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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Oral Histories, Bushmen Imageries and the Chances and Challenges of the DoBeS Digital Archive
| Panel |
46. Shaping collections, producing alternative histories: The example of Namibia as a contested research entity
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| Paper ID | 470 |
| Author(s) |
Boden, Gertrud Elisabeth
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | In this paper I would like to discuss the chances and challenges the recently established DoBeS archive presents for the contextualization of oral history accounts and other politico-cultural expressions. In 2000, the Volkswagen Foundation started the DoBeS programme in order to document languages that are potentially in danger of becoming extinct in the near future. The programme aims at maintaining or revitalizing the languages in focus and at presenting them in a digital archive in order to inform future generations of scientists and layman about the language diversity and the cultural treasures of mankind. The language documentations are to be carried out in their "cultural settings". The programme thus offers the chance to provide the cultural, hence the social, economical and political context of documents at the very moment of their creation, a task that historians too often have to come to terms with in hindsight when they try to re-construct contemporary contexts of documents. Namibian languages are represented with two projects in DoBeS of (at the moment) only three projects on African languages in all. Both Namibian projects are busy documenting languages spoken by people who are classified as San or Bushmen.
I am going to draw from experiences during my own research among one of the smallest San speech-communities in Namibia which I conducted within the DoBeS framework. The people involved are the !Xoon and 'N/ohan people of the wider Aminuis-Korridor area, who speak two varieties of the Taa language belonging to the Southern branch of South African Khoisan. I want to reflect on how Taa voices have shaped our documentation and how the research dialogue might in turn have shaped Taa voices. In particular, I want to elaborate on the challenges which the multiple past and present imageries of Bushmanness (like 'backwardness', 'indigenousness', 'helplessness') at work in this part of Namibia, have created for the research on oral history and hence for the documentation itself and its contextualization.
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