Dorothea Bleek : a life of scholarship / a biography by Jill Weintroub.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Weintroub, Jill, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

San (African people)--Research--Africa, Southern.

San (African people).

Art, San--Research--Africa, Southern.

Art, San.

Women ethnologists--Africa, Southern--Biography.

Women ethnologists.

Bleek, D. F. (Dorothea Frances), 1873-1948.

Bleek, D. F.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (250 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Johannesburg : Wits University Press, 2015.

Summary:

Dorothea Bleek (1873-1948) devoted her life to completing the 'bushman researches' that her father and aunt had begun in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. This research was partly a labour of familial loyalty to Wilhelm, the acclaimed linguist and language scholar of nineteenth-century Germany and later of the Cape Colony, and to Lucy Lloyd, a self-taught linguist and scholar of bushman languages and folklore; but it was also an expression of Dorothea's commitment to a particular kind of scholarship and an intellectual milieu that saw her spending her entire adult life in the study of the people she called'bushmen'. How has history treated Dorothea Bleek? Has she been recognised as a scholar in her own right, or as someone who merely followed in the footsteps of her famous father and aunt? Was she an adventurer, a woman who travelled across southern Africa driven by intellectual curiosity to learn all she could about the bushmen? Or was she conservative, a researcher who belittled the people she studied and dismissed them as lazy and improvident? These are some of the questions with which Jill Weintroub starts her thoughtful biography of Dorothea Bleek. The book examines Dorothea Bleek's life story and family legacy, her rock art research and her fieldwork in southern Africa, and, in light of these, evaluates her scholarship and contribution to the history of ideas in South Africa. The compelling and surprising narrative reveals an intellectual inheritance intertwined with the story of a woman's life, and argues that Dorothea's life work - her study of the bushmen - was also a sometimes surprising emotional quest.

Contents:

Cover; Half-title; Title; Copyright; Contents; Preface; Acknowledgements; A note on terms and languages; Map; Introduction: Revisiting the life and scholarship of Dorothea Bleek; 1 Colonial childhood, European learning; In Europe; Intellectual influences; Trips and notebooks; Life at home; 2 Tracing rock art in the field with Helen Tongue, 1905-1907; Rock art and knowledge making; Selectivity and subject matter; Invisible assistants; Learning in the field; Towards a systematic study; 3 Return to the Kalahari, July-August 1913; Taming the landscape; Travelling to Kakia; Making subjects

4 Ambiguities of interaction: South West Africa, Angola and Tanganyika, 1920-1930Windhoek and Sandfontein, 1920-1921; Mapping language, trade, genealogies and boundaries; Photography; Sound; Objects; Angola, 1925; Tanganyika, 1930; Maturing science and making 'bushmen'; 5 Testimony of the rocks: A 'cave journey', 1928-1932; The edited book; In the field; The field notebooks; Science, society and visiting prehistorians; Seeing for herself; 6 Intimacy and marginality in rock art recording, 1932-1940; Research by correspondence; Negotiating the field; 'Co-production' of knowledge

Knowing the fieldPackaging field notes; Cost of war; 7 Making the bushman dictionary, 1934-1956; Compiling and Publishing; Finding a publisher; From Bleek to Scott; Conversation in writing; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 231-243) and index.

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 09 May 2018).

ISBN:

9781868148806

1868148807

9781868148820

1868148823

OCLC:

957437017