ALAN BARNARD

Kalahari revisionism, Vienna and

the ‘indigenous peoples’ debate∗

The problem

In June 2003, Adam Kuper launched a powerful attack on the notion of ‘indigenous
people’. His full paper was published in Current Anthropology (Kuper 2003a), with a
shortened version in the New Humanist (2003b). Since then a defence of ‘indigenous
rights’, by Justin Kenrick and Jerome Lewis (2004), has appeared in Anthropology
Today, with further commentaries both there and in Current Anthropology. In this
paper, I shall try to situate the debate on ‘indigenous peoples’ within wider comparative
contexts of argument in anthropology, especially the anthropology of Africa. I shall
focus on two other such contexts of argument, the Kalahari revisionist debate and
the ‘Vienna School’ of anthropology, returning at the end to Kuper’s problem, its
complexity and its solution.
Who or what are ‘indigenous peoples’? Kuper begins his article (2003a: 389) with
the saga of a delegation of South African Boers who tried to gatecrash a meeting of
the Working Group on Indigenous Populations (not, as Kuper suggests, the Permanent
Forum on Indigenous Issues) in Geneva. Unlike those present at the meeting, I have no
problem with Afrikaners being classified as an ‘indigenous people’ if they truly believe
that they are, although the suggestion that other ‘indigenous peoples’ do not recognise
them as such, according to some activists, might disqualify them. The fact that (most of)
their pre-seventeenth-century ancestors came from Europe is beside the point, because
as Kuper himself implies, being indigenous to a place is not in itself what makes a people
an ‘indigenous people’.
The word ‘indigenous’ has many meanings, and being an ‘indigenous people’ bears
relation only in a rather loose sense to most of these. We can speak of the human
species, as a species, as indigenous to the African continent (since that is where Homo
sapiens evolved), the population of Ghana as indigenous to Ghana, or fishermen from
Scotland having indigenous Scottish fishing knowledge. But when we call a people
‘indigenous’ we imply much more. Sidsel Saugestad (2001a: 43) suggests four criteria:
first-come, non-dominance, cultural difference, and self-ascription. As Kuper (2004:
266) says, all such criteria have their problems, in Africa perhaps especially ‘first-come’,

∗ The title alludes to Adam Kuper’s ‘Post-modernism, Cambridge and the Great Kalahari debate’,
published in the first issue of Social Anthropology (Kuper 1992). My paper was presented at the
eighth EASA conference, Vienna, 8–12 September 2004. Attendance was supported by grants from
the British Academy and the School of Social and Political Studies, University of Edinburgh. I am
grateful to Peter Skalnı́k for inviting me to write and present the paper in his session; to the great
many at the conference who made useful comments and suggestions; to Justin Kenrick, Jerome
Lewis, Peter Pels, Sidsel Saugestad, James Suzman, and three anonymous referees for their written
comments; and to Stefan Ecks and Han Vermeulen for help in obtaining bibliographical items.

Social Anthropology (2006), 14, 1, 1–16. © 2006 European Association of Social Anthropologists 1
doi:10.1017/S0964028205001837 Printed in the United Kingdom
defined by Saugestad (2001a: 43) as: ‘that the people in question are descendants of those
inhabiting an area at the time of the arrival of other groups’. Yet quite rightly, what she
actually emphasises tends to be the relational or processual aspect of ‘indigeneity’, by
analogy with the Barthian notion of ‘ethnicity’ (e.g. Saugestad 2001b: 306). What most
defines an ‘indigenous people’, according to this view, is the relation of dominance of
one group over another, and especially the relation of different groups to the state,
where the state is perceived as protecting the values of non-indigenous over indigenous
peoples (cf. Barnard 1998: 72–4). Recent threats by the Botswana government to change
the country’s constitution if ‘indigenous people’ succeed in the courts in claiming land
rights makes this point.
However, such an understanding will not do, according to Kuper (2003a: 395),
who challenges the idea of an ‘indigenous people’ as being ‘essentialist’ and relying ‘on
obsolete anthropological notions and on a romantic and false ethnographic vision’. In
other words, ‘indigenous’ is simply a new word for ‘primitive’. I shall return to this
aspect of the debate later, but first let me turn to the earlier ‘Kalahari debate’, which in
a sense serves as a prologue to the present controversy.

Kalahari revisionism as a prologue to the debate

‘Traditionalists’ in the Kalahari debate regard the people called Bushmen, San or
Basarwa as exponents of a hunting-and-gathering culture and essentially isolated until
recent times, while ‘revisionists’ regard them as an underclass and historically part
of larger social formations. The debate came to a head in the late 1980s with the
publication of Wilmsen’s Land filled with flies (1989). This book shattered the prevailing
ethnographic image of San society as ancient, relatively static, and at the same time
adaptive. In Wilmsen’s view it was not so much adaptive as transformed by centuries
of contact with Iron Age, Bantu-speaking, agro-pastoralists:

Their appearance as foragers is a function of their relegation to an underclass in the playing out of
historical processes that began before the current [second] millennium and culminated in the early
decades of this [twentieth] century. The isolation in which they are said to be found is a creation
of our view of them, not of their history as they lived it (Wilmsen 1989: 3).

