Title: Annals of the South African Museum = Annale van die Suid-Afrikaanse Museum
Identifier: annalsofsoutha102199sout (find matches)
Year: 1898 (1890s)
Authors: South African Museum
Subjects: Natural history
Publisher: Cape Town : The Museum
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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178 ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM
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Fig. 5. Three young men at the /Xam encampment, Prieska, 1911. (Photograph: D. Bleek, South African Museum Photographic Collection.) supported by the presence of 'physical characters that could not be ignored' (SAM Annual Report for 1911: 22). Social and cultural information relating to particular indi- viduals, such as old Guiman Toonies who, in his youth, had been a hunter of gemsbok, eland and kudu, was not considered as important as his physical attributes. Later in 1911, when the casts were put on exhibition at the South African Museum, these physical characters became the primary focus of public interest. EXHIBITING THE CASTS The exhibited figures were not intended to evoke a presence of the social beings who had been cast at a particular time and place, but instead were presented as generalized examples of a racial type. Separated from their social and historical context, the people who were cast were literally objectivized and reduced to scientific specimens. People, who in actual life were living as farm labourers or domestic servants, having survived a long period of conflict with the Cape Government, became no more than examples of a physical type (Fig. 6). Janikie Achterdam (Fig. 7), an informant of Dorothea Bleek, was one of the people from Prieska who was cast by Drury. In sharp contrast to the wealth of cultural knowl- edge of /Xam life that the Bleek records reveal, in the Museum the cast of Janikie was displayed as a numbered specimen, bereft of all cultural and social context (Fig. 8). The main label in the exhibition (Fig. 6) of a group of casts taken at Prieska in 1911 read as follows: CAPE BUSHMEN: The Bushmen of the Cape appear to have been the purest- blooded representatives of the Bushman stock, much purer than those of the Kalahari

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