ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the nature of the 'dialogue' in relation, particularly, to the type of hybrid texts that it produced. The Bleek and Lloyd collection of /Xam materials is a rich and extensive record of the culture of a people whose language and hunting-gathering economic system had all but disappeared by the end of the 19th century. The /Xam language texts are presented side by side with the English ones for the benefit of later scholars. Andrew Bank argues that Bleek's own motivations and theoretical preoccupations changed and also diverged in important respects from Lloyd's as the /Xam project progressed. Bleek and Lloyd were writers, it could be argued, as well as collectors, transcribers and ethnographers. The mythologizing imagination represents, for Bleek, an important point in the evolution of the human intellect that achieved its full realization in European rationality. Labelling the Bleek and Lloyd materials as predominantly myth, folklore or traditional oral literature invites certain interpretations of their content.
