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Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society

Abstract

Arts destined for the tourist market have long been devalued and set aside from serious study. They are considered mass-produced, artistically uninteresting, and inferior in quality. Recent scholarship counters these views; many forms of tourist art can be recognized as artistically inventive and conceptually complex authentic objects of significance to both client and artist. Here the paintings and prints created by artists affiliated with the Kuru Art Project in Botswana are considered as forms of autoethnography, after Mary Louis Pratt’s term for indigenous autobiographies created in the context of “contact zones.” Autoethnographies are received heterogeneously—in this case, as both nostalgic images of longing that drive the touristic quest in southern Africa, but also as contemporary San yearnings for the reclamation of a hunter-gatherer past in the assertion of a new First People political voice.

Relational Format

journal article

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