From generalities to specifics in San rock art

Abstract

‡Today, virtually all researchers agree that San rock art is neither the product of idle hours nor merely the result of an innate human desire to make beautiful things. Research conducted over the last halfcentury has shown beyond reasonable doubt that the images were in some sense religious: overwhelmingly, they have to do with experiences, beliefs and practices that, though an integral part of daily life, dealt with the affairs of a notional spirit realm and the ways in which people interacted with that realm. Although this understanding of the art came principally through a study of specific painted themes and the ways in which nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury San ethnographic records illuminate them, many people still tend to think in terms of ‘the art’, a vague and highly generalized concept. They do not think of

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