The traditionalists countered (e.g. Solway and Lee 1990), bending some way in
recognising the importance of historical contact, but rejecting the suggestion that
this in itself should render San society non-existent in its own right. The revisionists
retaliated (e.g. Wilmsen and Denbow 1990) with the suggestion that this was all too little,
reiterating again and again their central thesis that the political economy of the Kalahari,
and not ‘Bushman’ or ‘San’ society, is the relevant unit of analysis. The Kalahari debate
takes diverse disciplinary forms: ethnographic, documentary and archaeological. To
some extent these merge into one, as with the interpretation of the writings (and even
the handwriting) of early travellers and ethnographers, or the reports of a thousand-
year-old Bos taurus maxilla found at CaeCae, the main site of Wilmsen’s ethnographic
fieldwork. (This crucial piece of evidence for the longtime existence of cattle in what is
now north-western Botswana was destroyed in an accidental fire in 1978.)

2 ALAN BARNARD
 There are actually two main facets to the Kalahari debate: one concerns the historical
details of interaction between San and others. The other concerns the interpretation
of such details in terms of what we understand San society to be. Traditionalists
emphasise cultural continuity and the cultural integrity of San peoples. They see them
as the inheritors of ancient environmental knowledge, hunting techniques, kinship
practices, religious beliefs, and so on: the kinds of things implicitly assumed by many
of those involved in ‘indigenous peoples’ advocacy (cf. Brody 2001). Revisionists de-
emphasise these aspects in favour of greater concern with centuries-old hegemonic
social formations. However, as some ‘indigenous peoples’ representatives and their
supporters have argued (e.g. ‡Oma and Thoma 2002), the existence of these, or their
contemporary projections through cultural tourism, need not necessarily deny the
continuation of indigenous aspects of culture or of a claim to ‘indigeneity’.
The main battles of the Kalahari debate were fought in the pages of Current Anthro-
pology during Kuper’s editorship of the journal (Kuper 1992). But there is also a parallel
battleground in History in Africa, a journal especially conducive to the increasing length
at which each side seems to want to deal with the issues. Two major treatises have
appeared there: Richard Lee and Mathias Guenther’s 51-page ‘Problems in Kalahari
historical ethnography and the tolerance of error’ (1993), and Wilmsen’s 94-page
‘Further lessons in Kalahari ethnography and history’ (2003). The Kalahari debate
was predicated on seemingly trivial issues expounded at great length, often concerning
subtle turns of phrase, and sometimes really quite plain understandings of words. As
the debate progressed, the details became more and more important, and the dominant
style of argument became the showing of error in detail as a means of undermining
the broader aspects of each position. The most famous example is Wilmsen’s (1989:
112) mistaken reading of the word ‘onions’ in the handwritten diaries of nineteenth-
century explorer Charles John Andersson. Wilmsen misread Andersson’s word ‘onions’
as ‘oxen’, thereby suggesting that the Ju/’hoansi of nineteenth-century Nyae Nyae had
cattle, whereas in reality they had only wild onions (Lee and Guenther 1991: 592–3).
The ‘indigenous peoples’ debate has elements of this too, if not on as grand a scale.
Both sides make minor errors, often with subtle political implications, though Kuper’s
detractors focus more than Kuper on these. For example, Saugestad (2004a: 264) points
out that Kuper in his opening paragraph about the ‘delegation of South African Boers’
confused the Working Group on Indigenous Populations with the Permanent Forum
on Indigenous Issues, inaugurated in May 2002 (several years after the incident Kuper
describes). The moral of the story is that to write on such contentious issues, almost any
error one makes, or almost any casual statement, leaves one open to having one’s errors
amplified and one’s phrases deconstructed to create new meanings, or mis-meanings
where none were intended. It is very easy to do, and as we shall see, at times in the
history of the Vienna School also small points were used as ammunition in battles about
rethinking larger theoretical constructions and deeper debates on the relations between
those now called ‘indigenous peoples’.

The ‘Vienna School’ and the notion of Urkultur

The Kulturkreislehre developed major centres in museums and departments of

ethnology in Leipzig, Berlin and Vienna. The leaders of the Vienna School, a branch

