Anthropology News • May 2007
Raising Awareness of
Prehistoric African Rock Art
A Talk by David Coulson
JEAN SCHAUMBERG
LYNN THOMPSON BACA
SCHOOL FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH
The African continent is home to some of the
world’s most beautiful art—rock art. Images
of 20-foot giraffes in Niger’s Aïr Mountains,
engravings of human footprints in the Western
Kalahari Desert, and carvings of 6.5-foot intri-
cately decorated human figures in Chad are just
some of the figures meticulously etched into or
painted on rock surfaces throughout Africa.
Over 500,000 pictographs and petroglyphs
dating back as much as 26,000 years tes-
tify to the fact that prehistoric African people
were prolific artists who created intricate and
thoughtful pieces of art across a vast continent.
African rock art is among the best preserved on
earth and predates writing by tens of thousands
of years. While it is difficult to determine the
exact age of the rock art using modern scien-
tific methods, the images themselves can offer
valuable clues. The artists painted and carved
what they saw in their world.
What Is Web 2.0? What Does It
Mean for Anthropology?
Lessons From an Accidental
Viral Video
MICHAEL WESCH
KANSAS STATE U
What is Web 2.0 and what does it mean for anthro-
pology? By late January of this year I had spent
several months struggling to answer this question
for a paper I was preparing on the possibilities
and challenges of using new web technologies for
the presentation of ethnography online.
A New Mediascape
Web 2.0 is notoriously difficult to capture in
words. The name itself is strategically non-
descriptive, refusing to declare anything except
that whatever it is, it is different than the “Web
1.0” that came before. Coined by O’Reilly
Media in 2004, there is a healthy skepticism
among many that it is nothing more than
a marketing buzzword. However, few would
argue that technologies like blogs, wikis, RSS
feeds and tagging that operate under the ban-
ner of “Web 2.0” have not significantly trans-
formed the way many humans now interact
and participate online.
30
In March, British photographer David Coulson
spoke to an audience in Santa Fe, NM at the
Lensic, Santa Fe’s Performing Arts Center. The
event was a first-time collaboration between the
School for Advanced Research (Santa Fe, NM)
and The Leakey Foundation (San Francisco, CA).
Coulson’s images aptly illustrated the magnif-
icent engravings and paintings he documented
for the book, African Rock Art: Paintings and
Engravings on Stone (2001) that he co-authored
with Alec Campbell. Vertical rock surfaces are
good locations for rock art, although engravings
tend to be concentrated in the Sahara Desert,
central Tanzania, eastern Zambia and South
Africa. Paintings are found in protected areas
either in shelters of sandstone or granite or on
cliffs and boulders not exposed to the elements.
The locations of several hundred thousand
works of art are officially known and each year
hundreds more are added to the list.
The late paleontologist Mary Leakey intro-
duced Coulson to the rock paintings of central
Tanzania. Leakey and Coulson shared a love for
the rock art and a mutual concern for its protec-
tion. This led to the 1996 creation of TARA, the
Trust for African Rock Art, a not-for-profit, NGO
registered in Kenya and America.
The more I tried to explain Web 2.0 and its
significance in words, the more I was struck with
the irony of trying to represent dynamic, visual
and participatory media in a traditional static and
authorial paper format. I tried to imagine how I
could present my work in the medium I was trying
to explain, and the idea for a YouTube video was
born. Three days later I had completed a rough
draft, posted it to YouTube, and sent the link to ten
colleagues. To my great surprise, one week later the
video was the #1 featured video on YouTube and
had been viewed over one million times.
NET@WORKING
The video delivers a quick history of the web
and highlights the most significant differences
between paper-based media and digital media,
focusing especially on the ability of digital media
to separate form and content. In the video I argue
that this allowed more users to create content
without needing to know complicated format-
ting codes, opening the way for the user-gener-
ated revolution we are now witnessing.
The video quickly tracks the most common
manifestations of this revolution—blogs, media-
sharing, tagging and wikis—and ends by suggest-
KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE
Fighting cats. Photo courtesy of David Coulson
“TARA’s mission is to create greater global
awareness of the importance and endangered
state of Africa’s rock art; to survey sites and
monitor their status; to be an information
resource and archive; and to promote and
support rock art conservation measures.” The
organization has the support and endorsement
of Kofi Annan and Nelson Mandela as well as
The Getty Conservation Institute, The National
Geographic Society and The Ford Foundation.
