The Woman with the Zebra's Penis: Gender, Mutability and Performance

Abstract

In certain African hunter-gatherer cultures (the Khoisan and Hadza), gender appears mutable and paradoxicalwith respect to sex. Duringinitiation ritual, girls acquire 'masculine' characteristics, such as penises and hunting weapons; boys are treated as menstruants. Anthropological models of a hierar- chized 'masculine' v. 'feminine', correlated with biological sex, would not predict such reversals. Alternative models of 'multiple' genders fail to account for the structural similarities between female and male initiations, which tend to unify gender irrespective ofsex. Using data on Khoisan and Hadza ritual and myth, with illustrations from southern African rock art, a 'native model' of gendered sym- bolic oppositions is presented. This indigenous model represents gender as mutable through time, and as correlated with ritual potency, not with biological sex; the model thereby supports predictions made by the 'sex-strike' theory of the origins of symbolic culture.

Full text

The Woman with the Zebra's Penis: Gender, Mutability and Performance
Author(s): Camilla Power and Ian Watts
Source:
The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute,
Vol. 3, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 537-
560
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THE WOMAN WITH THE ZEBRA'S PENIS: GENDER,
MUTABILITY AND PERFORMANCE
CAMILLA
POWER
& IAN
WATTS
University College
London
In certain African hunter-gatherer cultures (the Khoisan and Hadza), gender appears mutable
and
paradoxicalwith respect
to sex. Duringinitiation ritual, girls acquire
'masculine'
characteristics,
such
as
penises and hunting weapons; boys are treated
as menstruants. Anthropological models of a hierar-
chized 'masculine'
v. 'feminine', correlated
with biological sex, would not predict such reversals.
Alternative models of 'multiple' genders
fail to account
for the structural similarities between female
and
male initiations, which tend
to unify gender irrespective ofsex. Using data
on Khoisan and Hadza
ritual and myth, with illustrations from southern African rock art,
a 'native model' of gendered sym-
bolic oppositions is presented.
This indigenous model represents gender
as
mutable through time,
and
as
correlated
with ritual
potency,
not with biological sex;
the model
thereby supports predictions made
by the 'sex-strike'
theory
of the origins of symbolic
culture.
Sex orgender?
Does anthropology
need the two words 'sex' and 'gender'? Recent sociobiological
literature
increasingly employs
the term 'gender'
as a redundant
synonym for 'sex'
in discussion of animal behaviour (e.g. Ridley 1993; and see Goodhart 1996).
While biologists collapse gender into nature,
some feminist theorists create a con-
flation of another kind. The philosopher Butler, for instance, argues that 'the
distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all', on the
grounds
that sex 'is as culturally
constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps,
it always
already
was gender' (1990: 7). For
her,
sex collapses wholly into culture.
Postmodernists stress context in the usage of the terms 'sex' and 'gender'. Even
within the same
volume (e.g. di Leonardo
1991;
Miller 1993a),
the meaning
of the
term 'gender' may vary:
to some authors
it connotes basic biological differences,
while to others
it signifies
some undefined combination
of biological
characteristics
and arbitrary
cultural constructs. Feminist cultural
anthropologists, having spent
the last
two decades
attempting
to distinguish
between
gender
and sex 'in an effort
to denaturalize
asymmetry' (Morris
1995:
567), will surely object
to descriptions
of
the selfish-gene-driven strategies
of primates as 'gendered behaviour' (e.g. Sperling
1991).
On the other
hand, biologists
are
entitled to look askance at postmodern
no-
tions of sex as 'the effect of gender', of 'embodied sex' as purely socially con-
structed. No amount of wishing away
the perceived threat of reductionism will
remove
certain
anatomical constraints. One sex menstruates and gets pregnant; one
sex does not. To be sure,
culture can affect
these processes. But such gene-specified
developments may proceed
without cultural intervention at all.
J. Roy.
anthrop.
Inst.
(N.S.) 3, 537-560

538 CAMILLA POWER & IAN WATTS
There can only be one reason for needing both terms
- the same fundamental
reason
that two separate branches of anthropology exist. Symbolic culture dif-
ferentiates humans from animals. Any serious discussion of the relationship be-
tween sex and
gender
entails
problematizing
the origin of symbolic
culture itself
(cf. Ortner 1974). In fact, as a means of provoking
communication between
both sides of the discipline,
the problem
of cultural
origins
can be reframed as
the 'Origin of Gender'.
This article is offered
with a universalizing
intent. We
aim to make
an assault
on the muddle in the middle of sex and gender
- some-
what in the spirit of Ortner (1974) in her landmark essay
- by positing cultural
universals.
There are occasions in the biological literature
when 'gender'
is used advis-
edly.
An example
is a recent article on hermaphrodite
snails
which states: 'the
term gender is used to indicate
the behavioural nature of sexual function be-
cause such organisms
cannot
be labelled
as either sex' (De Witt 1996:
345). Such
anomalous
examples
reveal how sexual ambiguity
forces authors,
even biolo-
gists, to resort
to use of 'gender'
instead of sex. In these cases, gender
refers
to
acts rather than essences. This idea has powerfully
motivated
the theorists of
gender performativity, notably Butler. If everything could be unambiguously
described
in terms of sexual
difference,
what need would there be for the word
gender?
Butler presents 'drag'
- performances
of cross-dressing
and cross-sex
impersonation
- as the arch-metaphor, the quintessential act of gender, which
enacts and reveals
gender's
imitative function (1990: viii, 137; and see Morris
1995:
580). If gender fundamentally
involves
thumbing
the nose at the necessi-
ties of sex, then we see unambiguously
that gender is not sex, and sex is not
gender.
In the two decades
since Ortner
wrote of gender
as a structure of sexual hier-
archy rooted in the essentials
of reproduction,
feminist anthropologists
have
been wrestling
with the implicit
reductionism
of her compelling
argument.
To
overthrow Ortner's position, it was necessary
to repudiate
any reductionist
mapping
of gender onto sex. Despite the persistence
of the view of gender
as a
cultural construct independent of sex (e.g. MacCormack & Strathern
1980;
Moore 1988; Overing 1986), no satisfactory
theoretical grounds for this
'independence'
have been established
(but see Amadiume
1987). Indeed,
much
recent feminist work accepts
that
there is a biologically
determined
component
to gender (e.g. Miller 1993b:
4; Nicholson 1994:
82;
Worthman
1995:
599). This
has left Ortner's model to haunt feminist anthropology
with several of its as-
sumptions intact:
first, that gender consists in a universal
dichotomy between
'masculine'
and 'feminine'; secondly,
that these categories
ultimately
correlate
with male-female
biological sex; and thirdly,
that underlying
all gender repre-
sentations
is a hierarchical
relationship
between
the powerful
masculine and the
disempowered
feminine.
In her single, dazzling image
of gender
as drag,
Butler
severs
the Gordian
knot
of sex and gender.
This bold gesture captures
the parodic
relationship
between
gender
and sex which has eluded feminist research
for the past
twenty years.
Yet
as soon as Butler's
theory is transposed beyond a contemporary
capitalist
envi-
ronment, she, like Ortner, becomes vulnerable
to the charge that she is impos-
ing
Western
conceptual paradigms. Surely, only a Western conceit
could imagine
that gender is a 'free-floating
artifice'
detached from the binary
constraints
of

