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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:'The Africa I Know': Film and the Making of 'Bushmen' in Laurens van der Post's 'Lost World of Kalahari' (1956)
Author:Van Vuuren, LaurenISNI
Year:2006
Periodical:Kronos: Journal of Cape History
Issue:32
Pages:139-161
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:cinema
San
images
anthropology
Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups)
Literature, Mass Media and the Press
Architecture and the Arts
About person:Laurens Jan van der Post (1906-1996)ISNI
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/41056562
Abstract:The 1956 BBC documentary film series 'Lost World of the Kalahari', based on Laurens Van der Post's 'The Lost World of the Kalahari', along with Van der Post's voluminous literary output on Bushmen (now San), have made a significant contribution to a pervasive 20th-century conception of Bushmen as mystical pristine primitives who live in harmony with the natural environment, unmolested by a corrupt modern world. This is despite the critique on this conception by many academic anthropologists, historians and others. The present paper analyses the film 'Lost World of the Kalahari' in order to better understand this successful visualization of Van der Post's idealized pristine 'Bushmen'. It shows how Van der Post's particular and conservative views on Africa were transmitted to an international television audience through the film, and how Van der Post underwrote his powerful 'Bushmen' mythology with a particular mode of self-mythologization. Furthermore, the film is considered in the context of changing disourses on Africa in the West in the 1950s, and Van der Post's timeous confluence with anthropological interest in the 'Bushmen'. Notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract]
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