Therianthropes as human-animal relations: contextualising rock art in anthropological perspective

Abstract

Southern African rock art is painted on exposed but sheltered rock faces and features involved collocations of images in generally ambiguous relation to one another. Therianthropes — mixtures of parts of humans and animals — condense in one image a relationship between animals and human persons. This analysis takes inspiration from the anthropology of iconography and value creation in Melanesian and Australian indigenous cultures rather than from Siberian “shamanism.” It argues that specialised artisans created value by marking nodal points in the landscape that helped to focus and to locate human-animal relations. Ethnographic sources for the interpretation of some images is not restricted to vanished “Bushmen” cultures but is present in contemporary “traditional” healing practices. Southern African cultures have used and understood the relationships between humans, non-humans and the landscape in region-wide healing and ritual practice. This paper abandons anachronistic “ethnic” boundaries of essentialised “Bushman” or “hunter-gatherer” cultures, together with the notion that this art is the primitive manifestation of altered consciousness. In sum, rock art images express concepts concerning the practical and ethical relations that necessarily exist between human health (well-being), social life, “nature” (animals, plants, earth) and the landscape in which human life and nature are set.