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Overview
The Denver African Expedition went to Africa in 1925 to "seek the cradle of Humanity." The explorers claimed to have found the "Missing Link" in the Heikum bushmen of the Kalahari - and they proceeded to market this image. As Robert J. Gordon shows in Picturing Bushmen, the impact of the expedition lay not simply in its slick merchandising of bushmen images but also in the fact that the pictures were exotic and aesthetically pleasing. The Denver Expedition played a key role in romanticizing bushmen. Indeed, its image of bushmen has permeated Western mass culture. Before the expedition, bushmen commonly had been presented on postcards as impoverished savages. In its wake, the bushmen of South Africa have inspired not only commercial advertisements, but art exhibitions and novels. Although Rob Gordon is an anthropologist, this study ranges into questions of film theory, history, and popular culture. It offers a new perspective on coffee-table books, ethnology, and the nature of research on those labeled "others." While suggesting how "ethnographic photographs" might be appreciated, Picturing Bushmen is also a subtle analysis of the perennial issues that haunt field workers - especially what and how they "see" and how their perception is influenced by the mundane in their own societies.Editorials
Library Journal
Gordon (anthropology, Univ. of Vermont), who was born in Namibia and has done fieldwork in South Africa, has written an engrossing study of the Denver expedition sent out by the University of Colorado in 1925 to film life among the Kalihari bushmen. While photographs of the undertaking survived in museum collections and archives, Gordon had to reconstruct the history of the expedition itself from personal interviews with relatives of team members, journals, photographic archives, and correspondence. He found that before the Denver expedition, images of bushmen showed them as "decadently impoverished," whereas "the Denver expedition was the first attempt on a large scale to present a systematically romanticized image of bushmen." The best in anthropological analysis informs Gordon's study. His lucid approach, coupled with the moving reports of the expedition's encounters with bushmen, will make this extraordinary work of interest both to scholars and lay readers.Joan W. Gartland, Detroit P.L.Book Details
Published
July 28, 1997
Publisher
Athens : Ohio University Press, c1997.
Pages
221
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780821411872