggen took /Kwammang-a's shoe. He soaked it in the water and it grew into an eland. Hiding the eland among the reeds, /Kaggen came back from time to time, calling for it in order to feed it with honey. The people wondered why /Kaggen never brought any honey home. /Kaggen said that the honey was lean; that it was not fat. /Kwammang-a (or the Ichneumon's brothers) told his son the Ichneumon to go with /Kaggen to see what happened with the honey, but /Kaggen put the Ichneumon in his bag so that he could not see anything.