Bridging Realms: Towards Ethnographically Informed Methods to Identify Religious and Artistic Practices in Different Settings

Abstract

Most religions involve communication between physical beings in this world and spiritual beings in a supernatural realm. This communication occurs across metaphorical bridges that connect the contrasting realms. Focusing on the hunter-gatherer San of southern Africa and the mixed agriculturalist and hunter Cherokees and Creeks of southeastern North America, this article shows that San painted in rock shelters and Cherokees and Creeks engraved open-air rock surfaces. In doing so, both communities juxtaposed and integrated entities from the material and spiritual realms. Ritual practitioners moved between realms and manifested this movement on the rock surfaces that bridged the realms. The cumulative effect of continually adding images was not, for the indigenous people, chaotic but rather the creation of a powerful, inter-realm construct. Ritual practitioners’ ability to cross the bridges between realms gave them an opportunity to further their own social standing and influence, as is indicated in the historical records of both societies.

Keywords:

• southern African San
• southeastern Native American Indians
• rock paintings
• rock engravings
• liminal

Acknowledgements

We thank David Pearce, Director of the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, for providing the map of southern Africa and the San illustrations from the Institute’s collection. Scott Ashcraft, Lorie Hansen, James Wettstaedt, Pamela Baumann, the late John Carney, Jan Simek, and members of the Cherokee and Creek communities are thanked for enabling Loubser to work on petroglyph sites in Georgia and North Carolina.