Dr Penny Bernard
Penny Bernard, a Senior Lecturer in the department, received her PhD in April 2010. The title of her PhD thesis is Messages from the Deep: Water Divinities, Dreams and Diviners in Southern Africa. The primary focus of this research was a comparative study of the phenomenon of the water divinities and their role in diviner training throughout southern Africa. Her incorporation and subsequent initiation into a diviner (izangoma) training school in KwaZulu Natal enabled Penny to use the radical participation method to explore the potential value of the anthropology of extraordinary experience, particularly through the use of dreams, in aiding our understanding the water divinity phenomenon.
Other areas of interest that have emerged as a result of this research are the issues of morality that are central to diviner-healer training, and the problems, conflicts and temptations that pervade these traditional healing professions in contemporary South Africa. This relates primarily to the forces of modernity, and the emerging and contradictory pressures that desire for individual accumulation of resources, prestige and power bring. The research has also highlighted the processes by which diviner-healers accommodate, or symbolically convert, Christianity into their cosmologies and practices, particularly as they relate to water rituals, baptism, healing and power. The research also contributes to the growing rock art literature that suggests that there may be a connection between the beliefs relating to the underwater experience, and the various divinities associated with the experience, to some aspects of San rock art.
Penny is also interested in the broader concept of healing that her doctoral research has afforded her, especially in relation to her biomedical nursing training. She has a broad understanding of Medical Anthropology which she has taught to 3rd year anthropology students for the last 14 years. She was a collaborator on a SANPAD project investigating the impact of Tuberculosis on the Grahamstown community (Investigator – Dr Valerie Moller) where she supervised a Masters student who subsequently graduated with distinction.
Emerging from Penny’s PhD research was the realization of the central importance of various sacred natural sites and natural resources for healers who are given information regarding these sites in their dreams. Such experiences constitute an essential component of southern African indigenous knowledge systems. However, it became evident that there are many problems healers encounter in accessing these sites and their resources, and many of these sites are facing environmental and/or spiritual destruction due to development induced damage, including tourism. The conviction that these issues needed to be explored more widely and measures taken to protect healers rights of access and protection of such sites, as a means of protecting their knowledge, led to Penny’s NRF funded research program ‘Knowledge, Nature and Resource Rights’. Thanks to the generous funding from the NRF she was able to fund a number of post-graduates to explore these issues at various sites across the country from 2001-2005, with five students graduating with Masters degrees and one with a PhD.
Penny’s teaching interests and experience also reflect these interests. She has taught environmental anthropology to 2nd year anthropology students for the last 14 years, a large component of which examines the notion of indigenous peoples, IKS and bio-cultural diversity. She has also taught Landscape Anthropology to honours students on a regular basis. Penny has collaborated on two SANPAD projects (Investigator – Dr Michelle Cocks) supervising Masters’ students exploring the topic on amaXhosa perceptions of the landscape, and narratives regarding sacred sites and landscape. Currently she is collaborating with Dr Nomfundo Mlisa of Fort Hare University on another NRF IKS funded project held by Dr Mlisa on the topic of ‘Traditional Healers in Transition’.
Penny can be contacted at p.bernard@ru.ac.za.
