Faculty of Humanities
School of Social Sciences
Department of Anthropology and Archaeology
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
As a matter of international law, genocide has received a great deal of attention in recent years. The UN's ad hoc tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the establishment of the International Criminal Court represent important milestones in setting up the laws, courts, and precedents to respond to this most serious crime against humanity. But genocide is more than an infraction of international law. It is also a political, social, and economic phenomenon that devastates whole societies, leaving in its wake innumerable crises and challenges. A collection of essays entitled New Perspectives on Genocide: Cambodia and Rwanda considers some of the more understudied aspects of these two important cases of twentieth century genocide, including the impact of regional politics, and the role played by social institutions in the perpetration of genocide. [Cook's own contribution to the volume examines genocide memorials in Rwanda, arguing that the preservation of genocide sites, while important from an international legal perspective, is viewed very differently, and often negatively, by Rwandans themselves.]
Contact person: Dr SE Cook.
Traditional leadership is a topic of considerable controversy and debate in South Africa today. Hereditary leaders operating within a democracy, the quest for gender equity in areas governed by 'customary law', land reform and mineral rights in communally-owned territory held in trust by royal clans: these are just a few of the complex issues emerging from South Africa's former bantustans. Ongoing research in the North West Province addresses these issues within one of those most influential and well-resourced traditional communities in South Africa - the mineral-rich Royal Bafokeng Nation. In contrast to most other traditionally-governed communities in South Africa, "the business of being Bafokeng" involves translating ascribed ethnic membership into shareholding in a corporate entity that styles itself as a ethnic nation, and functions as an autonomous municipality. The Bafokeng case not only serves to illustrate contemporary issues of identity, ethnic politics, and emerging understandings of the role of traditional leaders in South Africa, but is in fact central to these debates at all levels.
Contact person: Dr SE Cook.
Anthropologists have recently began to identify media as a critical site of knowledge production. The circulation of televised images is seen to have significantly altered social life leading anthropologists to examine television primarily through questioning the way soap operas play out the dramas of national belonging and exclusion in every day life. Getting real with Survivor Africa is a means to examine not only how "Africa" and the "United States" are performed, staged, and constituted in the present but also how "Americans" should relate to the world and themselves. Survivor echoes in fundamental ways the equivalent popular culture form of the nineteenth century travel writing. It posits a story told with nostalgic colonial flair with critical plots that turn on notions of a future of constant surveillance and a form of life conducive to an "empire for a post-imperial age". Survivor moves across the globe dropping Americans into differing geographies and carefully teaching them how to "be" in relationship to themselves and the world. For the Survivor participants Africa needs to be recuperated, especially from AIDS, or it becomes a sign of the failure of American modernity. Reality television is just one window on a broader project on the relationship between the US and Africa. This research examines the ways that Americans interact with Africa and Africans through representations in books, magazines, museums, movies, policy discussions and, especially, through travel to South Africa.
Contact person: Dr C Mathers.
Field research being done in the Lowveld provides material for a critique of various models of 'African sexual culture'. Life stories were collected from a number of individuals in Bushbuckridge. The life stories focussed on experiences of sexual socialisation, schooling, initiation, marriage, divorce, labour migration, unemployment and sexual violence. The stories reveal the interplay of different discourses of sexuality, highlight the impact of institutions such as schools, migrant compounds, and drinking houses on sexual behaviour, and distinguish between what people say and what they believe, and between what they aspire to and what they are constrained to do. Life stories are more accurate predictors of actual sexual behaviour than cultural models of so-called 'African sexuality', and may therefore be of greater strategic importance in preventing the spread of HIV/Aids.
Contact person: Prof IA Niehaus.
De-industrialisation and the switch to a service economy undermine many of the certainties of the modern industrial era. Research in the former working-class suburbs of Pretoria West is examining the impact of these transformations on the lives of the residents, and on the ways they make sense of society and their place in it. Fieldwork has involved extensive interviews with workers retrenched from heavy industry in the 1990s, and with their wives and children. In many instances the burden of domestic provisioning has passed to former dependents, resulting in profound changes in family relationships and the undermining of firmly held notions of patriarchal control. Field research has also involved extensive participant observation in one of the growing number of lodging houses in the area, which provide temporary accommodation for people - mostly men - whose domestic lives have been entirely disrupted by the economic transformations of the last decade. This transient population reveals a great deal of how life is lived under post-industrial, post-familial and, indeed, post-ethnic circumstances.
Contact person: Prof JS Sharp.
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