(RETROSPECTIVE) CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: ELAINE SALO HONOURS ESSAY COMPETITION - 2020, 2021, 2022.

 

Elaine Salo: 1962–2016

Elaine Rosa Salo trained in anthropology at UCT in the early 1980s. She was a feminist scholar, she completed her PhD at Emory, examining gendered roles in Mannenberg, Cape Town. She was part of UCT's African Gender Institute from 2000 to 2008, before leaving to become director of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Pretoria. She became associate professor in political science and international relations at the University of Delaware in 2014. 

The Elaine Salo Honours Prize was introduced in 2016. The prize is awarded to the best student essay submitted by a honours student as a paper at the annual Anthropology Southern Africa conference.

Congratulations to our 2018 winner Aimée Mutabazi

Previous Winners

2018: Aimée Mutabazi

2017: Hestia Victor

2016: Julia Munroe

          Chloe Shain

 

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2018 Aimée Gratia Ilibagiza Mutabazi

Biography 

Imana yirirwa ahandi igataha iRwanda [God roams elsewhere in the world and returns to rest in Rwanda]. This Rwanda mentioned is the birthplace of Aimée Gratia Ilibagiza Mutabazi who, due to the war in 1994, had to flee it and seek refuge elsewhere in the world. The saying both hints at the importance of Rwanda as the resting place of God and at God’s timeless wondering away from it in the world. This paradoxical contemplation characterizes much of the personal and professional aspirations that Aimée Gratia is drawn to. Currently as a Master of Arts candidate in Anthropology, her academic interests include identity reconstruction amongst Rwandan refugees who live and have grown up in exile. She draws largely from her experience as both Rwandan refugee and South African permanent resident to reflect on the ambivalent feelings of growing up away from home and having to live in different cultural contexts to make sense of life.
Aimée Gratia is a traditional Rwandan dancer in a Johannesburg based refugee cultural group. It is from here that she has drawn much of her creative and intellectual inspiration for her academic and community service work. She is a Mellon Mays fellow and has presented her research at Bowdoin College and Columbia University at summer institutes in the United States. Passionately curious about humanity, Aimée Gratia describes herself as a creatively intuitive person who strives to find collaborations between her African-orientated academic work and broader social, political and artistic spaces. She is also interested in the role of African women in knowledge production as well as their financial emancipation as community builders.

Abstract: Drawing inspiration from critical theorists such as Weheliye (2008) and Nietzsche (1967), in this paper I show how one community of refugees—my own—makes life, time and value beyond the immediate present. I do this through an auto-ethnographic account of Gihozo, a Rwandan traditional dance group in Johannesburg. The paper contributes to a different vantage of discourse on refugees which often centres on their political integration in host countries, and their potential for renewed violence due to ‘anti-social’ behaviour. Popular representations of refugees tend to present them as helpless victims of circumstances beyond their control, while even radical scholars such as Agamben (1998) write of the refugee as the embodiment of ‘bare life’. The voices, narratives and experiences of refugees is often drowned out amongst intervention and integration programs, political policies, and the stamp of humanitarianism which further marginalizes and undermine their agency in creating and determining their identity. Refugee identity and its space in society and discourse is thus often explored so that it may inform how refugees can be pragmatically dealt with, in the places they reside in.
Using the framework of kwitoza (to practise; to exercise), I trace how the participants of Gihozo creatively make the world anew through improvisations with space, the movements of their bodies through dance, and how they engage dialogically with different kinds of audiences that position them in relation to different scales of context. These audiences range from Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) and civil society structures on the one hand; and intra-community functions such as marriage parties and political memorials on the other.

 

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 2017 Hestia Victor

Biography 

I am currently an MA student in Social Anthropology at the North West University under supervision of Dr André Goodrich. My love for ethnography was sparked when I (with a group of fellow final year students) was assigned to write up the life story of an old ‘coloured’ man who was forcibly removed from his house by the apartheid state during the late 1960’s. The state’s continued violence imposed upon poor South Africans even after the dispersal of the apartheid state stirred me and inspired my current research interests which are in the creative ways people make life among turbulent economies of state abandonment.

My paper for the 2017 Elaine Salo prize is based on my honours research which was supervised by Pia Bombardella. The paper tells the story of how residents in Marikana, a dusty informal settlement outside Potchefstroom, South Africa, utilised DIY-formalisation and auto-constructed water infrastructures to navigate the troubled waters of state abandonment in order to experience and maintain ‘life in this place’. The life that residents experienced was neither ‘romantically’ resilient nor was it ignorant of adversity. I call this buoyant life.

 

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 2017 Molebogeng Mokoena

Biography 

Molebogeng Mokoena is a student currently completing her honours in anthropology at the University of Pretoria and also tutors first year anthropology students. Her research is centred on the black middle class and their social mobility and she looks at intergenerational wealth transfers within families in Sebokeng, a township in the south of Gauteng

"Inherited inequalities? An ethnography of inheritance and intergenerational wealth transfer in Sebokeng, Emfuleni District Municipality"

Abstract: There is a growing body of research in South Africa focussed on the middle class. Some scholars are focussed on the consumption patterns of the middle class as a way to understand class dynamics and inequality between genders, races and ages in terms of wage differentials. This body of research does not really engage with the issue of intergenerational transfer of wealth. While some scholars write about intergenerational relationships, very little has been written about intergenerational wealth transfers in the black middle class. One of the aims of this research is to contribute to this gap in the literature by exploring social mobility, expectations among the children of teachers (millennials), and cross examining intergenerational wealth transfers between five families in Emfuleni District Municipality. In our public discourse, much is made of popular sentiments such as “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer” but we do not know much about the middle class. This research aims to give insight into this group by using the new perspective of intergenerational wealth transfers. I employed life histories and interviews amongst middle class households in EDM with one or more of the main breadwinners who are employed as teachers. I also employed kinship diagrams to map the flow of intergenerational wealth transfers across the different families. I inquired into what constitutes wealth, what the emerging rules for sharing and transferring such wealth are, whether such forms of wealth are considered as gifts or not, and what relationships get formed or terminated upon the transfer of wealth. A key aspect was discovering whether the breadwinners self-identify as the middle class their occupations ascribe to them.

 

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2016 Julia Munroe

Biography 

Julia Munroe is a South Africa student completing her Anthropology Honours at the University of Cape Town under the supervision of Professor Fiona Ross. Her thesis research explores the work of an NGO which distributes washable sanitary pads to school girls and explores the politics of menstruation in the South African context. She is passionate about gender equality, reproductive health and sustainability.

‘7 Million Girls:’ Menstruation, Dignity and the Politics of Big Numbers

Menstruation is steeped in stigma and taboo thus the difficulties associated with menstrual management are commonly overlooked and under-discussed in South Africa’s public discourse and public policy. In 2011, the NGO the Sanitary Dignity Campaign asserted that in South Africa seven million girls miss a week of school every month because they cannot afford sanitary pads. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with the Sanitary Dignity Campaign over a period of five months, tracing how this narrative successfully engendered and foregrounded a ‘cause’ in public imagination, attracting NGOs, government MPs, students and activists to join forces in the name of ‘7 million girls’. This paper argues that the significant success of this campaign is twofold: regardless of the ‘truth value’ of the statistic of seven million, framing girls’ menstrual-related difficulties in terms of a ‘big number’ rendered the issue quantifiable and therefore ‘real’ in the eyes of a society which takes statistics as objective and ‘factual’. Secondly, by discussing a stigmatised, menstrual-related issue in terms of girls’ dignity and education the Sanitary Dignity Campaign’s narrative ‘sanitised’ a previously ‘unsanitary’ issue by rather framing it in terms girls’ constitutional rights and the contravention thereof. As a result of these processes, I argue, we can see the emergence of a greater awareness of a ‘gendered citizen’ and what such citizens might need in order for their basic constitutional rights to be met.