CAMILLA POWER & IAN WATTS 539
mammalian sex (Butler 1990: 6). Butler's
notion (after Irigaray)
of women as
the sex which is 'multiple ... unconstrainable and undesignatable'
(1990: 9)
yields a view of gender as a 'multiple interpretation
of sex', permitting any
model of gender desired. But does such licence to explore 'multiple models'
match the realities of life for women in populations
lacking
contraception?
After
all, members of these populations
have carried out the vast majority
of gender
'performances'
throughout
the course of human evolution and history.
Drag
artistes
themselves
rely
on the underlying
binary
structure
of sex to per-
petrate
subversive
acts of symbolic reversal.
If anybody
can be any number of
genders
imaginable,
what is being subverted?
If collective
expectations
are not
aroused,
what is being imitated? Butler assumes that
binary
structure is implic-
itly hierarchical
and must constrain
gender
within compulsory
heterosexuality
(the same presumption
which Ortner made). But just imagine for a moment
that gender emerged in a
performance
of
compulsory
non-heterosexuality.
Retain
the bi-
nary structure of sexuality,
because
we do in general
retain male and female
bodies. But suppose
that gender,
in so far as it is performance,
is a function of
ritual, performative
power, not of biological
sex. Suppose that a person's gender
can be transformed
as performance
occurs or does not occur. Here, gender is
constrained
by a binary structure,
but does not consist in sexual
hierarchy
since
either sex may 'perform'
the same
gender
at any given time. Gender
has a muta-
ble, non-mimetic relationship
to sex.
Such a model is a corollary
of a recent
theory
concerning
the origins
of sym-
bolic culture,
the 'sex-strike'
hypothesis.1
Knight
(1991; 1997; Knight
et
al. 1995)
posits a model of symbolic cultural
origins
based
in a female
strategy
of periodi-
cally refusing
sex to all males except
those who supplied them with fatty meat.
The symbolic domain emerged
through collective
female defiance
expressed
in
ritual
performance.
The signature
of sex-strike is a systematic
reversal of the
'normal' signals of animal
courtship (Knight et al. 1995: 84). 'While
mate recog-
nition in the animal
world involves signalling 'right
species/right
sex/right (i.e.
fertile) time', sex-striking human
females would deter
male advances through a
ritual
pantomime
of 'wrong
species/wrong sex/wrong
(i.e. infertile) time'.
In the light
of sex-strike
theory, gender at origin is inseparable
from ritual
power, and from
ontological
ambiguities
in which humans can metamorphose into non-humans
and females
into males.
In many cultures, gender as a set of representations or fantasies
is inculcated
during
initiation
ceremonies.
Repeatedly,
we see in these ceremonies
the signa-
ture of the sex strike:
ritual power expressed
as 'wrong sex'. While it is being
ritually constructed, gender opposes 'normal' sex: female initiates enact the
roles of males and male initiates
acquire female attributes. Only when ritual
constraints
are
relaxed is biological
sex disambiguated.
From the viewpoint of Ortner's model of dichotomized sexual hierarchy,
such a pattern
is anomalous.
Her model would suggest that
initiation, as the rit-
ual construction
of gender, should emphasize
masculine 'cultural'
empower-
ment versus feminine 'natural'
weakness. Recurrent
conflation of the sexes, with
deliberate
transgression
of human/animal
boundaries, would not seem to fit.
Neither do the coercive aspects of initiation rites meet Butler's notion of
'free-floating'
multiple
models of gender. Rather,
if gender correlates
with ritual
power, it will prove intolerant of multiplicity,
preserving a digital on/off

540 CAMILLA POWER & IAN WATTS
structure (cf Rappaport
1979). Indeed,
Butler herself is fully aware
that perfor-
mative force necessarily
constrains multiplicity
(1990: 24).
This article takes
data on initiation ritual
and tests predictions deriving
from
the three models of the relationship between sex and gender discussed
above
(Butler 1990; Knight
et at. 1995; Ortner
1974).2 The material
will be drawn from
the ritual, myth and rock
art of two African
hunter-gatherer cultures:
the Khoi-
san peoples of southern
Africa and the Hadza of Tanzania. These are societies
fundamentally
structured by gender. First,
we examine Khoisan and
Hadza gen-
der constructs,
and then assess how well Ortner's model of a hierarchized
mas-
culine/feminine
dichotomy accommodates our data.
Next, we ask whether the
metaphor
of 'gender
as drag' provides useful insights into Khoisan
and Hadza
initiation,
and what licence
these rituals give to multiple gender
models. Finally,
we examine the rituals
in the light of sex-strike
theory.
In this model, gender is
an expression
of original ritual power.
It is constrained
within a binary
structure
- ritual power is either
'on' or 'off' - but is mutable
with respect to sex.
Ideological continuity
among the Khoisan
Despite considerable
differences in their former
subsistence
pursuits,
the Khoi-
san 'share a great number of common features of territorial
organization,
gender relations,
kinship, ritual and cosmology' (Barnard 1992: 3). Their lin-
guistic and genetic diversity suggest that their culture has great time-depth.
Barnard (1992: 297) warns that
the recent
focus on the past two thousand
years
of hunter-herder interaction
(cf Wilmsen 1989) has highlighted
'those aspects
of [Khoisan]
culture which are most susceptible
to outside influences
- those
related to production
and trade'. These, he suggests, are the least 'structural' of
cultural
elements. Such an approach 'grants
the Bushmen history,
but it mini-
mizes the uniqueness and resilience
of their cultures'
(1992: 298). To explain
change adequately,
Barnard
continues, 'we need to understand
the basic struc-
ture of belief' (1992:
298).
Few have done more to elucidate this 'basic structure of belief' than Lewis-
Williams, who has revolutionized rock art research
through his decoding of
Khoisan
rock
paintings
in terms of trance
experience.
His fieldwork
in the Kala-
hari with Biesele (Lewis-Williams
& Biesele 1978) revealed
significant
corre-
spondences
between
Ju/'hoan (!Kung)3
initiation
and the ritual
practices
of the
extinct
/Xam of the Cape
Province.
The /Xam ethnography gathered
by Bleek &
Lloyd (1911), in turn, matched
descriptions
of certain
Drakensberg
rock paint-
ings elicited
by Orpen (1874) from a young Maluti
Bushman.
There are
no reli-
able estimates of the age of Drakensberg
paintings (Mazel 1993). However,
Lewis-Williams
finds the art
and the nineteenth-century ethnography
to be 'co-
mplementary
expressions
of a single belief system' (1981: 34). He demonstrates
a coherence of structure and metaphor operating
in menarcheal,
first-kill and
marriage
ritual contexts, shamanic rainmaking
and medicine dances. Ritual
trance
experience,
in his view, was the prime ideological
means of organizing
the relations
of production
and exchange
central
to social
harmony
and healing
(Lewis-Williams 1982). But, as Lewis-Williams
himself originally showed
(1981), and Solomon (1992; 1994; 1996) and Parkington
et al. (in press) have

CAMILLA POWER & IAN WATTS 541
recently re-emphasized, initiation is also represented in Khoisan art and clearly
overlaps in its structure with trance.
Khoisan ritual construction ofgender:female initiation
The most renowned of Khoisan initiation practices is the Eland Bull dance, the
climax of a girl's first menstruation ceremony. Prevalent in the Kalahari, this
dance or its close equivalent probably belonged to southern groups as well. A
painting at Fulton's Rock in the Drakensberg Mountains (fig. 1) has been inter-
preted as representing the dance (Lewis-Williams 1981: 41 sqq.).
The central figure - the secluded girl - lies under a cloak inside a hut, like a
Ju/'hoan initiate. Among the Ju/'hoansi, the girl is 'created' an adult when
women of the band dance, pantomiming the mating behaviour of elands. The
FIGURE 1. Fulton's Rock, Drakensberg, Natal (Lewis-Williams 1981: 42).