KALAHARI REVISIONISM 3
of the ‘Culture-Circle School’, Wilhelm Schmidt (1868–1954) and Wilhelm Koppers
(1886–1961), were Roman Catholic priests of the Society of the Divine Word (Societas
Verbi Divini). Unlike their German counterparts, often based in museums, the Vienna
scholars were not so much interested in material culture. They were interested, in
Schmidt’s case especially, in the origin of religion, which he believed was in pre-
mythological, revealed monotheism.
Schmidt borrowed ideas on the ‘primitive high god’ from the Scottish writer,
Andrew Lang, and developed them into a Kulturkreis framework (Schmidt 1931: 172–
84). Schmidt explicitly rejected ‘evolutionism’, as he understood the term. In particular
he rejected both the Darwinian belief in descent of man from the apes, and, equally,
the theories of F. Max Müller, Sir John Lubbock, Herbert Spencer, Sir Edward Burnett
Tylor, William Robertson Smith and any others who saw nature-myth, fetishism, ghost-
worship, animism or totemism as the foundation of primal religion.
However, Schmidt’s scheme was what might, in later terms, be thought of as
a combination of diffusionist and evolutionist sentiment. Schmidt may have argued
against evolutionist thinking, but his main criticisms (Schmidt 1934: 1–9) were directed
quite specifically against those who dwelt on missing links, those who believed in
simplistic unilinear models and those who failed to recognise a highly developed
language or a high stage of reason in ‘primitive man’. In fact, just as there is much
diffusionism among the evolutionists (particularly Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan), so
too there is much evolutionism among the diffusionists: none more so than Schmidt. He
believed in putting together ethnology and prehistory in the service of understanding
human social and cultural development. Or as Marvin Harris (1968: 388) put it:
‘The Kreise were not only “Circles” but they were “Strata” – a part of a universal
chronological scheme, which rested entirely on the assumption that contemporary
cultures could be arranged according to degree of primitiveness’.
Schmidt’s spheres of culture were classified in four such strata or grades (1934: chart
facing p. 36; see also Schmidt 1926): Primitive (or Urkultur), Primary, Secondary and
Tertiary. The Primitive Grade contained four cultures, and all were essentially hunter-
gatherers. The Central Primitive had exogamous groups and were monogamous. The
Southern Primitive also had exogamous groups and sex totems. The Arctic Primitive
had exogamous groups and egalitarian social organisation. And the ‘Youngest’ or
‘Boomerang Culture’, a transitional type, had a mixture of primitive and matriarchal
features.
Each culture contained many peoples, and these were widely distributed. For
example, the Central Primitive Culture was represented by so-called Pygmies of
Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa. The Southern Primitive Culture included
African Bushmen, and also the Fuegians of South America, and southeastern Australian
Aborigines and Tasmanians. The Northern Primitive Culture was similarly widespread
across the Arctic and Subarctic. And Boomerang Culture included not only Australian
Aborigines but also Asian groups, and within Africa, Nilotics and some of the hunter-
gatherers of South Africa. Each culture in turn influenced others of different grades.
Schmidt cites, for example, two-way influences between Pygmies and Proto-Hamito-
Semites of the Secondary Culture Grade.
Schmidt and Koppers sent to Africa and other parts of the world several members
of their religious order and of the loosely associated Institute of Ethnology at the
University of Vienna (where both also taught). Among those sent to Africa were Martin
Gusinde and Paul Schebesta, also both priests. Gusinde worked in Rwanda, with Twa

4 ALAN BARNARD
hunter-gatherers, and briefly in what is now Namibia, with Khoisan groups (as well
as, perhaps more famously, in Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America).
He published a monograph (Gusinde 1966) as well as articles in both German and
English on ‘black’ (Hukwe and Kanikwe) and the supposedly purer ‘yellow’ (!Khung)
Bushmen.1 Schebesta worked in the Congo, among Mbuti, and in Mozambique where
he served as a missionary, as well as with so-called ‘Pygmy’ peoples of the Philippines
and modern Malaysia. These and other members of the Vienna School paid special
attention to the supposedly most ‘primitive’ peoples, whether in Africa, Asia or South
America. Schmidt’s view was that the culture of those he called ‘Asian Pygmies’ was
earlier and more primitive than that of Africa, and indeed it was commonly believed
at the time (against both Darwin and biological anthropology today) that humankind
originated in Asia rather than Africa. Nevertheless, much in African Pygmy culture
was, in Schmidt’s view, representative of the Urkultur, more specifically the Central
Urkultur. He believed their culture to be earlier than the Tasmanian, whose primacy
was championed by his counterparts in Germany, especially Fritz Graebner.
The Bushmen (today often called ‘San’, or in Botswana, ‘Basarwa’) were a more
complex matter. While Schmidt (e.g. 1933: 537–787 passim) argued that much in their
culture was part of the Primitive, he also suggested that they have elements of a later,
more complex sphere of culture that they share with their neighbours. In a sense,
his view was proto-revisionist, in Kalahari-debate terms. He already had a notion
of Bushman culture as influenced by herding peoples, though his main comparisons
here were with Khoekhoe and Damara, not with Bantu-speakers. Schmidt’s views also
had elements of regional structural comparison, the approach much later championed
and developed so successfully by Kuper in his work on Southern Bantu kinship and
symbolism (e.g. Kuper 1980). My own work on Khoisan kinship, settlement and
religious belief (e.g. Barnard 1992), which began while I was a postgraduate student
under Kuper’s supervision, is in this tradition too. In the Vienna version, Schmidt
systematically distinguishes in his search for ‘the ancient Bushman religion’, Eastern,
Southern and Northwestern Bushmen, and suggests that to understand Bushman
religion one must compare it to those of the Khoekhoe and the Damara (Schmidt 1929).
These pastoralist groups, which in the manner of his time he refers to respectively as
‘Hottentot’ and ‘Bergdama’, together with the Bushmen or San, form a single cultural
constellation known since that time (though with some historical ambiguity in the
case of the Damara) as the Khoisan peoples (Schapera 1930: 5) or Khoe-San peoples
(Saugestad 2004b: 23). The former spelling remains the more usual in anthropology,
though the latter is now the preference among some Khoe-San themselves and among
activists sympathetic to the idea that Khoekhoe and San have quite different political
goals.
Schmidt ends the fourth volume of Der Ursprung der Gottesidee with a short
comparative treatment of Bushman and Pygmy religion (Schmidt 1933: 696–707) and
a lengthy comparison between what he calls ‘Asiatic Pygmies’ and ‘African Pygmies’
with regard to religious belief and practice (1933: 709–87). He returned to the question,

1 Although Gusinde, in 1950–1 and 1953, was the only ethnologist in the Vienna School proper to do
significant work with Bushmen, he was preceded by the Viennese physical anthropologist Rudolf
Pöch, who, between 1907 and 1909, made films and sound recordings of Nharo (Naro) and others
in the Kalahari, and much less ethically, collected the remains of recently deceased Bushmen in the
Cape Colony (Legassick and Rassool 2000: 9–19, 27–9).