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From the editor's desk

Welcome to Anthropology Southern Africa 2014

Heike Becker, Ilana van Wyk & Kathleen Lorne McDougall

pages 1-2

 

SPECIAL SECTION: Life, form, substance: anthropological investigations
Life, form, substance: anthropological investigations

Fiona C. Ross

pages 3-6

 

Exit/Exist: Gregory Maqoma's dance and the call to life

Patricia C. Henderson

pages 7-18

Abstract
The paper explores life-giving qualities of creativity and self-stylisation in the performance art and dance of contemporary South African choreographer Gregory Maqoma. Placing his performance Exit/Exist in conversation with social theories of becoming, desire and futurity explored in the work of anthropologists Elizabeth Povinelli and Henrietta Moore, and the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, the paper gestures towards a vitalist understanding of sociality. The approach suggests potentiality rather than limitation, fragmentation and depletion. In the face of a neo-liberal world order and the lingering influence of apartheid history, much of South African social analysis continues to reiterate forms of structural violence that constrain lives. Such an emphasis cannot account for the ways in which individuals sometimes force celebratory and defiant images of themselves into the public realm, issuing into being new publics, locally and abroad.

Subjects: creativity, dance, memory, potentiality, self-stylisation

 

Just living: genealogic, honesty and the politics of apartheid time

Kathleen Lorne McDougall

pages 19-29

Abstract
“We were just living,” I was told of growing up an Afrikaner as apartheid was born. Is it possible for living at this time to be anything but political? To say “we were just living” of being an Afrikaner at this time is a political statement as much as a claim to there being a time outside of politics, a claim to being apolitical. Based on fieldwork with Afrikaner genealogists, genetic disease scientists and separatists, this paper considers the deliberative constitution of a time outside “the political” that is, nevertheless, always already political. This is a creative time that makes it possible to change history and express changed political points of view. It can also be a space for disingenuous disavowal of the aggressive nature of apartheid, and the history of present-day privilege. Genealogic suggests that the imbrication of life and politics be thought of in terms of temporality, and in relation to conceptions of history, destiny, contingency and honesty.

Subjects: Afrikaner, culture, genealogy, historiography, life, politics, post-apartheid, temporality

 

Knowledge of life: health, strength and labour in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Thomas Cousins

pages 30-41

Abstract
The article examines the production of new modes of calculation, calibration and measurement of bodies at work in the timber plantations of northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa — modes that echo older, diverse technologies of self and health while producing new ways of talking about the body and its social context. I describe two sets of substances that augment wellbeing for those who work the plantations, one in the form of a nutrition intervention and the other a class of popular curatives that operate in the registers of traditional medicine, vitamin supplement, and herbal tonic. I track the concepts and techniques of measurement, calibration and intervention in this locale in order to understand how they employ and generate ideas about culture, history, and wellbeing to produce new populations available for labour — as timber plantation labourers and as compliant HIV surveillance subjects.

Subjects: health, life, labour, measurement, vitalism

 

The politics and aesthetics of commemoration: national days in southern Africa

Heike Becker & Carola Lentz

pages 1-10

Abstract
The contributions to the special section in this issue study recent independence celebrations and other national days in South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo. They explore the role of national days in state-making and nation-building, and examine the performativity of nationalism and the role of performances in national festivities. Placing the case studies in a broader, comparative perspective, the introduction first discusses the role of the state in national celebrations, highlighting three themes: firstly, the political power-play and contested politics of memory involved in the creation of a country's festive calendar; secondly, the relationship between state control of national days and civic or popular participation or contestation; and thirdly, the complex relationship between regional and ethnic loyalties and national identifications. It then turns to the role of performance and aesthetics in the making of nations in general, and in national celebrations in particular. Finally, we look at the different formats and meanings of national days in the region and address the question whether there is anything specific about national days in southern Africa as compared to other parts of the continent or national celebrations world-wide.

