Claim to the Country: The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek

Editor's Pick for December 18, 2007

by Lisa Klopfer, Eastern Michigan Univ. Lib., Ypsilanti -- Library Journal, 12/19/2007 11:07:00 AM

Skotnes, Pippa. Claim to the Country: The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek. Ohio Univ. 2007. 392p. illus. index. ISBN 978-0-8214-1778-2. $65 with DVD. ANTHRO

Skotnes (director, Lucy Lloyd Archive Resource & Exhibition Ctr., Univ. of Cape Town) has created a dazzling work of archival reproduction and interpretation. At her institution and other South African archives, she scanned the notebooks, photographs, and papers of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, two 19th-century colonial scholars bent on documenting the language of the now culturally extinct |xam people (also known as Cape San or Bushmen). Bleek and Lloyd transcribed stories, drawings, poems, and recollections from the traumatized last generation of fluent speakers. Skotnes succeeds in her aim to give the reader “something of the experience of being in the archive,” offering thoughtful essays by nine experts in linguistics, history, archaeology, and art along with her own introduction. The book is sometimes confusing—the table of contents appears only after 25 pages of introductory illustrations, and lay readers will be challenged to get anthropologically oriented—but the accompanying DVD, with its own comprehensive index of hundreds of scanned images, will please serious scholars and the curious public alike. Highly recommended for all academic and large public libraries.