The Language of Myth and Art: Performance and Orality in San Bushman Expressive Culture

In 'primary oral societies', notions of repetition, addition, malleability of characters and agonistic contexts in narrative myths differ markedly from Western notions of time, orthodoxy and tediousness. What Western audiences and image-viewers expect as a consequence of their cultural background does not match the expectations of those who belong to oral societies. In The Language of Myth and Art, Witelson and Lewis-Williams strive to distance the language of Western myth and art from that of San myths and rock art.

The book argues that the inadequacies and inappropriateness of Western language can be overcome, in the case of San expressive culture, by paying closer attention to San languages. Although there are in some cases temporal and regional distances between ethnographic San sources and archaeological signatures from the direct cultural and genetic ancestors of contemporary San groups, we find that San languages are infinitely closer to that material than the languages of the modern Western world. The authors ultimately unlock a fuller understanding of both the myths and the images of a now vanished oral society.