ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the effects of those events, and the influence of the remarkable family whose records dominated Bushman studies in the late nineteenth century and much of the twentieth. Sir George Grey encouraged Wilhelm Bleek in his studies of Bushman languages and folklore, and the library was to serve too both as the source of employment and as the academic base of both Bleek and his eventual successor as librarian, Theophilus Hahn, ethnographer of the Nama. The classic notion of the myth-telling, rock-painting Bushman is a product of the Victorian era, and it owes much too to the pioneering research of George Stow and the Bleek family. Physical anthropologists perhaps had an easier time than early social anthropologists in finding material on Bushman to include in their comparative studies. Anthropologists and anthropology students of the twenty-first century tend to think of Bushmen as hunter-gatherers.