Subjects: Southern Africa, national days, nationalism, national celebrations, performance, aesthetics

 

Public holidays as lieux de mémoire: nation-building and the politics of public memory in South Africa

Sabine Marschall

pages 11-21

Abstract
This article engages with public holidays in post-apartheid South Africa as lieux de mémoire, ‘sites of memory’ that preserve particular interpretations of historical events and selected heroes for inscription into the collective memory of the nation. It first traces the legislative process that resulted in the official rearrangement of the festive calendar after the 1994 first general elections, exploring the political and pragmatic considerations that influenced the selection of public holidays. Based on a survey conducted in the Durban area, the paper then engages with the public reception of the new festive calendar and the knowledge that people of different demographic backgrounds appear to have about the historical events commemorated. It is argued that the creation of the post-apartheid festive calendar reflects the spirit of the tense transition period with its concern for tolerance, reconciliation and national unity, but that these national holidays have largely failed as memory sites and instruments of nation-building.

Subjects: South Africa, post-apartheid, public holidays, lieu de mémoire, memory, nation

 

‘Zimbabwe will never be a colony again’: changing celebratory styles and meanings of independence

Wendy Willemsa

pages 22-33

Abstract
As part of a revival of cultural nationalism, state-led national-day celebrations intensified in Zimbabwe in the early 2000s through the introduction of popular music events alongside the traditional official, militarised ceremony. Independence Day, in particular, provided ZANU-PF with an excellent opportunity to mediate a narrow version of the ‘party-nation’ that defined ‘Zimbabweanness’ in terms of everything that the growing opposition Movement for Democratic Change was not. The appropriation of national-day celebrations for party-political purposes turned these events into highly controversial and contested ceremonies. In this article, I focus both on the changing aesthetics, modes and styles of Independence Day celebrations in Zimbabwe, and the way in which meanings of independence have been rewritten and contested in recent years. The malleability of national days made it possible for ZANU-PF to adjust both the style and meaning of Independence Day to suit a new context. In the early 1980s, ‘independence’ referred to the struggle to escape from the Rhodesian colonial yoke, but in the early 2000s ZANU-PF began to interpret ‘independence’ primarily as economic freedom and as the continuing battle to remain free from the intervention of external actors such as the MDC—a party it considered to be driven by the interests of the United States, Europe and white farmers. While the protocol of the official Independence Day ceremony was tightly controlled, a number of spaces opened up in the early 2000s that enabled Zimbabweans to debate their history and heritage via alternative channels, such as political party websites and in private newspapers, which underlines the crucial role of both old and new media in collective memory.

Subjects: Africa, Zimbabwe, national days, cultural nationalism, independence, new media

 

From ‘One Namibia, one Nation’ towards ‘Unity in Diversity’? Shifting representations of culture and nationhood in Namibian Independence Day celebrations, 1990–2010

Michael Uusiku Akuupa & Godwin Kornes

pages 34-46

Abstract
In 2010 Namibia celebrated its twentieth anniversary of independence from South African rule. The main celebrations in the country's capital Windhoek became the stage for an impressively orchestrated demonstration of maturing nationhood, symbolically embracing postcolonial policy concepts such as ‘national reconciliation’, ‘unity’ and ‘diversity’. At the same time, nation building in post-apartheid Namibia is characterised by a high degree of social and political fragmentation that manifests itself in cultural and/or ethnic discourses of belonging. Taking the highly significant independence jubilee as our vantage point, we map out a shift of cultural representations of the nation in Independence Day celebrations since 1990, embodied by the two prominent slogans of ‘One Namibia, one Nation’ and ‘Unity in Diversity’. As we will argue, the difficult and at times highly fragile postcolonial disposition made it necessary for the SWAPO government, as primary nation builder, to accommodate the demands of regions and local communities in its policy frameworks. This negotiation of local identifications and national belonging in turn shaped, and continues to shape, the performative dimension of Independence Day celebrations in Namibia.