542 CAMILLA POWER & IAN WATTS
painting expresses two strong antitheses, observed in ritual practice. One is be-
tween the menstruant in her state of potency and hunting weapons: in the
panel, men and their weapons are kept to the periphery.
The other is between
the maiden and sexual contact with men. One man standing aside but watching
has a large penis with a bar across. Other visible penises in the picture are simi-
larly
barred. This common rock art motif was first interpreted by Vinnicombe
(1976: 257-9), in the light of Khoisan ethnography, as a reference to the sexual
abstinence
required
as a condition of hunting luck.
Yet,
sex is occurring
in this picture
- a fantasy
of animal sex. The women pre-
tend to be eland cows, dressed with tails of ostrich eggshell beads, waggling
their buttocks towards the girl in the hut. In typical Ju/'hoan or Nharo practice
(Barnard 1980: 117-18), one or two older men may join the dance wearing
horns as 'bulls' (two figures carry sticks in the picture). They sidle up to the
'cows', sniffing at their rears. According to older accounts, the dance could 'ea-
sily become indecent' (Schapera 1930: 119, but see England 1995: 264). The
heavy,
deliberate
dancing,
the clicking of adze blades
as eland hooves and the
women's Eland
Song summon up the presence
of the eland
(stippled shape
seen
next to the ithyphallic
man in figure 1).
Maiden
as hunter.
In Khoisan
cosmology,
the 'coldness'
of menstrual
blood op-
poses the 'heat' of effective arrow
poison (Biesele 1993: 196). A Ju/'hoan man
will not hunt while his wife menstruates lest his poison 'cool' and he himself
becomes hunted by carnivores (1993: 93). The same taboo exists among the
Hadza (Woodburn
1982: 188). Hunters'
fears of menstrual blood are recorded
among the G/wi (Silberbauer
1981: 119) and !Xo (Heinz 1966: 209). A men-
struating woman, then, negatively affects hunting and hunting gear. Yet,
precisely
in the context of initiation, when she is created as a gendered woman,
the new maiden ritually and metaphorically takes up hunting weapons. Of the
Ju/ hoan girl, people say:
'She has shot an eland' (Lewis-Williams 1981: 51). A
similar
metaphor
is used by the Hadza
for menarche: 'she has shot her first ze-
bra!' (J.
Woodburn, pers. comm., 1993). Among the !Xo, this shooting is
ritually enacted. On the final day of seclusion, a gemsbok-skin
shield is hung at
the back
of the menstrual
hut, and
the maiden
is helped by the mistress
of cere-
monies to shoot it with arrows.
This is intended to bring the weapons luck,
according
to Heinz (1966: 122).
Here, then, we have symbolic reversal
in conjunction
with menstruation: a
hunter whose wife is menstruating
risks becoming hunted, while the new
maiden herself becomes a hunter.
During seclusion, observes
Lewis-Williams,
'the girl becomes the focal point of the whole band.
Everyone
is actually
or po-
tentially
in a ritual
relationship
with her' (1981: 52). Establishing
the correct
rit-
ual
relationships
is vital
if the girl's supernatural potency
is to become a force for
good.
/Xam narratives are
preoccupied
with the devastating
effects
of any
breach
of menstrual observances. Yet through
her potency,
the new maiden is able 'to
bestow the benefits of, specifically, "fatness",
rain and successful hunting'
(Lewis-Williams
1981:
52). The effect of the girl's potency
on future
hunting is
channelled
in the Fulton's Rock painting by the game shaman (svated, right)
who points a finger of power at the giant eland summoned by the women's
dance.

CAMILLA POWER
& IAN WATTS 543
On her emergence,
transfer
of the new maiden's
power
was effected
through
ritual distribution of substances, typically red ochre, the aromatic
herb buchu
-
antidote
to excesses of potency - and scented eland fat. The Ju/'hoan maiden
takes
a portion
of eland fat mixed with buchu to each fire in her camp.
The effect
is that 'everyone
will be hot (eager)
for eating and
the men will want to go hunt-
ing' (Lewis-Williams 1981: 51).
Maiden
as eland.
Why an Eland Bull dance?
!Kun/obe,
an old Ju/'hoan woman,
told Lewis-Williams:
The Eland Bull dance is danced because the eland is a good thing and has much fat. And the
girl is also a good thing and she is all fat;
therefore
they are called the same thing (1981: 48).
Great
energy is invested in stressing
this identity of girl and Eland Bull. The
ochre design painted on the young woman's cheeks and forehead
may repre-
sent the eland's
red tufted forelock
(Lewis-Williams
1981:
70); her seclusion at
menstruation may be described
in terms of 'eland sickness' (Lewis-Williams
1981: 43); during that time, she must not eat eland meat (Biesele 1993: 136)
and
must refer to elands
by the respect
or avoidance
word dabba;
on emergence,
she must lower her eyes so that the eland will not see the stalking
hunter
(Lewis-Williams
1981: 51); and she is smeared
with eland fat. Similar
injunc-
tions were placed
on /Xam and !Xo maidens. Merely by looking up, the /Xam
girl could make the game 'wild' (Hewitt 1986: 285). The NXo
ceremony is
called the Eland Bull dance (Heinz 1966: 123-4), although
the girl is painted
with a gemsbok mask.
The menstruating maiden, then, is simultaneously a hunter and herself the
hunted
animal. This ambiguity
matches
that of the eland
itself,
which inJu/'hoan
thought is paradoxical and polysemic.
The Ju/'hoansi informed Lewis-Williams
that among all the antelope species they hunt, the female always has more fat,
except
in the
unique
case
of the
eland
(1981: 72). An old bull eland accumulates so
much fat around
its heart
that a man cannot put his arms
around
it. The bull
eland
- like the pubertal girl
- is the emblem of 'fatness'.
The girl undergoes
the
Eland
Bull dance, according
to !Kun/obe,
'so that
she won't be thin ... she won't
be very hungry ... all
will go well with the land
and the rain
will fall' (1981: 50).
The emphasis
on the identical fatness
of girl and eland confirms that
she is the
bull
eland,
that
bull being curiously
'female'
in its fatness.
A aansvaal engraving
illustrates this capacity
of the eland to unite opposites (fig. 2): both male and fe-
male are shown within one outline.
Androgyny
and fatness
mark the bull eland
as the prime metaphor
of transformation,
the animal
de
passage
of Khoisan
initia-
tion rites (Lewis-Williams 1981: 72).
Eating or drinking fat, writes Biesele, is aJu/'hoan euphemism
for sex (1993:
86). Men, as carnivores,
hunt and 'eat'
women, as herbivores
(cf McCall 1970).
Fat,
as a liquid solid, is a mediator, 'the cool result of a union of hot and cold'
(Biesele 1993: 196). Consumption of fat, continues Biesele, 'is metaphoric of
the sexual
mediation between semen (hot) and menstrual blood (cold)' (1993:
196). Implicit
in this metaphor is an opposition between sexual availability and
non-availability.
The good hunter fears eating or sleeping with his wife in case
his arrow
poison cools. After a successful hunt, however,
he would greet his
wife 'with special
fervour. He would "praise
the meat" ... he would see her

544 CAMILLA POWER & IAN WATTS
A....
FIGUR 2. Transvaal rock
engraving of eland
with male and female neck and belly
lines
(Lewis-Williams
1990:
80; drawing
T. Dowson).
buttocks
and her legs and would be happy
"because
the meat had fat and was
fat"'
(1993: 197). It is hard to tell, comments Biesele, which meat - animal or
woman - is being discussed: 'The metaphors tying women to the enchanted,
hunted
prey
are so intricate as utterly
to defy untangling' (1993: 197).
In the Eland
Bull dance,
the symbols
of blood and fat, hunting and sex work
in dynamic interaction. The menarcheal
maiden is dangerous, potent, su-
premely unavailable; yet she is fat, a 'good thing',
about to become available.
Maiden and the moon.
This mutable
gender
of the secluded maiden
is vividly ex-
pressed through her connexion to the moon. The Ju/'hoansi speak of
menstruation as a sickness,
sometimes called 'eland
sickness',
but often attrib-
uted to the moon. 'The moon torments me' is to have menstrual cramps
(Biesele 1993: 93). Among the Nharo, 'moon medicine' is used to treat men-
strual discomfort (Barnard
1979). Bleek notes a Hadza belief that women
become 'ill' when they see the moon (1930: 700). The /Xam called the girl's
tiny seclusion
hut 'the house of illness' (Bleek
& Lloyd
1911:
201), and equated
the menstruating girl and the moon through their commensurate
powers of
cooling arrow
poison (Bleek
& Lloyd 1911:
67, 77). In the story The
moon is not
to be looked
at when
game
has been
shot,
the moon's dripping water, like liquid
honey, falls on the game, cools the poison and revives it. The prohibition
on
hunters
looking
at the moon refers to the terrible
consequences
for a man if the
secluded
girl should glance at him: he is turned into a tree or a stone (Hewitt
1986: 79).
The /Xam, the !Xu and the G/wi and G//ana
released
a menarcheal
girl from
seclusion at the appearance
of the new moon (Bleek 1928: 122; Lloyd n.d.b:

