James David Lewis-Williams (born 1934 in Cape Town) is a South African archaeologist. He is famous for his research on South African rock art (Bushmen), which can be said that he discovered 'Rosetta Stone'. He is the founder and previous director of the Rock Art Research Institute and is currently a professor emeritus of cognitive archeology at the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS). Lewis-Williams is recognized by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa as a leading international researcher, with a rating of A1.
Video David Lewis-Williams
Theoretical effects
Lewis-Williams is exposed to social anthropology as a graduate in UCT. During this time he received lectures from renowned social anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (who started the social anthropology department at UCT in 1920 but later returned as a visiting lecturer) and Monica Wilson, a student of Bronislaw Malinowski. Malinowski's ideas that specifically concern the ritual association with social products mean that Lewis-Williams can finally challenge the idea that San Rock art is just a narrative of everyday life. Therefore, from the beginning of his career and unlike most scholars of the period, Lewis-Williams looked at San's rock art from a social anthropological perspective.
The following evidence from an article by South African scholar Patricia Vinnicombe, shown to him in 1966 by Professor Ray Inskeep (later editor of the South African Archaeological Bulletin), Lewis-Williams used a quantitative method for analysis of rock art images at Drakensberg. Altogether he recorded about 4000 images for his doctoral thesis research. His PhD, completed in 1977 and later published in 1981 as Believing and Seeing: the symbolic meaning in southern San rock painting, was regarded as a seminal text in the research of rock art globally.
Quantitative methods now have little impact on understanding the meaning behind the images in San rock art. There is too much ambiguity in what numeric values ​​can indicate.
In the early 1980s Lewis-Williams began to investigate other theoretical approaches. It's because of him
At that time in South Africa, during apartheid, Marxism was 'the language of liberation' and the only other available social theory. In the economic and social contexts of south San rock art (1982), Lewis-Williams explores the economic position of shamans in San society. Using the ideas of the symbolic work of Maurice Godeller, Lewis-Williams investigates the ritual role of shamans in terms of San's social structure and the context of rock art.
Concern for other members of the San society is seen in his interesting research
Maps David Lewis-Williams
Main research concepts
Ethnography
The basis for Lewis-Williams's work is the use of ethnography. As a scholar he was exposed to Isaac Schapera's The Khoisan Peoples of South Africa. (1930) From the beginning of his professional career he drew ethnography to discuss the meaning of San Rock art. In 1968, he read the philologist Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd a specimen from Bushman Folklore , and then engaged with transcript script records with the conversation? The Sanam people-speaking from the 1870s. Although he never met her, Bleek's daughter, Dorothea Bleek, held a position in social anthropology at UCT where the archive collection was kept.
Other available ethnographic sources have been central to Lewis-Williams's work, especially the report given by Joseph Orpen's colonial administrator in an article published in 1874 on his conversation with a San named driver Qing, the words spoken to Marion Walsham How about the southern Sotho people called the Mapote, and Kalahari San ethnography developed from the Marshall family and others during the 1950s and 1960s.
'The trance dance, like the one done by Ju' 'hoansi in Botswana and Namibia in the 20th century, has been central to Lewis-Williams's argument about shamanism and a state of consciousness that has changed as a source of images seen in southern Africa. rock art. However, some researchers (including Pippa Scotland artists, literary scholar Michael Wessels and archaeologist Anne Solomon) denied Lewis-Williams's interpretation of important texts/Xam San ethnographic describing dance and healing.
Shamanism
Shamanism, derived from the Siberian word Tungus shaman , is used by Lewis-Williams to explain the common metaphor of death for both ethnography and San rock art. The world of shamanism often has a tiered realm inhabited by spirits that can be accessed through a state of altered consciousness (ASC). The world inhabited by people is complemented by other realms that are usually conceptualized as being above or below the inhabited world. The shaman has the ability to mediate in these other worlds. For San, other realms are accessed during changing states of consciousness, and on the rock face where rock art can be found:
More importantly, the San ethnographic collection shows a trance or healing dance, see San healing practice, is the essence of San belief, Metaphor for death is contained in trance dance. When the San Shaman dance, their supernatural powers, or 'potentials', build up to the top point and fly out of the body. At this point, they are 'dead', a metaphor for traveling to other realms where spirits live in the same way that souls walk after going after physical death.
Trance dance has been shown to correlate with symbolism in the art of rock. The features depicted in related images relating to altered states of consciousness, such as nasal bleeding and 'back arm' posture, are two illustrative examples known to occur during dance, Lewis-Williams and Megan Biesele (known for their work with Ju/'hoan people' indicates that the gap between different San groups and different rock art traditions can be bridged because the same terms and concepts are centered around the dance used by the two/Xam San in the south and Ju/hoansi. San people to the north. Building on the work of previous scholars such as Lorna Marshall and Daniel McCall on the pan-San belief system, Biesele and Lewis-Williams together suggest that conceptual linguistic terms and ritual rituals are similar to those of Ju/'hoansi and | Xam can be used to understand the complexity of images. Indeed, Lewis-Williams wrote it
Neuropsychology
The idea of ​​a conceptual belief system is expanded using neuropsychology. Together with Thomas Dowson, Lewis-Williams explores the relationship between universal neuropsychological patterns in human brain wiring and practice in shamanic societies. Using data generated from laboratory experiments with hallucinogens, they proposed a neuropsychological model with several stages of hallucinations experienced during the altered state of consciousness. Put simply, the model shows the relationship between changing state of consciousness and subjective interpretation of hallucinations.
The premise of the neuropsychological model is that there is a distinction between cultural imaging and neurologically-generated visual patterns (known as entoptic phenomena). During ASCs, which can be induced in some way, the first stage of hallucinations experienced by the subject contains only entoptic phenomena, such as the scary scotomas experienced by migraine sufferers. The second stage begins when the hallucinations are interpreted by the subject into familiar cultural content. The implication is that entoptic phenomena will be understood differently in different cultures. The final stage is one of visual and somatic hallucinations, with many images and sensations understood in a cultural context.
Although able to explain why geometric and representational forms appear together in many hunter-gatherer arts around the world, and provide a 'universal' link through human neurology if cultural differences are allowed, the model has been criticized. Criticism has two concerns. First, cross-cultural extrapolations of shamanism, and secondly, push this idea deep into the past. In response, Lewis-Williams adheres to a neuropsychological model but insists that the idea of ​​shamanism is not a simple analogy, it requires contextual definition. Furthermore, there is a need to have an idea behind a neuropsychological model that is practically demonstrated in further examples of the rock art of the San, Coso and Upper Palaeolithic people used in the Signs of every moment: entoptic phenomena in Palaeolithic art Top (1988).
Research in the European Cave
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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