The questions

In this work, I have aimed to introduce a systematic study of dress to the already extensive scholarly literature on Bushman studies. I have argued that Bushman dress has been neglected in earlier studies because of a myth that has prevailed throughout the history of Bushman research – that of the ‘nearly naked Bushman’. By defining dress as a practice that includes body modifications and body supplements, I took a broad approach to the subject and included museum artefacts, photographs and written accounts in the study. This multi-source approach proved to be methodologically imperative not only to unravel the materiality of dress, but also because each source represents the material culture differently. Looked at as a whole, the sources show that far from being naked, or nearly naked, the practices of dress among the colonial Bushmen of southern Africa were multifaceted and of great social and personal significance.

My point of departure was the Louis Fourie and Dorothea Bleek museum collections, of which I asked: How do they, respectively and in comparison to each other, represent Bushman dress? These collections were both produced during the first part of the twentieth century and comprise the same kind of source material from overlapping areas of collecting. The categorisation, systematisation and comparison of the artefact material produced a representation of Bushman dress within frames and concepts of a cultural historical idea of people represented and identified through material cultural traits. Bleek complied with the uniformity paradigm of Bushman material culture, whereas Fourie saw each group as different from the other. The static image of culture implied in both selections of artefacts effectively leaves one with an understanding of ‘others’ as different from ‘ourselves’. It does not, however, say anything about how these ‘others’ understand themselves. That said, the inclusion of research notes and photographs in the analyses nuanced the picture. Bleek was interested in documenting dress as a means to effectuate social structure and individuality; Fourie was aware of dress as essential in extensive intergroup relationships. However, these are explanations of dress as representative of, and not part of, a living cultural practice.