Parkington - art, ideology and nets

Core argument → Gender in Western cape rock Art

• The art deliberately obscures economic reality to ideologically entrench male dominance.

Depiction of women

• Regularly shown as clappers and singers at trance occasions but almost never depicted experiencing trance themselves

• Subsistence contributions are almost entirely absent from the painted record.

Nets vs Entopics

• Lewis-Williams argued cross-hatched motifs are entoptic trance phenomena.

• Parkington argues some genuinely represent hunting nets: antelopes are consistently painted upright in side view with cross-hatched motifs at right angles to their movement;

Critique of Lewis-Williams

• Lewis-Williams attributed meaning only to constituent parts rather than to compositional relationships as a whole.

• Reducing all cross-hatched patterns to trance phenomena denies the existence of emergent meaning in composition

Linking nets to broader gender debates

• If some images depict communal hunting nets rather than trance, the arts gendered ideology is more visible

• Reinforcing Parkington's broader point that over-reliance on the shamanistic framework risks obscuring meaning that only emerges at the compositional level