The Language of Myth and Art

Reviews / Votes

Can a contemporary Westerner understand the symbolism of Indigenous cultures, from a true insider's perspective and at the most detailed level? In a remarkable intellectual tour de force, David Witelson and David Lewis-Williams do just that in The Language of Myth and Art. They chart an interpretive method that reveals and illustrates the underlying meanings of both the Southern African San (Bushmen) mythic corpus and cave paintings, based on a recognition of the key distinctions between oral and literate societies and the implications these have for the verbal and graphic arts. The result is a landmark study in mythic analysis, rock art interpretation and symbolic study that is destined to become a classic in the anthropological and archaeological literature. * David S. Whitley, author of Cave Painting and the Human Spirit: The Origin of Creativity and Belief * The Language of Myth and Art is an important book of rare beauty and intellectual adventure. Its strength proceeds from a lifetime of ceaseless research into the complex and elusive rock paintings and folklore of indigenous San hunter-gatherer populations of southern Africa. Cognitive archaeologists David Witelson and David Lewis-Williams together forge a fine synthesis of both fields as illuminated by oral principles and modern performance theory. * Megan Biesele, author of Once Upon a Time is Now: A Kalahari Memoir * This is a compelling analysis of San (Bushman) rock art and myth by two of the leading scholars in the field, one well-established, the other very much up-and-coming. It is, without doubt, the most innovative and significant work on San rock art (and San worldviews in general) to appear for many, many years and charts a new path for researchers, emphasising the enormous potential of investigating the subtle nuances and metaphorical allusions of San languages. After reading it, there can be no doubt that detailed knowledge and understanding of San ethnography - rather than Western expectations of what images might signify - is an essential precondition for saying anything useful about the meanings of southern Africa's hunter-gatherer rock art. In this, as well as in its eloquence and command of the subject, the book is a tour de force. * Peter Mitchell, University of Oxford, UK * The Language of Myth and Art is a productive and in-depth analysis of the complex visual expressions we call San hunter-gatherer 'rock art'. The authors' method draws on a wealth of imagery, ethnographic sources, anthropological and archaeological knowledge, contained within the framework of an overarching grammar. A similar approach could, potentially, be fruitfully applied to other bodies of rock art. The argument advanced here is clearly structured and the work is well-documented and richly illustrated. It will be a thought-provoking read for scholars and students of rock art, oral traditions, and southern African cultural history. * Jeremy Hollmann, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa *