The Making of the "Bushmen"
Abstract
The image of the Bushmen has altered several times over the last 150 years. These alterations reflect fluctuations in the relationship between power and knowledge rather than ethnographic "realities." Some mid-Victorian scholars did not distinguish Bushmen from Khoi pastoralists. When Bushmen posed an impediment to German ambitions in Southwest Africa, they came to be represented as remnants of a primordial race, either dangerously bastardized or so pristine they could never be assimilated. Once white hegemony was assured, the "San" could safely become "harmless people." In delineating these changes, the author notes that the supposedly anomalous genitalia of the Bushmen played a part in the contruction of racial difference, revealing white sexual anxieties similar to those reflected in the images of Jew and Gypsy in Nazi racial science.
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