Positioning The Project
San Musical Futures is a practice-based research project situated in Botswana, primarily across Ghanzi District, Kgalagadi District, Southern, Central, and North West District. It engages with San lives shaped by long histories of displacement and resettlement, and by enduring inequalities in access to land, education, and political recognition.
The San are widely regarded as among the oldest continuous inhabitants of Southern Africa and are characterised by linguistic diversity, deep ecological knowledge, and rich musical traditions. In Botswana, however, San communities have been positioned at the margins of national life through policies of integration, conservation, and development that have often undermined land-based livelihoods and cultural autonomy. Despite constitutional commitments to equality, San claims to Indigenous recognition remain contested, with material consequences for citizenship, representation, and access to resources.
This project is positioned within these historical and political conditions, but it does not approach San communities as passive subjects of marginalisation. Instead, it centres San youth as cultural actors who actively navigate constraint, negotiate belonging, and imagine futures through expressive practice. Music and performance are treated not as symbolic heritage alone, but as everyday social practices through which dignity, continuity, and political presence are sustained.
The research emerged from long-term engagement rather than a pre-scripted agenda. It was shaped by relationships, conversations, and concerns articulated by participants themselves, particularly around visibility, misrecognition, and the uneven value placed on San cultural expression. A central paradox runs through the project: while San people are frequently marginalised in social, political, and economic life, their music and dance are widely celebrated, circulated, and revered. This tension provides the analytical grounding for the research.
Rather than asking whether San culture is valued, San Musical Futures asks under what conditions cultural value translates into recognition, rights, and material change, and where it does not. It examines how San youth mobilise music, dance, storytelling, dress, and digital media to assert self-recognition and collective presence within unequal cultural fields.
The project is attentive to diversity across San communities and resists treating “the San” as a singular or static group. Differences of language, location, education, mobility, and aspiration are treated as analytically significant, shaping how cultural action is practised and understood. Youth perspectives are foregrounded not because they replace those of elders, but because they reveal how cultural knowledge is carried forward, adapted, and reworked in contemporary contexts.
Positioned at the intersection of ethnomusicology, Indigenous studies, and practice-based research, San Musical Futures contributes to broader conversations about youth agency, cultural capital, and recognition politics. It does so by aligning method with substance: listening rather than extraction, duration rather than compression, and ethical restraint rather than spectacle.
This positioning frames both the written dissertation and the ethnographic videos presented on this site. Together, they invite engagement that is attentive, relational, and open-ended, recognising that the futures explored here are not resolved outcomes, but ongoing work shaped by endurance, care, and collective imagination.
