San rock paintings of women in the southern Maloti-Drakensberg and eastern Stormberg, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa: ritual specialists, potency and social conditioning

Abstract

The investigation of gender and gender roles is crucial to understanding past lifeways. San rock art provides an important opportunity to do this because the paintings are specific, emic representations of how people were thinking and doing in the past. A gendered analytical lens can potentially provide new insights for an in-depth appreciation of the identities and personhood that San chose to depict and the stereotypes that were favoured. To explore this potential, quantitative and qualitative methods were used to record and analyse a selection of sites in two adjacent mountain regions of southern Africa: the southern Maloti-Drakensberg and the eastern Stormberg. This was done because we cannot merely assume that people living in adjacent areas identified in the same ways. Paintings of women were prioritised to show that with careful analysis of iconographic commonalities it is possible to clarify the nature of ‘indeterminism’ for the research areas. A binary understanding of gender can be identified in San ethnography and the San paintings of these areas in how men and women are presented. Significantly, the small number of images painted with either breasts or penises might on analysis show that specific aspects of their identities are being emphasised by these painted physical features and be a type of identity marking. In addition, there are significant differences in the number of women depicted in these mountain areas that may refer to variances in what stereotypes were favoured in space, and perhaps time. The paper argues that these paintings are multiplex because the importance of women ritual specialists, the reinforcement of specific conditioning behaviours and the status of individuals and groups of individuals are all highlighted in certain sites. Gender in humans and animals and the analysis of the variances in how gender is portrayed between different regions may have important implications for understanding differences in San personhood, individual and collective identities, identity marking and the roles of women and men.