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