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Introduction to Anthropology Southern Africa, special edition on ‘Debating Southern African Anthropology’
Item type: Journal Article • Journal: Anthropology Southern Africa • Authors: Kees (C. S.) van der Waal --- Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, South Africa Vivienne Ward --- Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, South AfricaBy challenging anthropologists practising in different southern African contexts to engage in debate, we elicited a rich array of viewpoints and counter-challenges as we gathered articles for this special edition. In this introductory article we set the scene for the... -
Primordialist paranoia, essentialism and South African realities: participating and observing across the ‘anthropological divide’
Item type: Journal Article • Journal: Anthropology Southern Africa • Authors: Michael de Jongh --- Department of Anthropology and Archaeology,This article interrogates the exigency of some of the current concerns of South African anthropology. The contribution is autobiographical and occasionally anecdotal; personal narrative hence shapes the mode of text development. In considering the current state of the South African... -
Claiming Cape Town: towards a symbolic interpretation of Khoisan activism and land claims
Item type: Journal Article • Journal: Anthropology Southern Africa • Authors: Rafael Verbuyst --- African Studies Centre Leiden, The NetherlandsCurrent political negotiations in South Africa which explore the possibility of pre-1913 land claims and the recognition of Khoisan traditional authorities have spurred the growth of the “Khoisan revival”: the phenomenon of people identifying as Khoisan and asserting indigenous rights... -
Britain and Brexit: imagining an essentialist sense of “Britishness” and navigating amongst “the British”
Item type: Journal Article • Journal: Anthropology Southern Africa • Authors: Nigel Rapport --- , United KingdomIn his analysis of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet control, Georges Devereux argued that social movements exist not because members exhibit attitudinal uniformity but because in the “same” collective act individuals serendipitously find a socially acceptable expression for their... -
Sheep, herbs and blood on the beach: discrepant representations of ritual acts for essentialising and reinforcing difference in contemporary South Africa
Item type: Journal Article • Journal: Anthropology Southern Africa • Authors: Andrew D. Spiegel --- , South AfricaSouth Africa’s 2018/2019 summer holidays were marked by a flurry of media reports describing, some in vivid, graphic detail, the ritual slaughter of a sheep on a popular Cape Town beach by a group of #MustFall activists. Their action was... -
Essentialism in Zoroastrian boundary construction
Item type: Journal Article • Journal: Anthropology Southern Africa • Authors: Paulina Niechciał --- , PolandThe article explores tensions in contemporary Zoroastrianism, one of the world’s oldest practiced religions, over who a “real” Zoroastrian is, what, for Zoroastrians, constitutes the essence of Zoroastrianism and how constructed collective boundaries may or may not be crossed. Considering... -
Persistent essentialism in Polish nationalist discourse: a Wittgensteinian critique
Item type: Journal Article • Journal: Anthropology Southern Africa • Authors: Witold Jacorzynski --- , MexicoEssentialism, an erroneous way of thinking that can be traced to classical philosophy, assumes a thing to hold necessary intrinsic characteristics. Such thinking has been commonly employed for a popular understanding of bounded groups of people, establishing imaginary communities and... -
The allure of essentialism and extremist ideologies
Item type: Journal Article • Journal: Anthropology Southern Africa • Authors: Jonatan Kurzwelly --- , South Africa Hamid Fernana --- , South Africa Muhammad Elvis Ngum --- , South AfricaThis paper examines different reasons that make essentialist thinking, and by extension extremist ideologies based on such logic, attractive to individuals. Drawing from theories of personal and social identities, we examine the benefits derived from adopting an essentialist and reductionist... -
Living excluded from the world: essentialism in development discourse and its percolation into Santomean self-perceptions
Item type: Journal Article • Journal: Anthropology Southern Africa • Authors: Nicola Soekoe --- , South AfricaUsing an analysis of development discourse in and about São Tomé and Príncipe (STP), this article aims to trace the relationship between sociocultural constructions of difference and socio-economic structures of exclusion in the global development project. Using ethnographic data from... -
Singing about the dark times in the US and India: notes on situated understandings in our age of essentialisms
Item type: Journal Article • Journal: Anthropology Southern Africa • Authors: Chandana Mathur --- , IrelandIn an age where essentialisms and reductionisms appear to drive the politics of hate in most parts of the world, this essay seeks to explore the insight, hope and room for manoeuvre offered by situated local knowledges. Counterposing the “white... -
Encountering, explaining and refuting essentialism
Item type: Journal Article • Journal: Anthropology Southern Africa • Authors: Jonatan Kurzwelly --- , South Africa Nigel Rapport --- , United Kingdom Andrew D. Spiegel --- , South AfricaEssentialism manifests itself in a diversity of forms and is used in multiple ways. Yet it is always potentially dangerous — even when it is mobilised strategically and in apparently worthy forms for purposes of overcoming oppressive structures. As the... -
“Feeling their way through their cultural roots”: theorising the Khoisan revivalist critique of authenticity from below
Item type: Journal Article • Journal: Anthropology Southern Africa • Authors: Rafael Verbuyst --- University of Gent, BelgiumAuthenticity is a longstanding concern in Khoisan Studies. Most scholarship has examined how stereotypical, essentialist and static notions of “authentic” Khoisan identity and culture are habitually reproduced and demanded of the Khoisan for economic or political gain. Recent work instead...