CAMILLA
PO'WER
& IAN WATTS 545
4001-2; Valiente
Noailles 1993:
94-7). The maiden
in her 'sickness' and emer-
gence dies and is reborn to wax fat with the moon. Through this identification
with the crescent
moon, the maiden is again gendered masculine,
in a metaphor
of transformation. According
to !Xu
informants, the new moon is said to be ei-
ther a child or a man, the full moon a woman: 'as a man it comes, as a woman it
dies away' (Bleek 1928: 122).
A similar grammatical gendering
- male crescent,
female full moon - has been found by Silberbauer
(1981: 126-7) among the
G/wi, and by Marshall
among Nyae Nyae Ju/'hoansi, Nharo, G/wi and G//ana
groups (1986: 181).
Just as the potency of the maiden influences hunting success,
the underlying
associations of the moon's gender
concern the future
availability
of food, espe-
cially of fat. Khoisan
ethnography
is replete
with references to beliefs linking
success in the hunt to lunar periodicity (e.g. Bleek 1920-21:
302, 328, 455, 469;
Estermann 1976: 17; Kohler 1978/9; Lloyd n.d.a 5206-40; Silberbauer
1965:
101; Viegas Guerreiro 1968: 97, 297). The waxing phase is believed to bring
hunting luck. The full moon, by contrast,
is associated with satisfaction
(Mar-
shall 1986: 180), being the ideal time to provide large game as brideservice
(cf
Potgieter 1955: 11). The gender mutability of the moon - like the eland's -
turns
on its fatness.
The eland
and
the moon appear
to be interchangeable sym-
bols in /Xam narratives
(see Hewitt 1986: 214 sqq.).
Maiden and the rain.
Galvanizing this shared
identity of the maiden, the eland
and the moon is a potent relationship between the maiden and the rain. This
again involves a construction of gender. The /Xam distinguished between the
desired, gentle 'female' rain, which fell softly, and the destructive 'male' rain
(Bleek 1933: 309). The danger lay in the maiden's capacity to summon and un-
leash this 'male'
power.
Violation of menarcheal observances roused the wrath
of the being !Khwa,
manifested
as a whirlwind,
black
pebbles, lightning
or Rain
Bull. This caused the utmost social calamity. Culture itself unravelled as skin
bags reverted to their 'raw' form as game animals.
The girl and her kin were
transformed into frogs, the Rain's creatures
(Hewitt 1986: 77-9). Female rain
was never mentioned in puberty lore (Hewitt 1986: 284). The word !Khwa
stood for water and also connoted menstrual blood (Hewitt 1986:
284). /Xam
informants
emphasized that !Khwa was attracted
by 'the odour of the girl'
(Hewitt 1986: 285). The girl's contact with water was rigorously
controlled
during seclusion (1986: 279). Yet, on her emergence,
such contact
was vitally
necessary
for preserving supplies.
The maiden had to sprinkle
the current
water
source with powdered haematite
(Hewitt 1986: 281), otherwise !Khwa
might
cause the pool to dry up. She painted
the young men with haematite
stripes
'like a zebra',
to protect
them from !Khwa's
lightning.
'When
she is a maiden,
she has the rain's
magic power', explained
the /Xam informant
Dia!kwain.
She
could snap her fingers to call the lightning and 'make
the rain kill us' (Bleek
1933: 297).
Lewis-Williams notes that a single adjective, //ka:n, is used in the SXam
phrases
for 'new maiden'
and 'new or fresh-fallen
rain' (1981: 52). The word
can also mean raw or uncooked. The new rain, like the new maiden,
was in a
state of special
potency, demanding respect.
The Ju/'hoansi,
who also distin-
guish between male and female rain (Marshall 1957), share this view of the

546 CAMILLA
POWER & IAN WATTS
great potency
(n/um)
both of the rain that has just fallen and of the pubertal
girl.
An ancient
symbolic
association
of rain
and eland has been discovered
through
analysis
of Khoisan music. The Rain Song and Eland
Songs, used in the Eland
Bull Dance, are
composed
in what
England
calls
the Rain-Eland scale, compris-
ing 'the oldest layer
of Bushman tonal
material'
(1995:
264).
The G/wi and !Xu (Marshall 1986: 202) enact a direct symbolic association
between the menarcheal girl and rain or lightning. Among the G/wi, Silber-
bauer
saw the initiate,
on her emergence,
taken on a run through a 'symbolic
shower
of rain'
by the young women and
girls (1981: 152). Among the !Xu,
the
male spirit
identified
with the lightning (//gduia)
led the initiate's
dance.
The girl
was tattooed
with marks in honour of/llgaa (Bleek 1928:
122-3).
The eland is readily
identifiable as a rain animal. Schmidt argues
that before
the coming of pastoralism
the eland
was the Rain Bull. The great antelope
lay
at
the core of an ancient
hunter-gatherer
cultural
complex
which linked
in a chain
of symbols 'trickster/moon/lightning/rain/fertility/life/eland/horns'
(Schmidt
1979: 219-20). InJu/'hoan
belief, people and certain large game animals possess
a force called n!ow
which influences
the weather (Biesele 1993: 87 sqq.; Mar-
shall 1957). Ju/'hoansi
hunters
burnt
eland horns to manipulate this force. The
concept of n!ow directly
links women's reproductive
capacities with the killing
of game. In Ju/'hoan thought, the most powerful and determinant effects of
n!ow occur when the
nlow of the hunter interacts with the n!ow of the antelope, the nWow of the woman interacts
with the n!ow of the child newly born ... when the blood of the antelope falls upon the
ground as the antelope is killed, when the fluid of the womb falls upon the ground at the
child's birth, the interaction of nlows takes place, and this brings a change in the weather
(Thomas 1959: 162).
Rain
was conceptualized
as the flowing of blood (cf. Bleek 1933:
309). Rain-
making
ritual
among the Auen involved sprinkling
the ground with 'red earth',
probably
haematite (Schapera
1930: 196). The /Xam informant
/Han?kass6
spoke of celebrations for the new rains
in these terms:
'they do this when the
rain
falls, they come out, they run about. They are all red' (Lloyd n.d.c 7463).
Red, in both Ju/'hoan and /Xam thought, connotes beauty and
joy, ceremony
and ornament
(cf Lewis-Williams & Biesele 1978:
21). The redness
of the rain
can be understood
as a deep structure of Khoisan
cosmology,
associated
with the
periodic
bloodflow of women and
of the great
antelopes.
The seasonal
periodic-
ity of the flowing of the rain's
'blood' and the lunar
periodicity
of the initiate's
bloodflow were brought into cosmic alignment
by means of the dances per-
formed to the ancient scale of the Rain Song and the Eland Songs. Emerging
from darkness
as the young moon which brings
luck and light to the hunt, the
new maiden
possessed
the 'rain's
magic power'.
As hunter and homed antelope
herself,
in the potency
of her rawness and
wetness, she was gendered
'male'.
Ju/'hoan and
IXamfirst-kill
observances:
parallels
with menarcheal rites
Among the /Xam, close parallels
between menarcheal ritual and the eland-kill
ceremony
for boys have been noted by both Hewitt (1986) and Lewis-Williams
(1981). Lewis-Williams has also revealed striking correspondences
between
/Xam and
Ju/'hoan puberty
and first-kill
observances,
as well as between the

