'The Story in which the Children are Sent to Throw the Sleeping Sun into the Sky': Power, Identity and Difference in a /Xam Narrative

This article examines a single story from the /Xam materials in the Bleek and Lloyd collection. After briefly relating the narrative, I discuss its aetiological implications. Various interpretations of the story are then offered and critiqued. The article proceeds to consider the story in terms of power and agency and to investigate its discursive features: its chain of speaking, the nature of the laughter it presents and its mode of interpellation. This is followed by an examination of identity in the context of the narrative and an investigation into how a /Xam mythic framework plays itself out in the story. The article concludes with a consideration of the story's narrative voice. My discussion of the story aims primarily to show that the structuralist, comparative and functionalist ways in which the /Xam narratives have previously been read have missed much of the play of difference that becomes apparent when the discursive character of the /Xam materials is foregrounded.