Last week we considered Paul Lane’s review of Miscast—a 1996 museum exhibition that asked viewers to consider the violent past and contested present of foraging and hunting communities in South Africa. (You can read other reviews here.)

This week, selections from Kairn Klieman’s The Pygmies were our Compass ask us to re-evaluate our understanding of hunting and foraging communities in west-central Africa, sometimes called Pygmies. Klieman also presents compelling evidence about the complicated, changing relationship between Pygmies/Batwa and Bantu-speaking farmers.

One of the problems that both Lane and Klieman point out is the stereotyped presumption that societies with clear connections to a long time horizon can be mistaken for representatives of primordial or timeless people:

“Modern-day subsistence strategies are taken as a model for those that existed in the Late Stone Age past, and the reader is left with the idea that there are societies in Africa that have remained unchanged through time.” (Klieman, xv)

Lane and Klieman, in conjunction with lectures and class discussion about human evolution and the formation of distinct societies in Africa raise a number of questions:

• How are we able to get at evidence of early human history?
• Are the histories of all communities treated with equal respect?
• How can we get at the stories of groups marginalized in contexts where even powerful political and religious institutions didn’t leave clear evidence?

This short news article about chiseling out chunks of rock and moving “Eve’s footprints” from Langebaan to the South African Museum begs the question:

• Who gets to keep the fossil record? Who gets to see it?

How do you respond to these issues? What questions do you have?