ROGER HEWITT AND |XAM STUDIES

Roger Hewitt's work has been seminal in the field of the study of |Xam narratives. Despite its centrality, however, this work has not yet been critically analysed. The purpose of this chapter is to initiate such a critique. Hewitt's research is meticulous. As a result, his writing is a reliable source of ethnographic information about the |Xam and is regularly cited. I often rely on Hewitt as a source in this book myself. Although Hewitt is also a perceptive interpreter of the |Xam texts narratives, his readings, as one would expect, are informed and intelligent opinion rather than fact, and they are historically and theoretically circumscribed. It is my view that the unexamined repetition of many of Hewitt's statements about the narratives does not take this sufficiently into account.

The detailed nature of Hewitt's work deserves, I think, a detailed response. Accordingly, in this chapter I closely examine his claims about the materials and his approach to reading the texts. I also analyse their purchase on a specific story before going on to propose different ways of reading this narrative. In the course of my examination of his writing, I will argue that Hewitt's functionalist and structuralist treatment of the texts often misses their intertextual nature and their ability to generate multiple meanings. In earlier chapters, I mentioned the existence of competing tendencies in his work. In this chapter, I will discuss this phenomenon at much greater length. Hewitt, for example, sometimes emphasises the specific historical and biographical contexts of the narratives, but, at other times, particularly in his structuralist breakdown of the materials, reinforces the notion that the |Xam texts belong to a timeless realm of folklore in which the details of the stories are a decorative adjunct to core narrative structures.

Pippa Skotnes (2007: 43) writes that ‘[i]t took more than 70 years’ from the appearance of Bleek and Lloyd's Specimens of Bushman Folklore in 1911