KALAHARI REVISIONISM 5
with particular regard to the history of the Asiatic–African relation, along with other
supposed historical relations between the peoples of Urkultur in his sixth volume
(1935). For Schmidt, the mechanism of cultural transmission was more migration than
diffusion, and through migration, he believed, the various forms of Urkultur had spread
throughout the world. Schmidt, of course, did not use the phrase ‘indigenous peoples’,
but his notion of the Urkultur was variously translated into English as ‘primitive
culture’, ‘primal culture’, ‘primordial culture’ or ‘primeval culture’; and the peoples it
covers tend to be much the same population groups as those now called ‘indigenous’.
It is noteworthy in the context of the current debate on ‘indigenous peoples’ that
Schmidt’s ideas on Urkultur attracted relatively little challenge from those within the
Vienna School who came to doubt the culture-circle project as a whole. In particular,
Bornemann (1938) wrote a short book (dedicated to Schmidt) on the notion of the
Urkultur, which he sought to justify through an argument that it is not the first
culture but the development of cultural ideas that had existed before the first ‘culture’
had formed. What is more, the form of the ancient cultures observed by the likes of
ethnographers such as Gusinde or Schebesta was, according to Bornemann (or even
according to Gusinde or Schebesta themselves), not quite the same thing as Schmidt
imagined: migrations, culture contact and secondary primitivity had taken their toll.
In the Post-War era, even Koppers came to doubt the culture-circle approach, but he
retained his belief in the Urkultur, as did many others within the School (Zwenemann
1983: 114–6). In a study of Schmidt’s theory of primitive monotheism, Henryk Zimoń
(1986: 251–6) examined the works of fifteen members of the Vienna School and came to
the conclusion that most of them were critical of the culture-historical method. Most
too rejected the notion of ‘primitive monotheism’, though not the idea of an awareness
of spiritual truth on the part of the most ‘primitive’ of peoples.
The Urkultur, in other words, is an anthropological concept that would not die.
More resilient than the Kulturkreislehre or the Kulturkreise themselves, Urkultur
remained.2 To my mind it remains still in anthropology, and its significance would
seem to be on the rise in recent decades, notably with the emergence of modern hunter-
gatherer studies, the revisionist critique and the current political and anthropological
concerns to which Kuper (2003a) refers. Certainly it is implicit in our present-day
discourse in the idea of ‘indigenous peoples’. The ‘native’ has indeed returned.

To w a r d s a r e d e f i n i t i o n o f ‘ i n d i g e n o u s p e o p l e s ’

If, as Kuper tells us, ‘indigenous peoples’ is a problematic term, then what term
should we use? Actually, as Kuper suggests, no term will do because the concept is
what is problematic. Yet if both the Vienna School with the notion of Urkultur and
the ‘indigenous peoples’ lobby are in agreement, maybe there is something to their
arguments? Two schools widely separated in time, space and broad anthropological
interest come to the same conclusion: both say it is possible to identify ‘primal culture’.

2 It is a debateable point whether, in some sense, even the Wiener Schule itself did survive, albeit
in a transformed state: in the culture-historical approach of Walter Hirschberg (1904–1996), in
the continuing interest at Vienna in ethnohistory, and in current historiographical interests in the
Vienna School proper. I am grateful to Werner Zips for this insight.

6 ALAN BARNARD
And we all know it when we see it. Kuper’s argument rests precisely on the fact that
no-one would seriously accept, say, ‘the English’ as an ‘indigenous people’. Being the
‘indigenous people’ of England is not the same thing as merely being indigenous to
England.
To reject ‘indigenous people’ as an anthropological concept is not the same thing
as rejecting it as a legal concept, or rejecting it as a useful tool for political persuasion.
If the United Nations and governments accept it, then it can have utility. Defined
polythetically in law (which it is), and defined intuitively by ordinary people –
indigenous and non-indigenous alike – around the world, it does have meaning. There
is therefore no reason to reject it, at least in these contexts. As I noted earlier, Saugestad
(2001a: 43) summarises the consensus in ‘international discourse in politics, law, and
anthropology’ in terms of relations between peoples and modern nation states in terms
of four criteria that hint at such a polythetic definition: first come (i.e. that ‘indigenous
people’ are descended from people who were there before others); non-dominance (i.e.
that they are under alien state structures); cultural difference (i.e. difference from the
majority population, with the assumption that ‘indigenous people’ are in the minority);
and self-ascription. I agree with Kuper that this kind of definition is messy, but with
Saugestad that, in spite of such problems, it is useful (see also Barnard 2004). Its
most important aspects are the second and fourth: non-dominance and self-ascription.
Complexity breeds contradiction, and the recognition that definitions must at best be
polythetic is part of the solution. Furthermore, simply because a community may be of
recent invention does not mean that it is not real. Real ‘traditions’ can be invented, just as
‘imagined communities’ can be real communities – assuming we recognise social reality
as a social construct (cf. Hobsbawm 1983). In a further irony, the notion of ‘indigeneity’
is itself a western construct, and claims to it follow a western social construction of
‘indigenous’ authenticity (Handler 1986; Thuen 2004: 279–82).
Nevertheless, ‘indigenous people’ is not really an anthropological concept, or at
least not a very good one. Although close to the notion of Urkultur, ‘indigenous
people’ is if anything less salient and certainly messier. It is an ideological and social
construct recognised by those who claim the status, by anthropologists who support
their cause and no doubt by the educated public at large. Kuper is quite right that
‘indigenous peoples’ is, in some respects, more like the racial categories of apartheid
than it is like anthropological ideas on ‘race’, whether past or present. Yet, under
apartheid, anthropologists sympathetic to the plight of individuals sometimes went to
court as expert witnesses to challenge the government classification of those individuals.
They did not accept the system, but could act within its confines to force changes for
individuals. Similarly today, anthropologists in the United Kingdom (and elsewhere)
have kinds of expertise to use in cases defining people as ‘refugees’ – a concept in some
ways much like ‘indigenous peoples’.
‘Refugee’ is a relational concept defined by nation states, by the UN, and by
other organisations (Good 2003; 2004). It has absolutely no meaning of substance, but
does of course have meaning with reference to the relation between people and states. If
‘indigenous peoples’ had no meaning of substance, the notion might be less of a problem.
If, in other words, we could free the idea from its association with the ‘primitive’ or
‘primal’, or remove the underlying Urkultur from it, the idea of ‘indigenous people’
might become acceptable. At that point ‘indigenous peoples’, we might think, could
become simply the same as any other disadvantaged minorities. But there remain two
differences. As with the idea of the ‘refugee’, the relation with the state or states is