CAMILLA
POWER & IAN WATTS 547
ceremonies for girls and those for boys within each culture (1981: 61; cf
Lewis-Williams & Biesele 1978).
Like the maiden, the young hunter is symbolically
identified
with the eland.
Where the girl suffers 'eland sickness', the boy limps slowly as the wounded
prey; both boy and girl keep their eyes down, so that the game will not look
about;
both boy and girl are marked
with specific 'eland'
designs and smeared
with eland fat in the course of initiation. The young hunter is conceptually
identified with the menstrual girlfrom the moment
he
has
shot the
poisoned
arrow into
the
antelope.
The /Xam explicitly
likened
the first-kill hunter
to a menarcheal
girl
(Lloyd
n.d. b: 4386). The counterpart
of the super-destructive
!Khwa, guardian
of menarcheal
observances,
is /Kaggen,
a gender-ambivalent
trickster
(Hewitt
1986: 153-4). Creator and protector of the game, /Kaggen tries to trick the
hunter out of his prey. During the critical
waiting period after the animal has
been shot and before the hunter can start
tracking
it down, /Kaggen provokes
the hunter to break the tenuous link between
himself
and
the animal
by sudden
or vigorous movements which would revive the game and counteract the poi-
son. The hunter's slow limping mimics the desired
effect of the poison on the
prey.
Like the maiden,
the boy is in an antithetical relation
to hunting weapons:
he
cannot
touch the shaft
of the arrow
(Hewitt 1986:
126;
Lewis-Williams 1981: 58
sqq.).
In both cases there are
strictures
concerning
bloodshed
and the cooling of
arrow
poison: if/Kaggen
comes in the form of a louse and bites
the boy,
the boy
cannot kill the louse because 'its blood will be on his hands with which he
grasped the arrow and when he shot the eland, the blood will enter the arrow
and cool the poison' (Did!kwain's account,
in Bleek 1932:
233-40). Where the
boy limps painfully
back
to camp,
a girl
who starts
menstruating
in the veld can-
not walk back,
but must be carried. She must not draw attention to her condi-
tion but sit and wait silently for other women or girls to approach.
A young
/Xam or Ju/'hoan
hunter remains silent and peripheral
until approached. Like
the menstruant,
the first-kill hunter is secluded and tended as if 'ill' (Lewis-
Williams
1981: 58). The same ritual injunctions are
placed on both boy and girl:
food avoidances
and rationing, keeping away
from cooking fire, keeping out of
the sun, not moving and not touching the earth.
The /Xam took precautions
over the dangerous
'scent' of both boy and girl.
Ju/'hoan
female
and male ceremonies are
structurally
similar.
An 'eland
medi-
cine dance'
is held beside the freshly
killed eland while the men are still in the
veld. Performed
'in praise of the fat' with no women present,
this may be seen
as the male counterpart
of the Eland Bull dance
(Lewis-Williams
1981:
60). On
the return to camp, successful eland hunters
are greeted
with a special praise-
call by the women, also uttered
to praise the menarcheal maiden as she takes
small
pieces of fat to each fire (1981: 61). Among the
Ju/'hoansi,
the same word
is used to denote the 'creation' of the gender of the boy and the girl. Scarifica-
tions (involving bloodshed) are said to 'create' the new hunter;
the Eland
Bull
dance 'creates' the new maiden (1981: 62). Both are then adults, eligible for
marriage. Discussing the symbolic androgyny of the eland
in relation
to the ini-
tiates, Lewis-Williams describes both boy and girl as 'neither
male nor female'
(1981: 72). We suggest that maiden and hunter take on the potency
of both male

548 CAMILLA POWER & IAN WATTS
and
female, a ritual potency symbolized by the eland representing a unifted
gender.
Themes of initiation in Khoisan rock art
The double-sexed image from Willcox's Shelter in the Drakensberg (fig. 3)
makes the point. This belongs to a set of very similar images from Natal and
Lesotho (see Vinnicombe 1976: 160-1), which can be included in a large gen-
eral set of spread-legged figures found from the Cape to Tanzania. Solomon
(1992; 1994; 1996), contra Lewis-Williams & Dowson (1989: 173), links these to
Khoisan initiation rather than to trance. The figures
are often enigmatic,
diffi-
cult to sex; they may well refer to initiates
in seclusion. The Willcox's Shelter
image signals
ritual
potency through
the metaphor of the 'female' whose attrib-
utes are 'male'.
The maiden at menarche with a large red emblem of potency
between the thighs becomes a unified power.
She is a hunter with bow and ar-
rows, yet herself an animal. She is the rain (cf. Solomon 1992: 315). She is
bloody,
fat and possesses
both vulva
and
penis.
In the Sorcerer's Rock image (fig. 4), also from the Drakensberg, we see again
the emblem of blood potency between
the thighs and, in addition, a barred pe-
nis (just
next to the figure's left foot). The 'hat' on the head could represent the
cap worn by initiates
of both sexes to keep off the sun (cf Heinz 1966: 124).
Thin red lines emanate
from the figure and, touching
the tips of arrows, extend
towards some antelopes (off figure). Solomon relates this symbolism to the
complex
of beliefs linking secluded women, arrow poison and game (1992: 316;
1994:
346; 1996:
34). Here, the figure's stereotypically
slender 'maleness' rather
than
animality
is being stressed.
FIGURE
4. Spread-legged figure,
FIGuRE
3. Spread-legged figure, Will- Sorcerer's
Rock, Drak-
cox's Shelter, Drakensberg, ensberg (Solomon 1994:
Natal (Solomon 1994:
335). 334).

CAMILLA
POWER & IAN WATTS 549
Initiation may also illuminate some of the most dramatic hunter-gatherer rock
paintings
of the Matopos, Zimbabwe, believed to pre-date 2,OOOBP (Walker
1987). Highly characteristic are obese, female figures
with exaggerated 'flows'
between
the legs. They carry
as their 'prime
emblem' (Garlake
1995:
87) a cres-
cent symbol. Figure
5 can
be read as a powerful
statement
linking
the maiden at
menarche identified
with the new moon, to the great
horned antelope, which
may refer to seasonal rains.
A similar structure
linking initiate
through blood
potency
to hunted
game is evident
in figures
4 and 5.
Obese potent women with genital flows and ritual paraphernalia
are often
shown in pairs.
The women in figure
6 have
'manes'
of hair
which, according
to
Garlake,
are
only otherwise shown on male hunters. Garlake
(1993) denies that
the genital
flow refers
to menstruation.
The swollen stomachs,
he believes,
con-
note the activation and expansion
of a potency
similar to the
Ju/'hoan concept
of
n/um. The release of this potency 'is represented by the streams that emerge
from the chests and genitals
of these painted
figures,
to a particularly extravagant
extent in the case
ofsomefemaleflgures'
(1987: 51; our emphasis). We agree that these
streams represent releases of potency, but we ask: Why are females in a condi-
tion of potency regularly shown with such genital flow? If the answer is only
that menstrual blood is a substance
bearing powerful n/um, then we are
brought
back to the potency of the menarcheal maiden at initiation. Given the evident
Khoisan
preoccupation
with menstrual
potency in initiation
ritual,
we can ex-
pect the portrayal of the same construct in rock art.
The swollen-bellied figures can also appear anatomically male (see Garlake
1995: 85). After puzzling over the way the 'imagery transcends designations of
gender', Garlake suggests these figures are 'in a sense androgynous. This may be
one of the sources of their power' (1993: 262). He compares this to the ideology
connected with the fat male eland, the fundamental metaphor of initiation. As
in the case of the eland, fatness signifying ritual potency represents a unified
gender embodying both female and male.
FIGURE 6. 'Obese' female pair, with
FIGURE 5. 'Obese' female figure with ritual paraphernalia,
crescent, streams of potency, 'manes' and stream of po-
Zimbabwe
(Garlake
1995:
88). tency, Zimbabwe (Gar-
lake 1987:
51).

