Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/23323256.2021.1988859
N. Mkhize, Qawekazi Maqabuka, Babalwa Magoqwana
In this article we explore and conceptualise incoko, conversationalism, as a critical praxis and pedagogy of care in our university teaching practice. In “normal” times, it is the conversations in the classroom, in the halls as we pass students and in seminars that help us make the human connection and foster belonging and engagement as we work and inhabit the university as a learning and working space. The conditions of Covid-19 have dramatically disrupted and made impossible organic opportunities for ukuncokola that characterise university life. This has compelled us to rethink how we can convey care, belonging and learning on digital platforms. We observe that digital platforms not only close down spaces for conversationalism but also open up opportunities for new networks of engagement that widen and deepen learning and engagement. We also find that these platforms have opened up rich opportunities for ukuncokola, more intimately and closely across space and geography. By abolishing constraints of space, travel and funding, the digital world opens up creative opportunities — engaging elders in intergenerational conversation, or non-university scholars such as musicians and activists — that foster community, care and belonging in the virtual university.
{"title":"Pedagogy of incoko: challenges in adapting conversational forms as a praxis of student care and engagement in the context of digital learning in South Africa","authors":"N. Mkhize, Qawekazi Maqabuka, Babalwa Magoqwana","doi":"10.1080/23323256.2021.1988859","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23323256.2021.1988859","url":null,"abstract":"In this article we explore and conceptualise incoko, conversationalism, as a critical praxis and pedagogy of care in our university teaching practice. In “normal” times, it is the conversations in the classroom, in the halls as we pass students and in seminars that help us make the human connection and foster belonging and engagement as we work and inhabit the university as a learning and working space. The conditions of Covid-19 have dramatically disrupted and made impossible organic opportunities for ukuncokola that characterise university life. This has compelled us to rethink how we can convey care, belonging and learning on digital platforms. We observe that digital platforms not only close down spaces for conversationalism but also open up opportunities for new networks of engagement that widen and deepen learning and engagement. We also find that these platforms have opened up rich opportunities for ukuncokola, more intimately and closely across space and geography. By abolishing constraints of space, travel and funding, the digital world opens up creative opportunities — engaging elders in intergenerational conversation, or non-university scholars such as musicians and activists — that foster community, care and belonging in the virtual university.","PeriodicalId":54118,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Southern Africa","volume":"16 1","pages":"109 - 122"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72872751","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/23323256.2021.1974305
Z. Erasmus
This article is about the use of long-form letters in the pandemic-pedagogical practice of a third-year undergraduate and writing-intensive course titled “‘Race’ and What it Means to be Human” and offered in anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2020. It was part of the university’s Writing Programme and of a project on epistolary pedagogy which emerged when the Covid-19 pandemic started in South Africa. I provide a reflexive analysis of five pedagogical practices: epistolary pedagogy; “the epistolarium,” a concept introduced by Liz Stanley; voice; writing as thinking; and pedagogical care. I draw on 10 student portfolios selected across grade bands from a class of 60. The data includes student responses to two introductory writing exercises, extracts from their notebooks and reflections on the course, response letters to students by the tutors and my letters to the class. I argue that letter writing created a dialogical presence that mediated the absence, distance and dispersion amongst teachers and learners enforced by the pandemic. Its facilitation of writing as thinking makes letter writing an effective form of learning beyond the pandemic.
{"title":"Learning with letters: epistolary pedagogy in anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand during the Covid-19 pandemic","authors":"Z. Erasmus","doi":"10.1080/23323256.2021.1974305","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23323256.2021.1974305","url":null,"abstract":"This article is about the use of long-form letters in the pandemic-pedagogical practice of a third-year undergraduate and writing-intensive course titled “‘Race’ and What it Means to be Human” and offered in anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2020. It was part of the university’s Writing Programme and of a project on epistolary pedagogy which emerged when the Covid-19 pandemic started in South Africa. I provide a reflexive analysis of five pedagogical practices: epistolary pedagogy; “the epistolarium,” a concept introduced by Liz Stanley; voice; writing as thinking; and pedagogical care. I draw on 10 student portfolios selected across grade bands from a class of 60. The data includes student responses to two introductory writing exercises, extracts from their notebooks and reflections on the course, response letters to students by the tutors and my letters to the class. I argue that letter writing created a dialogical presence that mediated the absence, distance and dispersion amongst teachers and learners enforced by the pandemic. Its facilitation of writing as thinking makes letter writing an effective form of learning beyond the pandemic.","PeriodicalId":54118,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Southern Africa","volume":"4 1","pages":"123 - 137"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75889254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/23323256.2021.2012492
J. Auerbach, G. Dlamini
{"title":"Introduction: When the scaffolds give way","authors":"J. Auerbach, G. Dlamini","doi":"10.1080/23323256.2021.2012492","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23323256.2021.2012492","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54118,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Southern Africa","volume":"2015 1","pages":"105 - 108"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74021214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/23323256.2021.1972014
H. Becker
{"title":"Listening to the sound(s) of colonial history","authors":"H. Becker","doi":"10.1080/23323256.2021.1972014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23323256.2021.1972014","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54118,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Southern Africa","volume":"127 1","pages":"98 - 102"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77388878","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/23323256.2021.1912615
W. Ellis, Clement F Cupido, M. I. Samuels
The recently developed walking ethnography, or go-along method, to study pastoralists in a participatory manner provides data that the usual sit-down interview is unable to realise, not least because it shifts the power dynamic between researcher and researched. The herder’s practice takes place outside — a mobile activity that is best understood or learnt in action. This project with Nama pastoralists in the arid regions of the Northern Cape, South Africa, has been walking with herders and learning from them, literally on the hoof. In our interactions, the herders lead us as they follow the animals and as these, in turn, seek out and engage the plants. The method allows us to see herders as the developers of unique knowledge of the ecology, the animals and the management of these resources in a challenging environment. The paper demonstrates the novelty of this method and explores the walking ethnography as a multispecies and multisensorial world that is a sympoietically intertwined cosmos. What emerges is a world that is neither science nor indigenous knowledge but rather an endogenous system that syncretically draws on science, herder knowledge and novel information to make possible the sustained practice of herding in this marginal ecology.
