THEORIES OF MYTH AND FOLKLORE

As is only to be expected, the writers who have provided interpretation of the |Xam materials draw on theories of interpretation. This theory is generally implicit in their work and has to be extracted from it. |Xam studies have, for the most part, been characterised by an absence of direct theoretical debate, and categories such as the trickster, myth, literature and folklore are generally deployed without discussion or qualification, as though they were natural and uncontroversial. This is true despite the fact that the categories of literature and mythology served as potent ideological markers in Bleek's theory of language and race, as Moran's (2009: 119–27) analysis of this aspect of Bleek's writing has shown. Interpreters of the |Xam narratives tend to draw liberally, eclectically and uncritically from different theories of mythology, a practice that frequently leads to inconsistencies in their contentions about the |Xam materials. This is not surprising when, as Strenski (1987: 3) observes, the different theorists propose ‘theories and concepts of myth [that] are so different that little can usefully be argued among them’.

Although there is little discussion of theory in the writing on the |Xam materials, certain writers and their theories recur quite often in this literature. In the first part of this chapter I will briefly introduce the theories of these writers as a prelude to the critique of these theories that is offered in the rest of the book. Hewitt and Guenther make use of both functionalist and structuralist analysis in their discussion of the |Xam materials. Hewitt draws explicitly on the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Vladimir Propp, while Guenther follows trends in Lévi-Strauss's writing, as well as that of Bronislaw Malinowski, but is also critical of them. Lewis- Williams's analysis of |Xam stories refers to Mircea Eliade and Lévi-Strauss. The writing of Paul Radin, Carl Jung and others on the trickster has also influenced the interpretation of the narratives and will be explored in some detail in chapter 4.