Subjects: Namibia, Swapo, national day, Independence Day, national commemoration, cultural nationalism, unity in diversity, Kavango, Omaheke

 

National days between commemoration and celebration: remembering 1947 and 1960 in Madagascar

Mareike Späth & Helihanta Rajaonarison

pages 47-57

Abstract
Today Madagascar officially celebrates two national holidays. 29 March is dedicated to the memory of anticolonial resistance in 1947, the commemoration of the dead and the decoration of surviving combatants. 26 June in contrast is celebrated as Madagascar's return to independence in 1960 with parades, cultural performances, singing and dancing. But consecutive governments have altered state politics of commemoration and non-state actors have influenced the way in which 1947 and 1960 are remembered.
This study of national days in Madagascar offers an interpretation of the different ways the two key events of national history have been remembered within the fifty years since Independence. Looking into complexities of commemorative practices we question the juxtaposition of commemorating sad events and celebrating joyful ones. Commemoration and celebration make up two poles of a continuum on which the valence memory-making can be placed. We notice that both ends are manifest in nationwide commemorative activities and thus allow for diverging narratives and keep the nation's sentiments between mourning and rejoicing in balance. To illustrate this argument we explore the interrelationship and interdependency of the said national days in Madagascar.
To consider different activities between celebration and commemoration to remember 1947 and 1960 we analyse historical and anthropological data of official and private Malagasy commemorative practises with respect to their polyvalence, flexibility and versatility.

Subjects: Madagascar, national holiday, insurrection of 1947, independence, memory, commemoration, celebration

 

The drama(s) of Independence Day: reflections on political affects and aesthetics in Kinshasa (2010)

Katrien Pype

pages 58-67

Abstract
On June 30 2010, in Kinshasa, a “drama” unfolded as the military march was abruptly interrupted by street children intermingling and enacting ndombolo-inspired dances in front of the president. Police and soldiers started beating up people; the state radio and television channels aborted the live broadcasts; and people were urged to return home. The order and discipline that the military march had expressed, had in a few seconds given way to chaos.
I take this “drama” as a case to study political sensibilities in contemporary Kinshasa. The main premise is that performances are not merely ‘representations’, but are also crucial events within the circulation of feelings and affects. Therefore, both political aesthetics and affects involved in this ‘drama of Independence Day’ will be studied. I first juxtapose the various aesthetics at play in the independence festivities, both performed in the défilé (military-inspired aesthetics) and afterwards (the ‘popular’, sexually explicit dances); and then analyse the ways in which these performances and reactions express different senses of ‘nationhood’ and different relations to the state.

Subjects: DR Congo, youth, dance, media, resistance, propaganda, public ritual

 

Beyond ethical imperatives in South African anthropology: morally repugnant and unlikeable subjects

Ilana van Wyk

pages 68-79

Abstract
In this article, I argue that anthropologists' dislike of their subjects in the field poses both epistemological and ethical questions that go beyond concerns about harming or exploiting those we study, about maintaining human relationships, or about the self-reflexivity and competence of individual anthropologists. While dislike threatens the very basis of our claims to know and to engage in proper ethical relationships with those we study, I argue that acknowledged and interrogated, dislike need not prevent research among ‘unlikeable’ or morally ‘repugnant’ Others. Indeed, as South African anthropologists move away from theoretical concerns with structure, the question of dislike could become more common.

Subjects: South African anthropology, fieldwork methodology, ethics, moral repugnance, self-reflexivity, Christian Fundamentalism

 

Leading while being led: developing the developer at a Catholic NGO in Cape Town

Grant A. Fore

pages 80-90

Abstract
The paper uses ethnographic data about the religious ethics undergirding the discourse and practices of development agents at Catholic Welfare and Development (CWD), a faith-based NGO in Cape Town, South Africa. It explores how the dynamic interrelation between faith and ethics permeated the development encounter and produced particular modalities for the ethical/moral development of the subjectivities of CWD's developers. Informed by their own experiences of development, developers attempted to ‘develop’ those they considered to be beneficiaries. The paper argues, and provides evidence to demonstrate that, through the shared experience of development as an interpersonal and intersubjective encounter, both developers and beneficiaries were developed, while they also developed each other. It goes on to suggest that this finding challenges the binary representation of development relationships (developer/beneficiary) and that-despite the asymmetry of the reciprocities involved-it is misleading to think in such dichotomous terms, precisely because doing that misrepresents the power and agency wielded by each subject position in every development encounter.

