This book is a semantic and semiotic analysis of tourism texts that represent specific groups of San (or Bushmen) in modern Botswana, and is framed by postcolonial theory, post-tourism and resistance theories. Critically, the book demonstrates the power that both written and visual language can have upon consumers of texts. It provides a case-study of neo-colonial exploitation and, conversely, reveals the efficacy of self-representation for tourist consumption, with an increasing number of San offering alternatives to an entrenched ethnic hegemony, effecting gradual political and social recognition and autonomy. As such, the book is written in a spirit of optimism for the burgeoning self-determination of a long-marginalised group.

A comprehensive and fascinating account of all the major groups of southern African hunter-gatherers.

Exploring a hitherto unexamined aspect of San cosmology, Mathias Guenther’s two volumes on human-animal relations in San cosmology link “new Animism” with Khoisan Studies, providing valuable insights for Khoisan Studies and San culture, but also for anthropological theory, relational ontology, folklorists, historians, literary critics and art historians. In Volume I, therianthropes and transformations, two manifestations of ontological mutability that are conceptually and phenomenologically linked, are contextualized in broader San myth. Guenther explores the pervasiveness of human-animal hybridity and transformation in San expressive culture (myth, stories and storytelling, ludic dancing and art, ancestral rock art and contemporary easel art), ritual (trance dance curing, female and male rites of passage) and hunting. Transformation is shown to be experienced by humans, particularly via rituals and dancing that evoke animal identity mergers, but also by hunters who may engage with their prey animals in terms of sympathy and inter-subjectivity, particularly through the use of “hunting medicines.”

This book provides a comprehensive, detailed and insight rich review of both the positive (capacity building, cultural conservation and economic opportunities) and negative (commodification, cultural change and possible loss of ownership and control) aspects of tourism development in indigenous communities. The relationship between tourism and indigenous people provides the ultimate test of sustainable tourism as a concept for tourism management and cultural conservation. The chapters range geographically from Central and North America, through Africa, and Asia to Australia. Issues covered include governance and engagement, research, minority language issues, visitor codes of conduct, trail development, Indigenous product design, Indigenous urban festivals, Indigenous values and capitalism, gentrification, heritage interpretation, marketing, demand, world views and representation. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Sustainable Tourism.

Environmental Anthropology studies historic and present human-environment interactions. This volume illustrates the ways in which today's environmental anthropologists are constructing new paradigms for understanding the multiplicity of players, pressures, and ecologies in every environment, and the value of cultural knowledge of landscapes. This Handbook provides a comprehensive survey of contemporary topics in environmental anthropology and thorough discussions on the current state and prospective future of the field in seven key sections. As the contributions to this Handbook demonstrate, the subfield of environmental anthropology is responding to cultural adaptations and responses to environmental changes in multiple and complex ways. As a discipline concerned primarily with human-environment interaction, environmental anthropologists recognize that we are now working within a pressure cooker of rapid environmental damage that is forcing behavioural and often cultural changes around the world. As we see in the breadth of topics presented in this volume, these environmental challenges have inspired renewed foci on traditional topics such as food procurement, ethnobiology, and spiritual ecology; and a broad new range of subjects, such as resilience, nonhuman rights, architectural anthropology, industrialism, and education. This volume enables scholars and students quick access to both established and trending environmental anthropological explorations into theory, methodology and practice.

This award-winning collection of essays about culture and identity was written from the perspective of post-apartheid South Africa. Voted best special issue of 2001 by the Council of Editors of Learned Journal.

This volume considers the meaning and power of images in African history and culture. It assembles a wide-ranging collection of essays dealing with specific visual forms, including monuments cinema, cartoons, domestic and professional photography, body art, world fairs, and museum exhibits.