Keyan Tomaselli : Autoethnography Among Indigenous South Africans

‘Writing in the San/d Autoethnography among Indigenous Southern Africans’
Name
Institutional Affiliation
Writing in the San/d Autoethnography among Indigenous Southern Africans
Keyan Tomaselli works as a professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. He is also the head of Communication, Culture and Media Studies at the same university. ‘Writing in the San/d Autoethnography among Indigenous Southern Africans’ was published in 2007 and has been on the market ever since. The book is majorly based on the San people. The San, also called Bushmen, are the most studied group of people in the world. There are various documentaries, movies and research books about the San people. Keyan Tomaselli’s book is an example of the research works about the San people. The paper gives a book review of ‘Writing in the San/d Autoethnography among Indigenous Southern Africans.’
Research Purpose
Keyan Tomaselli is an advocate for cultural studies for academic and real-life applications. His beliefs are supported by the book, where together with his team, they conducted fieldwork in South Africa to conduct reverse cultural studies of the San people. They give details of the encounters and experiences with the Bushmen who live in the Kalahari Desert, and the Khoi community who live in the Eastern Cape. They were able to study their lifestyles and record their findings, which Keyan Tomaselli later compiled and presented them in the book.
Research Paradigm
Keyan Tomaselli is a culture enthusiast. Most of his works revolve around culture. He has since trained other people on the same and convinced them to share the same convictions. ‘Writing in the San/d Autoethnography among Indigenous Southern Africans’ is one of the intriguing experiments that Keyan Tomaselli and his team use in their collaborative method of cultural studies. They intend to use the book to raise people’s consciousness, especially on the anthropological research that focuses on human beings. To some extent, they also challenge the existence of traditional techniques of ethnographic writing. They base their interactions with the San people.
Theoretical Perspective
What is described in the book are the interactions of Keyan Tomaselli’s less defined study group with the San people and the people who are considered to be less informal, but are more concerned with the representation, mediation, and phenomenology of the ethnographic encounter. Their activity as researchers positions itself in the postmodern anthropology. To any reader who goes through the book, they realize that the Kalahari research happens to be one of the best loci, where previous approaches of ethnography and postmodern ethnography ha...