Seclusion, Song and the Dance of the Eland

Lorna Marshall's decades of fieldwork among the Ju/'hoansi of the Nyae Nyae region record a girl's first menstruation as a moment of real spiritual danger, both to the girl herself and to the camp around her, requiring careful ritual handling rather than simple celebration. She is secluded in a hut built or set aside for the occasion, attended by older women who instruct her in the restrictions she must observe and who sing the eland songs associated with the rite, music understood as belonging to this ceremony specifically and not sung at other times.

While the women sing, men of the camp dance around the girl's shelter in a pantomime of eland courtship and mating, sometimes wearing a headdress suggesting the animal's horns, in a performance meant to draw the eland's fertility and vitality toward the girl at the threshold of her own adult, childbearing life. The eland is the largest and, in Ju/'hoansi understanding, the most potent of antelope, and its presence in a rite marking a girl's bodily transition is a deliberate pairing of the animal's own fertility with hers, rather than simple decoration. The songs themselves are treated as belonging to the ceremony rather than to ordinary performance, sung only in this context and passed from older women to younger ones across generations, which is part of why outside observers have recorded the dance itself far more often than they have recorded the songs' actual words.