KALAHARI REVISIONISM 7
crucial. And as with ethnicity, so too with ‘indigenous peoples’: self-definition, not any
substance of ‘race’ or ‘culture’, is the key.
Whether a people are or are not an ‘indigenous people’ is no more an anthropo-
logical question than who is or is not a ‘refugee’ in British law or a ‘coloured’ person
under the apartheid classification system. However, whether indigenous notions of land
ownership coincide with those of governments or their (culturally-naı̈ve) legislation
is an anthropological question. If we can provide an education for governments or
arguments that might enable courts to rule sympathetically on ‘indigenous’ views, then
we should, for these purposes, accept the notion just as we accept for similar purposes
notions of ‘refugee’ or even ‘asylum seeker’. Kuper’s argument on ‘indigenous peoples’
succeeds against substance, but it cannot succeed against what we might conceive of
here as the form of indigeneity, the relational aspects entirely devoid of any appeal
to notions of worldwide Urkultur. I do not mind if ‘indigenous peoples’ define their
essence according to what some of us might regard as spurious anthropological theories
because the legitimacy of the claims of ‘indigenous peoples’ actually rests on other
grounds. Related points are contained in Ernest Gellner’s (1983: 6–7) discussion of the
problem of defining a ‘nation’. The idea of being a ‘refugee’ relates fundamentally to
individuals, whereas ‘indigenous rights’ are claimed collectively for a ‘people’ (whose
membership may be open to question) as a whole. The added collectivity of a world
movement of ‘indigenous peoples’ makes this more problematic, but logically no more
than accepting the notion of a stateless nation or a multi-nation state.
There is no, and can be no, theoretically-unproblematic anthropological definition
of ‘indigenous’. It is a legal concept. But, of course, anthropology itself was founded
in the nineteenth century on legal concepts, and such concepts remain important in
many branches of the field, especially in kinship studies (Kuper 1988). Kuper is right:
the classification is reminiscent of that of the former regime in South Africa. But it
is not simply ‘apartheid’ as the term is loosely understood outside South Africa. So-
called ‘racial’ classification under the National Party government was a complex affair,
based not only on supposed biological features, but on presumed cultural history, and
very much too on social identity and ascription by members of different communities.
Indeed, it was in part constructed with the complicity of South African ethnologists
(see Hammond-Tooke 1997: 119–39). Of course, there is a difference between this and
the claims of indigenous peoples. Apartheid was an invidious system of domination and
oppression, whereas indigenous people do not seek to dominate or oppress; they only
seek to be regarded as different, albeit with special rights. As Kenrick and Lewis, and
Saugestad, point out, it is those called ‘indigenous peoples’, not generally the majority
populations of their states, who are the oppressed; such special rights (e.g. to land
under traditional arrangements) therefore mark a move towards equality rather than
away from it.
It is relatively easy to say who are ‘indigenous peoples’ in Australia or South
America, but who is ‘indigenous’ in this sense in Africa? Some peoples whose
representatives claim ‘indigenous’ status are not indigenous (in the perpetual residence
sense) to the places they presently live in. This is especially true of pastoral peoples.
Yet while the Maasai, the Himba or the Nama may not have lived a thousand years
ago in the precise locations they now do, who are we to say they should not be
considered ‘indigenous peoples’ in the political sense that phrase has acquired? The
Gaia Atlas of First Peoples (Burger 1990: 183) even includes among African ‘indigenous
peoples’ such dubious examples as Nuer, Dinka, Fipa and Eritreans. The criteria for

