DOI: 10.3828/hgr.2026.18 ISSN: 2056-3256

‘Flux’ or ‘wind’?

Gertrud Boden
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The last two decades have witnessed an increased anthropological interest in human–nonhuman relations among Khoisan peoples as part of a more general trend involving scholarly interest in ‘(new) animism’ ( Bird-David 1999

) and the anthropology of ontologies ( Kohn 2015
), or in how people experience, understand and categorise what exists. Low (2007
; 2008
; 2009 ; 2014 ) proposed that all Khoisan peoples understand ‘wind’, ‘essence’ or ‘potency’ as a force that connects beings. Meanwhile, Guenther (2015 ; 2017 ; 2020 ) sees ‘ontological flux’ as a central unifying theme among all San peoples – the former hunter-gatherers among the Khoisan. Many other authors have recently become interested in diverse aspects of human–nonhuman relationships within Khoisan groups. However, sources on the Khwe, a group of San, are absent from recent, as well as earlier, regionally comparative work. In this paper, I present ethnographic findings from the Khwe with regard to three related topoi in the comparative literature, namely amorphous First Order, ontological flux in storytelling, ritual and hunting, and essence transmission.

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