550 CAMILLA
POWER & IAN WATTS
Hadza epeme and initiation
Can the notion of 'gender
mutability'
be extended
to African
hunter-gatherers
beyond the Khoisan
region?
Woodburn
notes for the Hadza
- as we have ob-
served among
the Khoisan
- that
'the whole process
of hunting
big game (male
productivity)
is symbolically
linked to the whole process of female reproduc-
tion (female productivity)'
(1982: 188). The one stringent
taboo is that a man
whose wife is menstruating
cannot hunt big game because his arrow poison
would lose efficacy.
The Hadza believe that women synchronize
their periods
with the moon (J.
Woodburn,
pers. comm. 1993). Hadza cosmology associates
menstruation
with dark moon (Bleek 1930: 700).
It is during
the nights of dark
moon that the major religious
celebration,
the
epeme
dance, is held. Most epeme
rituals occur during conditions of dry-season
aggregation
when sufficient
women are present
to provide
accompaniment
of
special epeme
songs. Initiated men dance, embodying the sacred being epeme.
Failure
to hold the dance 'is believed to be dangerous'
(Woodbum
1982: 190).
Epeme promotes and maintains
'general
well-being, above all good health and
successful hunting'. The epeme
dance 'stresses kinship and joint parentage'
(1982: 190).
A pattern
emerges
in which rituals,
associated
with menstruation
and prohibi-
tions on hunting
or sex at dark
moon, precede
and motivate
hunting during
the
favourable
period towards full moon. To this day, during the dry season, the
most productive
form of Hadza
hunting
is night-stand
hunting
over game
trails
leading to water holes (Hawkes et al. 1992). This is necessarily
restricted
to
moonlit nights around full moon (Bunn et
al. 1988).
Epeme meat and
the 'bloodying'
of
the male candidate
Epeme
is the name given to certain
fatty portions
of large game.
This meat is sa-
cred, supposedly
reserved for the eponymous spirit being, but in fact eaten by
initiated men at special
epeme
feasts.
The men consume the meat secretly; at-
tendance
at the epeme
feast is a male privilege
from which women are excluded
on pain of rape
or death (Woodburn
1964).
A male candidate
will already
have proved
himself as a hunter. Invited to join
the other men at an epeme feast,
he is offered
some of the meat, and may at first
be reluctant to eat it. Having revealed the 'secret' that they themselves,
not the
sacred
being, eat
the epeme,
the men pretend
to give the initiate a beating,
threat-
ening actually
to beat him if he resists.
To deceive the women, the men make
the youth's nose bleed, covering
him with blood and
smearing
him with fat and
pot black.
He is then carried
over to the women and secluded
in a hut. Treated
like a menstruant,
he is decorated
with beads
by his kinswomen
and ceremoni-
ally
reintroduced
to each
type of food. Thereafter,
he becomes a member of the
men's group.
Female circumcision
and ritual
violence
Menarche
itself does not mark
initiation
for a Hadza
girl but, as in the
Ju/'hoan
usage, she is likened to a hunter
who 'has shot her first zebra!'.
Female initia-
tion is a dramatic,
collective affair
which sunders Hadza society along gender

GAMILLA
POWER & IAN
WATTS 551
lines. The Hadza rite is one of group circumcision
(Woodbum
1964). The op-
eration is wholly under the control of the older women of the camp, who
perform
it on girls at puberty.
Men regard
the entire affair as 'women's non-
sense'; they are
rigidly excluded,
and even little boys are sent away.
One significant aspect
of this rite is that each
woman undergoes
circumcision
on a number of occasions. Circumcision ceremonies
may
be characterized
as es-
tablishing a definitive sex, effectively removing those parts of the genitalia
which resemble the opposite sex. However, this does not explain why the
women submit to the operation
more than
once. The Hadza
female initiation
is
a rite of collective bloodshed
which sexually active women endure repeatedly.
Their behaviour immediately after the operation is anything but 'feminine'. As
soon as they emerge, the women who have been circumcised
start
attacking the
men with
considerableforce. Moreover, they are
dressed as
men. Having removed their
leather skirts, they advance
with buttocks naked,
in the manner
of hunters wear-
ing loincloths. They attack ferociously, wielding sticks, and they target joking
relatives who are potential or actual sex and marriage partners. Women are not
supposed
to hit their brothers
or fathers-in-law
since these are avoidance rela-
tions. The men are virtually
driven from the camp. Woodburn
describes the
ceremonial
violence as 'a recurrent
assertion
of femininity by the sexually
active
women of the group' (pers. comm. 1993). Certainly, it is an assertion of gender
solidarity;
but it does not exactly
match
the Western
concept
of the 'feminine'.
The woman with the zebra's penis
A Hadza myth links the symbolism of epeme to female initiation:
Long ago epeme meat used to belong to the women. The owner of the pot in which epeme
meat was cooked was an old woman called Mambedaka. She dressed like a man with a wild
catskin
in front and with her buttocks naked. Under the wild catskin
she had tied the penis
of a zebra.
She was married to beautiful
wives and used to have intercourse with them using
the zebra penis. She had a man's bow and used to hunt, but she only hunted male zebra.
When she killed one, she cut off its penis and tied it onto herself ...
When men hunted and killed an animal, the epeme
was cut off and carried
to the hut of
Mambedaka.
She took out her pot and went with the meat to the women's meeting place.
There the women ate the meat. The men stayed at home and had no share in the epeme
meat ... (Woodburn 1964: 298-9).
The 'rule of women' was brought to an end by the violent humiliation of
Mambedaka
and the other women. Since that time, epeme
meat has been the
prerogative
of men.
Mambedaka,
the original
owner of epeme meat, is linked to female ritualized
bloodshed:
she shoots zebra
- the metaphor
for the menstruant;
she dresses
as a
hunter, making
her the archetype
of the female initiate. The word epeme signi-
fies the following:
i) the sacred
meat;
ii) the dark moon dance, emphasizing kinship relations, held when women are believed to
be menstruating;
iii) the sacred
being.
Through ritual and mythology, the concept of epeme
links:
a) collectively menstruating
and/or circumcised
women;

552 GAMILLA POWER & IAN WATTS
b) the dark moon phase;
c) 'male'
violence or animality possessed by women; and
d) access to sacred meat hunted by men.
Mambedaka, masquerading
as a male zebra and hunter of male zebra,
who has
sex with beautiful 'wives', recalls the metamorphosis
of the Khoisan 'new
maiden' as an Eland Bull mating with eland cows, who is also a hunter of
eland.
Solomon's analysis of Khoisan gender
construction:
the Ortner
model
Solomon regards gender
as 'the most marked
and enduring
division in Khoisan
societies' (1992: 291). In line with the assumptions
of Ortner's model, she
takes as axiomatic that 'differentiation
by gender
is inseparable
from sociopoli-
tical hierarchy, (1992: 292). Equipped with the hierarchized
constructs of
'masculine'
and 'feminine',
Solomon attempts
to fit the Khoisan ethnographic
and rock art data into these categories.
In the course of doing so, she posits a
'third gender category'
(1992: 303), a residual
class of anomalies.
These turn
out to be the most elaborated symbols and metaphors of Khoisan cosmology,
crucial to initiation: notably the trickster
deities,
the eland
and, we can add, the
moon. Solomon is forced
to set aside
the 'complexities
of the gendering
of dei-
ties and the eland' (1992: 304), unable to integrate these into the model. She
presents
a set of structured oppositions
relating
to gender
polarity, which we re-
produce
in part here (1992: 299):
Feminine Masculine
Full moon New moon
Blood Water/rain
Death Life
Herbivore Carnivore
Prey Hunter
Gathering Hunting
Weak Strong
This classification,
we suggest,
cannot
work. The proposed
opposition
between
blood and water
- ritually potent substances
of extreme
affinity
- is untenable.
Moreover,
it is inconceivable,
in the light of the rigorous
nature of /Xam men-
strual observance,
that blood is 'weak'. Given the death-dealing potencies of
male rain,
how can an opposition
exist between death
and water?
Can the /Xam
hunter
limping painfully
back
to camp,
unable so much as to crush a louse that
is biting him, reasonably
be described
as a carnivore?
Solomon argues
that 'initiation ceremonial
may be seen as a central
reference
point for these conceptualizations'
(1992: 298). Under her classification,
the
Eland Bull - the archetypal
metaphor
for initiation
- is herbivorous
prey,
there-
fore 'feminine',
and ritually powerless.
This is a manifest
contrad,iction
of the
entire Khoisan
system of belief Solomon uses the 'prey
as victim' structure
to
ascribe
vulnerability
to the girl in seclusion - the same girl who takes up