8 ALAN BARNARD
inclusion comprise being ‘affected by civil war, nation-building by centralized states
and inappropriate economic projects’. To my mind, this will not quite do, although it
does hint at the looseness with which some are prepared to employ the concept. The
looseness of definition seems to reflect something deeper, and it betokens the theoretical
difficulty of defining the idea of ‘definition’ itself. ‘Indigenous peoples’ are not merely
peoples who are indigenous to some place. There is an added, and almost impossible to
define, even mystical, additional factor.
This aspect of the definition of ‘indigenous peoples’ reminds me of a centuries-
long debate in the history of mathematics described by the philosopher Imre Lakatos
(1976).3 Lakatos shows that although the geometry we learn in school proceeds entirely
deductively, the process of deduction, that is of reasoning from definitions to see where
they lead us, is an illusion. Mathematicians do not make definitions and then see where
they lead; rather, they formulate and reformulate them to make them lead where they
want them to lead. The history of mathematics is a history of debate between dogmatists
and sceptics, just as is the ‘indigenous peoples’ debate. Yet it seems to me there is a third
possible position in the latter case. Supposing one’s definition of ‘indigenous people’
accidentally leads one to the conclusion, which Kuper raises, that the English might
qualify as ‘indigenous people’, or that Maasai might not qualify? As a sceptic, Kuper
would see this as an argument for getting rid of the concept of ‘indigenous people’.
The dogmatists in the indigenous peoples’ lobby, however, would see it as a problem
to be solved by redefinition. Each case becomes a special case, and the refinement of
definition becomes endless. The third solution is the recognition that we do know an
‘indigenous people’ when we see one; and the English are not one! It is the idea of
definition itself that is the problem. There can be no perfect, universally applicable
definition. The logical solution then, is to reject the idea of a monothetic definition,
and indeed of a nomothetic definition, and redefine ‘indigeneity’ according to local
requirements for the achievement of legitimate political goals. There is no essence that
unites Pygmies, Maasai, Hopi and Navaho (Navajo), no clear definition that unites
them and excludes the English. The fact that diverse groups may see themselves as
‘indigenous peoples’ involves something other than definition.
We have seen this before in anthropology. The debates among scholars of the
Vienna School on the notion of Urkultur were similar. There came a point, even by
the 1930s, when it seemed problematic to some. The idea of grand culture circles in
general was pushed to one side, while there remained a belief in this one great primitive
culture circle, or more accurately set of culture circles: Northern, Southern, Eastern
and Boomerang, which both underlay as substrata all cultures and at the same time
existed with specific living representatives: Pygmies, Bushmen and so on.

Definitions and obsolete definitions

Urkultur was a legitimate, if problematic, anthropological concept. Yet its usefulness

in anthropological theory has long since passed. If the phrase ‘indigenous peoples’ is

3 The debate concerned Euler’s theorem about the relation between the numbers of sides, edges and
vertices in a polyhedron. Although Lakatosians may prefer to see Lakatos’s comments in terms
of his larger theory of the structure of scientific research programmes, I have extracted only the
relevant point for my analogy here.

KALAHARI REVISIONISM 9
simply a postmodern way of saying Urkultur, then it may be best to let anthropology
and the ‘indigenous peoples’ movement go their separate ways. If, however, we
recognise the political nature of the phrase and jettison its old-fashioned anthropological
associations with the ‘primitive’ and the ‘perpetual’, there is hope. Land rights and rights
to utilise the resources passed down from the ancestors are human rights. If we want
to call them ‘indigenous rights’, that is fine; but let us not take these ‘indigenous rights’
too literally. We no doubt all agree that every individual has a right to a claim of cultural
identity, and many of us would simplify this to say that all peoples have cultural rights.
There may be something in the spirit of our time that leads some peoples and their
advocates alike to claim belonging to such a category as ‘indigenous’. Unlike Kuper,
I have no problem with that, or even with the association of the individuals in the
‘indigenous peoples’ movement with primitivism, Green politics, anti-globalisation,
fox-hunting or any other such cause, dubious or otherwise (see Kuper 2003a: 395).
Proponents of ‘indigenous rights’ seem to be looking for real ‘indigenous peoples’,
in deserts and jungles, in Arctic wastelands and Subarctic steppes, just as Gusinde
(1966), for example, was looking for ‘real’ Bushmen – in his case the ‘yellow’ Restvolk
(remnant people) of the northern Kalahari, supposedly purer in race, culture and
primal monotheistic religion than surrounding groups. Kuper is looking for ‘real’ or
idealised ‘indigenous peoples’ too, in the writings of fellow anthropologists, ‘indigenous
peoples’ organisations, the UN, the ILO and so on. More to the point, Kuper is
looking for definitions of ‘indigenous peoples’, to discredit them by pointing out the
inevitable fallacy of the equation of ‘indigenous’ status with ethnographic fact. The
debate reminds me in this sense of the one over ‘elementary structures of kinship’ or
‘prescriptive systems’ in the 1960s and 1970s (cf. Kuper 1988: 226–9). Like ‘elementary
structures’, ‘indigenous peoples’ are figments of the imagination. But figments of the
imagination are real too. They are real to self-identification, in this case, identification
as an ‘indigenous people’. And they are real, and legitimately so, to those who assist the
political causes of rights to use and to own land according to ‘indigenous’ law, to practise
‘indigenous’ cultural pursuits, and so on, whether we take ‘indigenous’ here to mean
specifically ‘of indigenous peoples’ or in its wider sense to mean simply indigenous
to some place or other. Yet the category of an ‘indigenous people’ is not a meaningful
category of ethnographic description. It identifies no useful conceptual framework for
anthropological comparison or analysis. Kuper (2003a: 395) notes the association of
‘indigenous peoples’ activists with causes such as fox hunting in the United Kingdom.
He also likens the idea of special rights for ‘indigenous peoples’ with apartheid in South
Africa and with anti-immigrant feeling in parts of Europe. But in fact right-wing and
left-wing are moveable and reversible concepts, weaving in and out of the discussion.
There is a sense in which the recent Kalahari debate, earlier discussions of Urkultur,
and the present ‘indigenous peoples’ debate are all part of the same grand theme in
the history of anthropology. Wilmsen often claims that the debate in which he takes
vigorous part is not the Kalahari debate, but the second Kalahari debate. The first
Kalahari debate was a squabble between ‘traditionalist’ Gustav Fritsch, who travelled
in the Kalahari in the 1860s, and ‘revisionist’ Siegfried Passarge, who was there in the
1890s. Fritsch’s ‘traditionalism’ is, certainly in our terms today, undeniably the right-
wing tendency. He objected to monogenism, a single origin for humankind, and with it
to the term Urrassen (primal races), precisely because it suggested that Europeans and
Bushmen might have the same origin. Fritsch writes, in 1880: ‘The term “Urrassen”,
which apparently offers itself naturally for [discussion of such a category of peoples], is

