Introduction to Anthropology Southern Africa special issue on ‘Engaging Difference: Perspectives on belonging and exclusion in contemporary southern and East Africa’

Abstract

This special issue of Anthropology Southern Africa is the result of troubling questions of how to engage difference and belonging. Anthropologists in South Africa, like their colleagues elsewhere, today face the return of difference thinking. The articles in this special issue speak to a range of interconnected challenges presented by the politics of difference in contemporary southern and East Africa. Despite the variation of conceptual, epistemological and methodological approaches, the articles gathered in this issue all address tricky connections between difference, belonging, and exclusion. In this introductory article, I chart the genealogy of the relationship of South African anthropology with the practice and concept of difference. I also point towards recent innovative theorising of authenticity, which takes up the challenges to constructivism whilst retaining the valuable insights of constructivist approaches. Such re-conceptualising of difference thinking enables us to move beyond the worn primordial/essentialist vs. instrumentalist/constructionist divide in anthropological discourse on difference. This special issue, most importantly, sets the stage for further discussions about the concept, practice and politics of difference in southern and East Africa.