'The Stars Know Where He Is': World-Making, Wayfaring, and Navigational Theory in Southern African jXam Forager Folklore.

SOUTH Africans; SOCIETIES; FOLKLORE; POLITICAL science; ANIMAL species

Forager societies have had a profound influence on the natural world as modernity has come to know it, engineering environments over the course of millennia through consistent interventions in the lifeways of the plant and animal species around them. Leveraging the human capacity for processing social information, these societies preserved and transmitted their understanding of these processes through folklore. Taking the example of the |Xam foragers of nineteenth-century southern Africa, this article examines the narratives related to navigation and spatial education as a means of articulating value in a landscape, and ordering the lives of those who passed through it. Amongst a society for whom absolute references were rare, the |Xam communicated in stories that overlapped personal life history, deep mythology, and momentary politics, preserving an understanding of how to track the sun, moon, stars, and many social others besides, reckoning with an ever-shifting definition of what 'time' meant for 'place'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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