10 ALAN BARNARD
unserviceable because authors have a habit of applying the same name to earlier periods
of our own cultural ancestors’ (Fritsch 1880: 290; this translation Wilmsen 1997: 32).
Twenty-five years later, Wilmsen’s hero Passarge claimed that Bushmen and Pygmies
were ‘the original African race . . . representing all the original character of humankind’
(Passarge 1905: 326; this translation Wilmsen 1997: 32), and the squabble continued.
So what happened next? Urrasse became Urkultur, just as present-day discussions
of ‘culture’ reproduce old arguments about ‘race’. What is interesting to me is that it
was the proto-revisionist Passarge, not the proto-traditionalist Fritch, who recognised
the primal human way of being. It is not possible to make a simple equation of right-
wing, traditionalist, ‘indigenous peoples’ movement, and so on, because the threads of
‘primal’ imagery run under and over, through both right-wing and left-wing ideology.
Passarge was for a time associated with the Colonial Institute in Hamburg, while Fritsch
moved in the more liberal circles of Rudolf Virchow’s Berlin. I would not care to say
who is more right-wing and who more left-wing among today’s anthropologists, but
it is worthy of note that at least in my observation those active in ‘indigenous peoples’
organisations include individuals as diverse as New Age hippies, human-rights activists
and (as Kuper points out) fox-hunting enthusiasts. It is also worth recalling the famous
quotation from the preface to Lee and DeVore’s Man the Hunter: ‘We cannot avoid the
suspicion that many of us were led to live and work among the hunters because of a
feeling that the human condition was likely to be more clearly drawn here than among
other kinds of societies’ (Lee and DeVore 1968: ix). For ‘hunters’ read ‘indigenous
peoples’; the range of anthropologists who subscribe to this view may be just as diverse
as the range of ‘indigenous peoples’ supporters.
Kuper is correct to question ‘indigenous peoples’ as a theoretical concept, and the
problem is historically even more complex than he suggests in his Current Anthropology
article. This is implied in the writings of his main supporter, the contemporary
ethnographer of the Ju/’hoansi, James Suzman, whose published views on the matter
actually pre-date Kuper’s (e.g. Suzman 2001). Suzman’s opposition to ‘indigenous
rights’ discourse, stems from practical rather than academic concerns; he argues that
the emphasis on San difference may in fact reinforce the structures of domination that
he, Kuper and ‘indigenous rights’ activists alike so strongly contest (cf. Suzman 2002;
2003). Kuper and Suzman are keen to take cognisance of the anti-ethnic stance of
governments, especially in southern Africa, over the views of the activists. Nor is the
Suzman–Kuper line quite as recent as it may seem. There are hints of it, for example, in
Nicholas Thomas’s (1994: 30) reference over a decade ago to primitivist constructions
with racist and colonialist roots. Thomas maintains:

that this essentialism has a negative side: the celebration of authentic Aborigines or Navajo fixes
the proper identity of those peoples in their preservation and display of a folkloric and primitivised
culture and denigrates and marginalizes urbanized or apparently acculturated members of these
populations who speak English, lack ethnic dress, do not obviously conduct ceremonies and do
not count as real natives to the same extent as those who continue to live in the bush and practise
something closer to traditional subsistence (Thomas 1994: 30).

Nevertheless, the point Kuper makes in his final paragraph remains unproven.
Kuper says: ‘The conventional lines of argument currently used to justify “indigenous”
land claims rely on obsolete anthropological notions and on a romantic and false
ethnographic vision. Fostering essentialist ideologies of culture and identity, they may

KALAHARI REVISIONISM 11
have dangerous political consequences’ (Kuper 2003a: 395). While the first part of
this statement may be true, the second part does not necessarily follow. We can,
if we try, make use of such romantic, even obsolete, anthropological notions with
our professional insight. It is our ethnographic knowledge and our ability to think
anthropologically that gives us insights that can help solve problems for ‘indigenous
peoples’. We do not need to have, and should not have, this phrase ‘indigenous peoples’
in our glossary of technical terms. But we can still battle along side those who call
themselves ‘indigenous’, through organisations founded on the premise of ‘indigeneity’,
‘aboriginality’, ‘nativity’ or ‘firstness’, without necessarily espousing the theory of
Urkultur that survives beyond all the definitions in the imagery of ‘indigenous peoples’.
This is imagery that led some of us into anthropology in the first place, and for which
we have no reason to apologise.