{"title":"Walking with herders: following into the multispecies classroom","authors":"W. Ellis, Clement F Cupido, M. I. Samuels","doi":"10.1080/23323256.2021.1912615","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23323256.2021.1912615","url":null,"abstract":"The recently developed walking ethnography, or go-along method, to study pastoralists in a participatory manner provides data that the usual sit-down interview is unable to realise, not least because it shifts the power dynamic between researcher and researched. The herder’s practice takes place outside — a mobile activity that is best understood or learnt in action. This project with Nama pastoralists in the arid regions of the Northern Cape, South Africa, has been walking with herders and learning from them, literally on the hoof. In our interactions, the herders lead us as they follow the animals and as these, in turn, seek out and engage the plants. The method allows us to see herders as the developers of unique knowledge of the ecology, the animals and the management of these resources in a challenging environment. The paper demonstrates the novelty of this method and explores the walking ethnography as a multispecies and multisensorial world that is a sympoietically intertwined cosmos. What emerges is a world that is neither science nor indigenous knowledge but rather an endogenous system that syncretically draws on science, herder knowledge and novel information to make possible the sustained practice of herding in this marginal ecology.","PeriodicalId":54118,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Southern Africa","volume":"40 1","pages":"50 - 63"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82676162","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/23323256.2021.1973904
H. S. Basure, L. Nhodo, C. Dube, Roselyn Kanyemba
This article is an ethnographic inquiry into the cultural dimensions of forced relocations. It is based on the experiences of four resident anthropologists on the forced displacements at Tugwi-Mukosi in Masvingo province, Zimbabwe. Using the concept of death, we question the idea of belonging and what is regarded as an “honourable” way of exiting this world. These are interwoven in the cultural fabric of most Zimbabwean communities and any phenomenon that severs this tie to home is a cause of discomfort and pain amongst local people. Forced displacements have altered issues of honour associated with death rituals. We use death rituals as a window to understand the sociocultural effects of displacement. Novel ways of dealing with death are witnessed as people struggle with lack of a permanent “home.” The sacredness of cultural dimensions of death has been reconfigured in ways that have left the displaced struggling to find closure in dealing with the dead. Death rituals give us an opportunity to understand the multifaceted effects of displacement. Through death we experience the pain of displacement, understand the chords that bind the displaced communities together and witness the enduring social bonds that structure life beyond the disruptions of displacement.