Vandalism, an encroaching population, and a
growing tourist industry are major threats today
to the petroglyphs and pictographs. David and
TARA are committed to helping preserve the
magnificent work of African prehistoric peoples
as a legacy for present and future generations.
ing that the changes we are witnessing are so pro-
found that we may need to rethink everything
from copyright and authorship to love, family
and ourselves. While the content of the video
may not offer enough evidence to support such a
radical claim, the journey of the video itself maps
out at least three important characteristics of the
new mediascape that suggest that some signifi-
cant rethinking does need to be done.
Speedy Creation and Distribution
First, the fact that I was able to create this video
in just three days without any professional
training demonstrates that the tools for creating
content and self-publishing to large audiences
are now within the reach of millions of people,
including most anthropologists. Publishing writ-
ten content is especially easy. Using free hosting
services like Blogger or Wordpress, a blog can be
created in less than one minute.
Second, new web technologies allow self-
published information to spread to interested
parties across traditional disciplinary boundaries
with tremendous speed. In the first day after I
released the video it spread slowly by email to
just over 100 viewers. Some users of del.icio.us
and other social bookmarking sites began tag-
ging it with words like “Web 2.0” and “anthro-
pology,” spreading the link to other users of
those services watching for those words.
Bloggers began writing about it, spreading
it throughout the blogosphere. On day three
it received its biggest boost when somebody
posted it on Digg.com, a site that allows users to
KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE
“digg” a website to the top of the list or “bury
it.” It was quickly “dugg up” to the front page.
By noon the next day it had over 18,000 views
and had become the most linked video in the
blogosphere, appearing at the top of video rank-
ings on Technorati and viralvideochart.com.
From there it had the momentum to attract over
two million views over the next two months.
Creative Commons and Collaboration
Third and finally, collaboration has never been
easier. The video I created was actually created in
collaboration with Deus, a musician living in the
Ivory Coast whom I have never met. Deus offers
his music for free under a Creative Commons
license which designates that others may use his
music as part of their own creative works as long
as they give credit to him for the music.
Creative Commons is just one of many new ways
of thinking about copyright that enables more cre-
ativity and collaboration. I offered my video under
OFF THE SHELF
The Value of Folklore
Huichol Mythology. Robert M Zingg. Jay C Fikes, Phil C Weigand and Acelia García de Weigand,
eds. U Arizona Press. 2004. 290 pp.
Elders: Wisdom from Australia’s Indigenous Leaders, Forewords by Mandawuy Yunupingu and Lowitja
O’Donoghue, photographed and recorded by Peter McConchie. Cambridge U Press. 2003. 126 pp.
Folktales from Syria, collected by Samir Tahhan, intro by Andrea Rugh. U Texas Press. 2004. 110 pp.
JIM PIERSON
CAL STATE U SAN BERNARDINO
You do not have to be a folklorist to consid-
er folktales important ethnographic resources.
These three books demonstrate, in somewhat
different ways, the value of folklore for field
researchers, readers generally interested in learn-
ing more about an area and its people, and the
people among whom the stories were collected.
Each book contains stories that were collected
in very specific locations but seem to represent
broader geographic and cultural areas. Huichol
Mythology is a collection of myths (accompanied by
24 pages of photographs) recorded in 1934 in the
Huichol village of Tuxpan in west central Mexico.
Elders contains the observations of 17 contempo-
rary indigenous Australian “clan and tribal leaders”
from various locations as they summarize locally
relevant beliefs and knowledge. Folktales from Syria
includes 20 folktales for children collected a couple
of decades ago in Aleppo in northern Syria. The
Huichol myths were published in Spanish in 1998;
the Syrian folktales were published in larger collec-
tions in Arabic in the early 1980s; the Australian
collection has not been published previously.
Each of the three collections of stories was ini-
tially recorded for different purposes than the oth-
the same Creative Commons license, which means
people can show it, save it and change it as long as
they give me proper attribution. I also posted it on
Mojiti, a site which allows people to add their own
subtitles and animations to the video.