Conclusions

The three arenas of anthropological discourse examined here – the ‘indigenous peoples’
debate, the Kalahari debate, and the Vienna School – share transformable images of
primitiveness and cultural purity embedded in theories of migration and historical
domination. In a sense, then, they represent one great anthropological debate replayed.
Peter Pels (1999) has drawn attention to the trend beginning in the 1830s in which the
activism of the Anti-Slavery Society and the Aborigines Protection Society gradually
gave way to the objectivity of the APS’s scientific successor, the Ethnological Society of
London (founded in 1843). He argues, with India as his example, that the rhetoric of the
APS was an inversion of the colonial settler doctrine of terra nullius, and thus doomed.
And so the presumed ‘aborigines’ of India came to be understood ‘more in terms of
salvage ethnography . . . than in terms of a live population whose rights, interests and
education were a source of concern’ (Pels 1999: 109).
Some 150 years later, in southern Africa, we see a double-inversion of that trend,
where first Kalahari revisionism (associated in 1980s and early 1990s South Africa
with anti-apartheid, anti-ethnic, class-based theories of society) replaces the salvage
ethnography of the previous generation; and then the activism of post-apartheid,
ethnicity-based ‘indigenous’ politics comes to the fore. The year 1989 marks both the
publication of Wilmsen’s Land filled with flies and the ILO Convention Concerning
Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries (ILO 169); while 1993
marks the proclamation of the UN International Decade of the World’s Indigenous
People, and with it, a decade of intensive action-oriented research by anthropologists
working alongside indigenous peoples’ organisations, culminating in the publication of
Kuper’s article and responses to it by that anthropological constituency. The liberation
of anthropology to pursue ethnicity as a topic in the new South Africa (following
the institution of democracy, coincident with the start of the International Decade of
World’s Indigenous People, in 1994), coupled with successful land claims there on the
part of ‡Khomani and other ‘indigenous’ groups, make a stark contrast with the eviction
of the last remaining G|wi and G||ana from Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve
in the early 2000s, and cries of racism in that country. It is worth recalling that Botswana
was once widely praised as Africa’s shining example of democracy, anti-racism and the
successful integration of minority and majority populations – if not of the original
population of Basarwa (San) hunter-gatherers.

12 ALAN BARNARD
 Recent interdisciplinary work among Darwinian anthropologists, evolutionary
psychologists, archaeologists, linguists and geneticists hints that there really was an
Urrasse, and there really was an Urkultur (Dunbar, Knight and Power 1999). Both are
represented in the ‘anatomically modern’ Homo sapiens population that gave rise to the
‘Out of Africa’ migration about 80,000 years ago.4 This migration spread early symbolic
culture; let us call it Urkultur. However, the relation between this Urkultur and the
cultures of today’s so-called ‘indigenous peoples’ is no greater that that between this
Urkultur and the cultures of all peoples. Schmidt’s idea of an Urkultur presupposed a
subsequent spread of primary, secondary and tertiary culture circles, and de-emphasised
any relation between the Urkultur and the cultures of what many now call ‘non-
indigenous peoples’. That latter de-emphasis, and not the notion of an Urkultur
in the abstract, is what I would reject. In other words, an Urkultur that belongs
equally to all peoples, or even an Urkultur still belonging to all, but which is more
reflected in the art, ritual or belief systems of some peoples than in those of others,
is consistent with at least some contemporary anthropological and interdisciplinary
scientific views. If the latter is what ‘indigenous peoples’ advocates see in ‘indigenous
peoples’, I see it too. But it exists only at a level of high theory, and it is extremely
difficult to justify its use in claims of special rights for some peoples (or individuals)
over others.
Such claims must therefore be based on something else. The legitimate claims
of ‘indigenous peoples’ appeal not to objective elements of anthropological theory,
but to common identities objectified by participants, whether these participants be
‘indigenous’ claimants themselves or their advocates. Saugestad (2001b: 306) is right in
her appeal, mentioned at the beginning of this paper, to Barthian notions: ‘indigeneity’
as a political concept is like ethnicity. And who are we to deny the ethnic identity, or
the ‘indigenous’ identity, of others, however unscientific such a claim may seem to us?
Indeed, whether ‘our’ definitions are more objective than ‘theirs’ is a matter worthy of
debate, and this problem may yet emerge as the next phase of the current controversy.
I agree with Kuper that an essentialist notion of ‘indigenous peoples’ is philosophically
problematic, but I disagree on the implication of this for the political strategies of those
seeking to regain the lands of their ancestors or to link their causes with the causes of
others, on different continents, in similar positions.
For me, it is difficult too to separate the ‘indigenous peoples’ debate from the
related debates (not least the Kalahari debate) which have preceded it, or from the
broad convergence of understanding in the field of history of anthropology that sees
the close relations between colonial and nation-state politics, the moral concerns of
anthropologists, and the changing theoretical dispositions of the discipline. What is
more, the idea of Urkultur as propagated by the Vienna School, although different in
form from that of present-day high theorists of early symbolic culture, shares with the
popular notion of ‘indigenous peoples’ an undeniable likeness. It is a popular notion
which now too is grounded both in international law and in the practical politics of
rights for oppressed minorities whose claims are fought under the guise, not simply

4 The date is, of course, a matter of yet further debate, with some experts at least until recently
claiming a somewhat later start for the global migration. The date suggested here is consistent with
evidence presented by Stephen Oppenheimer (2003).

KALAHARI REVISIONISM 13
of relations of oppression, but of presumed ‘indigeneity’. Thus, in yet another strange
twist, the old science has become the new politics.

Alan Barnard
School of Social and Political Studies
University of Edinburgh
Adam Ferguson Building
George Square
Edinburgh EH8 9LL
Scotland
a.barnard@ed.ac.uk

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