CAMILLA POWER & IAN WATTS 553
hunting weapons, can kill men at a glance and snap her fingers to call down
lightning.
Khoisan females, Solomon argues,
are positively
valued only when they are
sexually available
and desirable
(1992: 302). She points to the convention in
rock
art
by which females are
depicted
as squatting
with legs apart.
This posture,
she suggests,
connotes availability
for sex, making
females sex objects.
But this
posture
is the very one which characterizes the 'bloody'
female initiate,
the su-
preme emblem of ritual
potency and sexual taboo, as Solomon herself recog-
nizes. If Khoisan
art works by convention
and stereotype,
we may infer that the
female squatting figures actually
bear reference to ritual
non-availability
for sex.
Solomon has recently
revised
her analyses
of gender representation
in rock art
(1994; 1996). But her 1992 article demonstrates
the inadequacy
of Ortner's
model of gender as sexual hierarchy
when applied to Khoisan data. Such a
model cannot account for the flexibility and sophistication of Khoisan
conceptions.
Conclusion
Summary of data
on
gender
construction.
The logic of Ortner's model would sug-
gest that initiation rites should construct young women as 'feminine' and
young men as 'masculine', employing a polarized
set of symbols to distinguish
these two counterposed
roles. But Khoisan
and Hadza material reveals a consis-
tent ideology of merging
and confusion of roles: initiate
girls become hunters,
and initiate boys become bloody and weak. The processes of production and
reproduction
are mystically intertwined.
To menstruate is to shoot a poisoned
arrow; to give birth
is to kill a large game animal.
Initiates
experiencing
the performances
which 'create' their gender are under
strict constraints which militate against
the emergence of 'multiple genders'
(Butler 1990). Indeed,
there is an insistence on performing what appears to be a
single gender, irrespective
of the neophyte's
biological
sex. Initiation creates
and
sustains a collective
representation
of an individual's
new sexual, social and eco-
nomic status.
It may
serve as an exemplar to which all future practice refers. The
strictures of the menarcheal observances remain
in force
throughout
a woman's
reproductive
career
in the form of menstrual and pregnancy
taboos. Similarly
for youths, lifelong hunting
observances and 'respect'
customs refer
back
to the
elaborate
details of the 'first-kill' rite.
Any failure to observe
the menarcheal rite
would imperil
the girl's reproductive
power and the group's productive
future.
Failure to observe the first-kill rite would likewise jeopardize the young
hunter's
productive power and hence, fundamentally,
his procreative power.
Rather
than permit proliferation
of distinctions
and categories,
Khoisan
gen-
der ritual turns apparent opposites into conceptual equivalents. The gender-
mutable
moon, in its waxing, offers
the fundamental
metaphor
for transforma-
tion from death to rebirth,
cold to hot, wetness and blood to fire and fat. The
major
ritual
preoccupation
of the Khoisan,
evident
in both initiation and trance
dance, lies in effecting these transformations. As ritual power is expressed
through imagery
of blood, death,
male 'rain' or the whirlwind, categories
of fe-
male and male, animal
and human,
become fused. The only effective
means of
containing
these threatening
forces is meticulous observance of ritual
through

554 CAMILLA
POWER & LAN WATTS
the stages
of seclusion and
emergence.
Respect
for menstrual
potency
- whether
coded 'good' or 'evil'
- is vital
to secure
the benefits
of soft rain, 'fatness' and so-
cial harmony. And it is there that the performative force of initiation resides.
The ideological coding of these potencies is negotiable, potentially multiple;
what is beyond negotiation, allowing
no licence to multiplicity,
is respect for the
ritual syntax. The potency of the waxing moon marks initiation, hunting luck
and the fattening
of the eland; waning
moon is ritually unmarked.
All that may be said of the Khoisan
is even more apparent
in the case of the
Hadza. Their ritual focus on the dark
moon - in conjunction with kinship and
menstruation
- is evident and vital to success
in the hunt, health and harmony.
In their initiation rituals, we see gender (and kinship) solidarity in action, ac-
companied by symbolic sex reversal. Such rituals clearly embody an ongoing
sexual
political struggle.
To cheat women of epeme meat, male initiates must be
symbolically
bloodied and
dumped
at the feet of their mothers. As initiates, men
dominate the epeme
ritual. Yet women periodically
seize back ritual
power, as
initiates united by bleeding together;
when they launch themselves into action,
their naked
buttocks signal
'maleness'.
This symbolic exposure of the women, both Khoisan
and Hadza, is ambiva-
lent. In the Eland Bull dance, as we saw,
the Khoisan women's nakedness
has
been described
as erotic. But in the light of the Hadza
material,
we should re-
consider its meaning.
No Khoisan or Hadza woman in everyday circumstances
would so expose herself. In a ritual
context,
this
collective
exposure
carries
a completely
dfferent
connotation:
it means maleness, animality and therefore non-availability.
Such ritual exposure is an assertion
by women of collective control over their
sexuality.
Table
1 summarizes
the ritual construction of gender among the Hadza and
Khoisan.
The syntax
of initiation
suggests
that
we take
lunar
time as the frame-
work of transformation,
with ritual
action
and initiation
placed
in waxing phase,
and
profane
life in waning phase.
The moon itself is male in 'ritual
time' and
fe-
male in 'profane
time'. For these hunter-gatherers, gender is lunar-governed,
ritually 'powerful'
in waxing phase, 'weak'
in waning phase.
At initiation, boys
and girls undergo essentially
the same symbolic treatment,
their shared
gender
during
seclusion
conforming
to a logic of reversal
governed by lunar
phase.
TABLE 1. Syntax
of Khoisan
and Hadza
gender
construction.
Waxing
moon
(male) Waning
moon
(female)
ritual
time ordinary
time
hunger
of initiate food taboos
relaxed
fattening
of eland bull consumption
of eland
flesh raw, bloody flesh cooked
male rain female
rain
lightning,
medicine fire cooking fire
death life
menarche/circumcision/sexual
taboo sexual
availability
women naked/'male/'animal'/unavailable
women modest, available
eland
bull is female initiate woman is meat,
wife
female initiate is hunter woman is gatherer
male initate is wounded prey husbands feast on meat
kinship/avoidance
relations maritaVjoking
relations

CAMILLA
POWER & IAN WATTS 555
Symbolic
reversal: gender as drag? Ortner's theory of gender origins is rooted in the
model of cultural
origins proposed
by Levi-Strauss (1969). Levi-Strauss
did not
claim that his model was testable or yielded explicit
predictions.
But it is clear
that the ritual
domain disturbed
him as a source of anomaly.
Guardians of the
ritual order consistently failed to conform to the heterosexual,
exogamous,
sister-exchanging
stereotypes
of alliance theory.
On the contrary,
the shaman
or
other ritual
leader, Levi-Strauss
complained,
is not a normal
spouse but is typi-
cally bisexual,
or a transvestite,
or half-animal:
There are myths which say that, for ritual to be invented, some human being must have ab-
jured the sharp, clear distinctions existing in culture and society; living alongside the ani-
mals and having become like them, he must return to the state of nature, characterized
by
the mingling of the sexes and the confusion of degrees of kinship ... (1981: 679).
Such anomalies led Levi-Strauss (1981:
675) to counterpose myth to ritual,
de-
nouncing the latter as the very negation - the 'bastardization'
- of culture-
creating thought. Where Levi-Strauss
saw confusion and loss of boundaries,
Needham sought to explain 'ritual
reversals'
by proposing
that they served to
mark
boundaries. Our survey
of Khoisan
and Hadza 'rituals of inversion'
is a
step towards
making
sense of what Needham termed 'those practically
univer-
sal usages and beliefs by which people create disorder, i.e. turn their
classifications
upside down or disintegrate
them entirely' (1963: xxxix).
Through her metaphor
of gender
as drag,
Butler has forcefully posited sym-
bolic reversal as intrinsic to gender.
This metaphor
can be applied
to both the
Khoisan and Hadza traditions,
in that initiates
are made to enact and imitate
roles and attributes
of the other sex. Gender proves
to be performative,
Butler
argues,
in constituting
its own identity;
it does not refer to, or express,
some
underlying absolute truth or falsity of identity (1990: 25). The subversive
or
doubly parodic
force of drag
lies not in mimicking some 'natural'
or 'original'
state,
but in parodying
'the very notion of an original'
(1990: 138). The whole
thrust of Butler's work implies the domination of cultural constructs over any
possibility
of 'naturalness'. The Khoisan and Hadza
rites, like all initiation
rites,
can be interpreted
as 'culture' asserting
itself over 'nature'; this is expressed
most graphically
by constructs which defy reality, such as the notion of women
with zebras'
penises.
In accord with Butler's theory,
we agree that gender
as per-
formed in Khoisan
or Hadza ritual
does not refer to any natural
or original
sex.
However, we argue that it does in some sense re-enact an original
gender.
By
understanding
initiation
ritual
as meta-performative
of gender in Rappaport's
(1979) sense, we imply that such ritual
may contain a paradigm
of the creation
of gender.
In re-presenting
a primordial
union of form and substance,
words
and bodily acts,
gender
ritual can both conventionalize
the natural and natural-
ize the conventional (Rappaport
1979: 202). The interface of sex and gender,
as
analysed by Butler,
consists in just such an interplay
between 'the anatomy
of
the performer
and
the gender
that is being performed'
(Butler 1990: 137).
'Wrong species,
wrong
sex': the 'gender of power'. Butler's metaphor appears vindi-
cated, but the sex-strike model (Knight et al. 1995), entailing a strict binary
structure, generates predictions
that match the African hunter-gatherer
data
more precisely
and account for the centrality
of lunar/menstrual periodicity
in
Khoisan and Hadza cosmology.
The model posits a 'time-resistant syntax'
pre-