Subjects: Development, religion, ethics, intersubjectivity, agency, empowerment, participation

 

Book Reviews

Justin Dixon, Ilana van Wyk, Heike Becker & Denver Davids

pages 91-97

Instructions for authors (download)

More detailed information can be found on the journal's website https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rasa20

 

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To assure the integrity, dissemination, and protection against copyright infringement of published articles, you will be asked to assign us, via a Publishing Agreement, the copyright in your article. “Your article” is defined as the final, definitive, and citable Version of Record, and includes: (a) the accepted manuscript in its final form, including the abstract, text, bibliography, and all accompanying tables, illustrations, data; and (b) any supplemental material hosted by Taylor & Francis. Our Publishing Agreement with you will constitute the entire agreement and the sole understanding between you and us; no amendment, addendum, or other communication will be taken into account when interpreting your and our rights and obligations under this Agreement.

 

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ASnA Editorial Collective

Editors

Leah Junck (African Observatory on Responsible AI, South Africa), South Africa

Tarminder Kaur (University of Johannesburg), South Africa

Efua Prah (University of Johannesburg), South Africa

 

Book Review Editor 

Hameedah Parker (University of the Western Cape), South Africa

 

Translator

Juliana Braz Dias (University of Brasília), Brazil

 

Editorial Board

Sophie Chevalier (Université de Picardie Jules Verne), France

Teresa Connor (University of Fort Hare), South Africa 

Sylvia Croese (University of California-Irvine), United States 

Gregor Dobler (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg), Germany 

Joost Fontein (University of Johannesburg), South Africa

Divine Fuh (University of Cape Town), South Africa 

Claudia Gastrow (University of Johannesburg), South Africa 

Kelly Gillespie (University of the Western Cape), South Africa 

Simbarashe Gukurume (Sol Plaatje University), South Africa 

Pamila Gupta (University of the Free State), South Africa 

Rita Kesselring (University of Basel), Switzerland 

Thomas Kirsch (Universität Konstanz), Germany 

Gilson Lázaro (Agostinho Neto University), Angola

Lenore Manderson (University of the Witwatersrand), South Africa

Sandra Manuel (Eduardo Mondlane University), Mozambique 

Godfrey Maringira (Sol Plaatje University), South Africa

Fraser McNeill (University of Pretoria), South Africa 

Katerina Mildnerova (Palacky University), Czech Republic 

Sethunya Mosime (University of Botswana), Botswana 

Maheshvari Naidu (University of KwaZulu-Natal), South Africa 

Romie Nghitevelekwa (University of Namibia), Namibia 

Julia Pauli (University of Hamburg), Germany 

Octavia Sibanda (For Hare University), South Africa

Shaheed Tayob (Stellenbosch University), South Africa 

Christian Williams (University of the Free State), South Africa

 

Honorary Editorial Board members

Jean Comaroff (Harvard University), United States

James Ferguson (Stanford University), United States

Robert Gordon (University of the Free State), South Africa

Deborah James (London School of Economics and Political Science), London

Francis Nyamnjoh (University of Cape Town), South Africa

Ross Parsons (Africa University, retired), Zimbabwe

Andrew “Mugsy” Spiegel (University of Cape Town), South Africa

Fiona Ross (University of Cape Town), South Africa

Richard Werbner (University of Manchester), United Kingdom

 

Updated May 2024

 

About ASnA

Anthropology Southern Africa is the professional association for social anthropologists living and working in Southern Africa. We represent members in seven Southern African countries. ASnA organises the largest anthropological conference in southern Africa and collaborates with other anthropological organisations across the continent, and world. We provide a venue for publishing academic papers via our journal Anthropology Southern Africa. Our mandate is to:

• Promote anthropology in southern Africa.
• Support anthropological research.
• Disseminate anthropological knowledge in the academic milieu and to the wider public.

 

Anthropology Southern Africa

Formerly the South African Journal of Ethnology (1994–2001), the journal changed name and focus in 2002 and is published under the auspices of the Anthropology Southern Africa association. Since 2014, Anthropology Southern Africa (ASnA) has been co-published by Taylor and Francis and NISC on behalf of the association.

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