{"title":"Death and the sociocultural dimensions of forced relocations: experiences from the Tugwi-Mukosi displacement in Masvingo Province, Zimbabwe","authors":"H. S. Basure, L. Nhodo, C. Dube, Roselyn Kanyemba","doi":"10.1080/23323256.2021.1973904","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23323256.2021.1973904","url":null,"abstract":"This article is an ethnographic inquiry into the cultural dimensions of forced relocations. It is based on the experiences of four resident anthropologists on the forced displacements at Tugwi-Mukosi in Masvingo province, Zimbabwe. Using the concept of death, we question the idea of belonging and what is regarded as an “honourable” way of exiting this world. These are interwoven in the cultural fabric of most Zimbabwean communities and any phenomenon that severs this tie to home is a cause of discomfort and pain amongst local people. Forced displacements have altered issues of honour associated with death rituals. We use death rituals as a window to understand the sociocultural effects of displacement. Novel ways of dealing with death are witnessed as people struggle with lack of a permanent “home.” The sacredness of cultural dimensions of death has been reconfigured in ways that have left the displaced struggling to find closure in dealing with the dead. Death rituals give us an opportunity to understand the multifaceted effects of displacement. Through death we experience the pain of displacement, understand the chords that bind the displaced communities together and witness the enduring social bonds that structure life beyond the disruptions of displacement.","PeriodicalId":54118,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Southern Africa","volume":"1 1","pages":"80 - 93"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79779392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/23323256.2021.1978852
H. Dawson
{"title":"The laziness myth: narratives of work and the good life in South Africa","authors":"H. Dawson","doi":"10.1080/23323256.2021.1978852","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23323256.2021.1978852","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54118,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Southern Africa","volume":"129 1","pages":"96 - 98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79572818","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/23323256.2021.1943694
E. Becker
{"title":"Death of a discipline? Reflections on the history, state, and future of social anthropology in Zimbabwe","authors":"E. Becker","doi":"10.1080/23323256.2021.1943694","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23323256.2021.1943694","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54118,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Southern Africa","volume":"24 1","pages":"94 - 95"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83047433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/23323256.2021.1974909
I. Niehaus
Social researchers associate paradoxical developments in post-apartheid South Africa — such as increased hardship at a time of heightened expectations — with a proliferation in witchcraft accusations. This article examines this postulate in greater depth, drawing upon multi-temporal ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a village of Bushbuckridge since 1990. The evidence I gathered does not confirm any dramatic increase in accusations of witchcraft but does show significant changes in the pattern of who is being accused. More specifically, villagers now increasingly suspect male cognates of practicing witchcraft, and sons regularly accuse their fathers. I relate these changes to processes of de-industrialisation and to the AIDS epidemic that have both dashed young men’s expectations of progress in the period after political liberation. The ambiguous position of elderly men as marginal yet historically powerful persons resonates with the status of witches. Villagers imagine that by having used witchcraft to attain status, health and prosperity in the past, fathers unwittingly sacrificed the futures of their sons.
{"title":"Blaming the father: witchcraft, de-industrialisation and generation in South Africa","authors":"I. Niehaus","doi":"10.1080/23323256.2021.1974909","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23323256.2021.1974909","url":null,"abstract":"Social researchers associate paradoxical developments in post-apartheid South Africa — such as increased hardship at a time of heightened expectations — with a proliferation in witchcraft accusations. This article examines this postulate in greater depth, drawing upon multi-temporal ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a village of Bushbuckridge since 1990. The evidence I gathered does not confirm any dramatic increase in accusations of witchcraft but does show significant changes in the pattern of who is being accused. More specifically, villagers now increasingly suspect male cognates of practicing witchcraft, and sons regularly accuse their fathers. I relate these changes to processes of de-industrialisation and to the AIDS epidemic that have both dashed young men’s expectations of progress in the period after political liberation. The ambiguous position of elderly men as marginal yet historically powerful persons resonates with the status of witches. Villagers imagine that by having used witchcraft to attain status, health and prosperity in the past, fathers unwittingly sacrificed the futures of their sons.","PeriodicalId":54118,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Southern Africa","volume":"122 1","pages":"64 - 79"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87579334","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/23323256.2021.1878381
Shingirai Nyakabawu
Since 2000, large numbers of undocumented Zimbabweans have settled in South Africa in search of better living opportunities. In 2010, the South African government approved an immigration amnesty known as the Dispensation Zimbabwe Permit (DZP). This article argues that DZP applicants were liminal beings who were unclassifiable, situated between legal and illegal, legitimate and illegitimate status. As people with yet undefinable political belongingness, they repeatedly travelled to queues at Home Affairs offices where they experienced direct and indirect violence as well as harassment and victimisation by criminals and security officials alike. Based on data gathered through interviews in Cape Town, this article concludes that DZP applicants endured waiting because of the desire to end the legal and juridical ambiguity of an undocumented status that inhibits access to rights and protections encoded in domestic and international law.
{"title":"Liminality in incorporation: regularisation of undocumented Zimbabweans in South Africa","authors":"Shingirai Nyakabawu","doi":"10.1080/23323256.2021.1878381","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23323256.2021.1878381","url":null,"abstract":"Since 2000, large numbers of undocumented Zimbabweans have settled in South Africa in search of better living opportunities. In 2010, the South African government approved an immigration amnesty known as the Dispensation Zimbabwe Permit (DZP). This article argues that DZP applicants were liminal beings who were unclassifiable, situated between legal and illegal, legitimate and illegitimate status. As people with yet undefinable political belongingness, they repeatedly travelled to queues at Home Affairs offices where they experienced direct and indirect violence as well as harassment and victimisation by criminals and security officials alike. Based on data gathered through interviews in Cape Town, this article concludes that DZP applicants endured waiting because of the desire to end the legal and juridical ambiguity of an undocumented status that inhibits access to rights and protections encoded in domestic and international law.","PeriodicalId":54118,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Southern Africa","volume":"43 1","pages":"1 - 15"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79000394","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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