556 CAMILLA POWER & IAN WATTS
served
in the structure
of ritual
and myth (Knight et al. 1995: 91). According
to
this syntax, ritual power is switched 'on' by blood/wetness; dark/crescent moon;
the extinguishing
of cooking fires; hunger (prior
to hunting); and abstention
from marital sex. Ritual power is switched 'off' by light; full moon; cooking
fires; feasting; and marital sex (see Knight 1997). This syntax is closely borne
out by the gendered oppositions
derived
from Khoisan and Hadza data in Table 1.
Knight
et al. (1995: 84) argue
that while courtship
'ritual'
in the animal
world
involves signalling 'right species/right
sex/right time', sex-strike
'by
the same
to-
ken would most emphatically
have been conveyed by signalling "wrong species!
wrong
sex! wrong
time"'. Culture dominates nature - and gender overrides sex -
through such reality-defying
ritual
metamorphosis
of ordinary
human women
into the 'wrong species'
and the 'wrong
sex' at the time of menstruation.
We therefore propose
that
women originally
established their gender identity
by becoming 'animal', 'male'
and 'bloody'.
The fundamental
ambiguity
here is
that the biologically
female process of menstruation was itself culturally
con-
structed
as 'male'. We term the gender first acquired by women during ritual
sex-strike
the 'gender of power'. Women who needed to resist aggressive
or
unco-operative
males
would have drawn on their sons and
brothers for support.
Ritual
power
was necessarily
mobilized
in alliance with male
kin, symbolized
by
shared blood. Thus both sexes indistinguishably
become ritually empowered.
'Gender',
in this model, transcends
and negates
sexual
difference.
Simple, fixed
male/female dichotomies are ruled out because,
in the phase of the sex-strike,
the newly constructed
domain of 'gender'
includes
equallyfemales
and males. We
conclude that while ritual
power is mobilized, both sexes have identical gender;
namely,
the gender
of power.
The opposite
category,
'weak
gender', corresponds
to the profane
status
of marital
availability
when taboos are relaxed.
Again,
both
sexes share the same gender:
a weak gender
state where the sexes are
clearly po-
larized. Hence, gender
is a periodic
function of ritual
power, waxing
and
waning
with lunar
phase.
This model predicts that initiation
rites should have the following features:
1. Both women and men are characterized
by 'bloodiness', kinship itself being conceived as
'blood relationship'.
2. Within kin groups,
there is a conflation of sexual attributes,
with penises belonging to sis-
ters, wombs to brothers, etc., amounting
to a general
state of androgyny.
3. Men, in identifying
with their bleeding sisters, also identify
with bleeding game animals,
and are themselves wounded; conversely,
menstruating
women in identifying
with brothers
are also 'hunters'.
These predictions
can now be incorporated
into the ritual
syntax
described
earlier:
Ritual
power
on Ritual
power off
gender
of power weak gender
ritual performers
in 'animal mode' all partners
'human'
women are 'male',
'sacred' women are 'female',
available
men bleeding,
'wounded' all flesh 'cooked'
conflation of sex attributes clear
polarity
of sexes
androgyny heterosexuality

CAMILLA POWER & IAN WATTS 557
In all this, the most basic point is that the symbolic reversal of sexual and/or hu-
man/animal categories has been central
to gender
since its earliest construction.
Thus,
sacred androgyny can be accommodated within a binary structure
without re-
course to a 'third gender category' (Solomon 1992: 303). We are now in a
position to turn Ortner's
nature/culture
dichotomy on its head. Just as culture
asserts itself over nature through the universal
mechanism of ritual (Ortner
1974: 72), so the ritual 'gender of power' dominates the 'weak gender'. But
there is no necessity for these binary hierarchies
to map onto sex. Far
from it
being the case that females have everywhere
been denied access to ritual and
cultural power because of their
biology, ritual power in its very origin
was predicated
on a model of female biology:
ritual menstrual
solidarity.
To be powerful, it is
necessary
to be wounded and periodically
bleed.
NOTES
The authors would like to thank
James
Woodburn for his time and assistance. Chris Knight
and Alan Barnard
have been most helpful with comment on earlier
drafts,
and Anne Sclomon
has discussed aspects of her research. The African Studies Library,
University of Cape Town,
and the Rock Art Research
Unit, Witwatersrand
University, have made available
unpublished
manuscripts.
Thanks to Peter Garlake,
David Lewis-Williams
and Anne Solomon for permis-
sion to use illustrative material.
1 See Dunbar (1996: 147), Foley (1995: 78), Power & Aiello (1997), Steele & Shennan
(1996: 12-3), Stringer
& McKie (1996: 208) and Taylor (1996), for assessment
of the status of
this model.
2 We found that the bold and explicit early statements
by Ortner (1974) and Butler (1990)
gave their models greater power as heuristic
devices. We therefore chose to use the framework
provided by these earlier formulations
rather than subsequent revisions of either author (see
e.g. Butler 1993; Ortner 1990).
3 While older texts employ the term '!Kung', current ethnography favours the use of
Ju/'hoan (pl. Ju/hoansi),
the people's own name for themselves
(see Biesele 1993: 203).
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560 GAMILLA POWER & IAN WATTS
La femme avec un penis de zebre: relatlons entre les sexes, mutabilite
et representation.
Resume
Dans certaines cultures africaines de chasseurs-cueilleurs
(les Khoisan
et les Hadza), les rela-
tions entre hommes et femmes sont apparamment
fondees sur une cat6gorisation
mutable et
paradoxale
des sexes. Pendant le rituel d'initiation,
les filles acquierent
des caracteristiques
masculines,
telles que des penis et des armes
de chasse: les garsons
sont trait6s
comme sujets a
la menstruation. Les modeles anthropologiques
hierarchisant
le 'masculin'
v. le 'feminin' en
fonction du sexe biologique ne sont pas en mesure de predire de telles inversions. Les
modeles altematifs de categories
de genre multiples ne rendent pas compte des similarit6s
structurelles
entre les initiations males et femelles, qui ont tendance a unifier les categories
sexuelles quel que soit le sexe biologique. Sur la base de donnees sur les rituels et mythes
Khoisan
et Hadza avec
des illustrations
d'art
rupestre
d'Afrique
du Sud, un 'modele indigene'
des oppositions symboliques des categories
sexuelles est presente. Selon ce modele, les cate-
gories sexuelles sont mutables a travers le temps et sont associees a la puissance du rituel et
non au sexe biologique; de ce fait, le modele est a l'appui
des predictions faites par
la theorie
qui attribue les origines de la culture a la 'greve sexuelle'.
Department
of
Anthropology,
University
College London, Gower
Street, London
WClE 6BT