With the combination of a Creative Commons
license, Mojiti and other collaboration-enhanc-
ing technologies like Google Docs, the video has
inspired others to create a mass of additional
material which includes a full transcript, embed-
ded links to additional information, numerous
thoughtful commentaries in which people actually
wrote on top of the video, and mashups in which
people took pieces of the video to create their own
arguments in reply to mine. Most impressively,
within just two weeks after I first posted the video,
it had been translated into five languages.
In short, creation, dissemination and col-
laboration have never been easier. And these
three elements feed into one another. The ease
of creation and dissemination creates more
ers and has been published for somewhat different
audiences, suggesting the importance of context
in evaluating the use of folkore as a resource.
Robert M Zingg collected the Huichol myths
during ethnographic research in 1934; the edi-
tors discuss this research in the introduction.
The myths are organized into the Dry Season
Cycle, the Wet Season Cycle and the Christian
Cycle. The editors intended the book to be “the
most authentic and comprehensive work on
Huichol mythology ever published” (p xiii).
Their translation, editing, introduction, eth-
nohistorical background, discussion of Zingg’s
background and research, and copious footnotes
are important in achieving such an aim.
Their goal is not to analyze the material, con-
tending this would be “premature” (p xiii), but
rather to make it and the richness of Huichol
culture accessible to nonspecialists and the
body of myths available to future researchers.
Complex stories and situations provide details
about the origins and explanations of many fea-
tures of the Huichol physical and sociocultural
environments. This book’s scope is much more
comprehensive than that of the other two.
The Syrian folktales were collected by Samir
Tahhan and transcribed by his wife to try to pre-
serve the largely oral narratives they felt would
May 2007 • Anthropology News
material for collaboration which feeds
back into the loop of creation and dis-
semination.
New Forms of Sociality
But if we focus on the media alone we are
missing the bigger picture. It is not just the
mediascape that is transforming, it is human
relationships, and anthropologists are increas-
ingly being called upon to explain this.
Understanding human relationships within
this new mediascape will require us to embrace
our anthropological mainstay, participant obser-
vation. We know the value of participant obser-
vation in understanding social worlds. Now we
need to participate in the new media in order to
understand the new forms of sociality emerging
in this quickly changing mediated world.
Michael Wesch is assistant professor of cultural anthro-
pology at Kansas State University.
disappear with the generation of grandparents
in the area in the 1970s. Folktales from Syria
contains about a third of the folktales that were
collected and originally published in Arabic.
Andrea Rugh provides a preface that discusses
Tahhan and a very informative introduction.
The folktales are brief and quite entertaining
and informative, due in part to Rugh’s explanation
of the types of Syrian folk narrative, techniques
(such as repetition and detail) used in the sto-
ries to educate children, how different characters
and occupations symbolize religious and ethnic
groups, and how Syrian oral narratives are often
altered by the storyteller for different audiences.
The Australian narratives focus on important
contemporary issues that are strongly influenced
by long-held myths and rituals. The book’s nine
short chapters each emphasize a topic—the land,
the sea, family, spirit, for instance—through a
narrative by one or more elders. The chapters are
accompanied by Peter McConchie’s beautiful
color photographs and some colorful “maps of
Aboriginal Australia” (pp 112–15) to give readers
a sense of the locations of the elders’ homelands
within the broader context of Australia.
The book refers to the narratives as “wisdom”
that is being shared with a larger population.
McConchie recorded these narratives, according
to Mandawuy Yunupingu’s Foreword (p vi), so
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people can
share their “timeless wisdom” and enable others to
“Learn from us, as we have had to learn from you.”
This is not just some New Age vision; the first chap-
ter, “Healing,” discusses reconciliation, being sorry,
and other issues that have strongly influenced eth-
nic relations in Australia the past decade or so.
The book and its stories, in short, are intended
to be part of a cross-cultural exchange of informa-
tion and recognition of the value of Aboriginal
cultural knowledge. The book therefore seems
aimed especially at a general Australian audi-
ence. For a non-Australian audience, the stories
are interesting and educational but not in the
same way they are for someone who is aware of
some of the issues of reconciliation.
31