David M. Witelson: A Painted Ridge: Rock Art and Performance in the Maclear District, Eastern Cape, South Africa
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BOOK REVIEW
David M. Witelson: A Painted Ridge: Rock Art and Performance in the Maclear District, Eastern Cape, South Africa Archaeopress, Oxford, 2019, 147 pp., ISBN 978-1-78969-244-0 Anne Solomon # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
A Painted Ridge is a study of a cluster of painted sites in the Maclear District, Eastern Cape, South Africa (hereafter abbreviated as MR), which proposes that rock art should be viewed through the lenses of “performance,” practice, and shamanic ritual. This published monograph is a slightly altered version of an M.Sc. dissertation (Witelson 2018), though it does not provide this information on its origins. Despite the effort invested in the work, its arguments seem contradictory and lack coherence. The author begins with the claim that aspects of southern African rock art “remain under-theorised and under-researched” (Abstract). Chapter 1 describes the sites and discusses previous research and recording. Eight sites, none of which was a living site, are examined. They contain 1405 separate images in total, with humans and antelope predominant. The images are undated. In Chapter 2, an approach derived from performance studies is elaborated. Following Schechner (2013, p. 2), the premise is that: performance studies does not “read” an action or ask what “text” is being enacted. Rather, one inquires about the “behavior” of, for example, a painting: how, when, and by whom was it made, how it interacts with those who view it, and how the painting changes over time. The artifact may
A. Solomon (*) Wales, UK
be relatively stable, but the performances it creates or takes part in can change radically. The performance studies scholar examines the circumstances in which the painting was created and exhibited; she looks at how the gallery or building displaying the painting shapes its reception (p. 16). It is then argued in Chapter 3 that painting and (shamanic) dancing were a “performative dyad.” Trance dancing (problematically assumed to have been practiced by all San groups) is “a genre of San performance that can be used to guide, comparatively, the reconstruction of other, extinct San performances, such as the making of the MR images” (p. 39). In Chapter 4, the researcher considers processes as ritualized steps: “acquiring imagery” in a trance, paintmaking, image-making, and finally, how images were used. Chapter 5 considers the artists’ use of the rock face, before identifying another “four kinds of interaction between painters and images” that exemplify “how rock paintings participate actively in the performances of image-making” (p. 77), because “they are not passive” but “have agency” (p. 97). Chapter 6 purports to set down additional criteria for considering painting as performative, while Chapter 7 briefly addresses “similarities and differences” between sites. Witelson’s starting point (p. 17–18) is that: “The making of rock paintings falls under the umbrella of performance studies because this cultural expression is within the broad category of ‘pe
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