Anthropological Perspectives 2009

ELECTIVE MODULE 2: 13 - 24 July 2009

Keiskammahoek from all Angles

[Professors Chris de Wet & Robin Palmer]

The Eastern Cape is in many ways the crossroads of South African society. It is where hunters and herders have interacted for centuries before colonialism, with significant Khoisan influence upon Xhosa culture. It is where European and African cultural groupings first met in significant numbers, where the “Frontier Wars” were fought, where ties of trade, education and religion were developed, and resisted. The Eastern Cape has given birth to some of South Africa’s major cultural and political leaders, as well as to its major millenarian movements. It is in the Eastern Cape that many of the complex patterns of political, territorial and cultural interaction at the basis of contemporary “South Africa” were forged. As such, the Eastern Cape provides a privileged historical and cultural vantage point for scholars seeking to come to grips with the complexities of South African society.

Anthropologists distinguish themselves from other social scientists, not so much by a different theoretical perspective on society, as by the way they go about research. Anthropologists do “field work,” they go and live amongst a group of people different from themselves for an extended period of time, trying to live as much as possible as one of them, on their terms, in order to see things from their perspective. The idea is to try to avoid bringing one’s own cultural way of seeing and evaluating things – one’s own prejudices – to bear on the situation, and to try to provide (while never an objective) at least a more open-ended rendering of the observed situation, which takes account of the way local people view things.

In this module we look together at how selected anthropologists have gone about doing their anthropology in the context of the Eastern Cape – rather than trying to present you with an ‘anthropology of the Eastern Cape’. While you will obviously gain some detailed knowledge of certain ‘communities’ of this region in the course of your readings and seminars, the main purpose of the module is to uncover the different ways in which anthropologists of different generations and with different theoretical perspectives have approached the ‘communities’ they have studied.

We will be considering questions such as

• How have the approaches of anthropologists working in this region influenced the way in which they have defined their research problems, and the socio-cultural issues they studied?

• How have their approaches determined what they have found ‘in the field’?

• How have they written up their findings?

Objectives:

An understanding of the major theoretical trends that have influenced anthropological investigation in relation to 'communities' in the Eastern Cape.

• An understanding of the major theoretical trends that have influenced anthropological investigation in relation to ‘communities’ in the Eastern Cape

• Exposure to some of the classic and contemporary anthropological texts relating to the Eastern Cape

• An appreciation of how different ethnographic and theoretical analyses have built upon each other

• An understanding of how what we take into the field (i.e. our theoretical and other assumptions) influences what we take out of it (i.e. our findings and analyses)

• An exploration of these issues in the context of an actual field situation, that of the Keiskammahoek area, which has both rural and urban components.

Field Trip: From 20 to 24 July

Students will participate in field work in the Keiskammahoek district, accompanied by Professors de Wet and Palmer who have both researched the area extensively. Participants will be staying with families in Chatha, one of the rural villages in the district. Students will be involved in researching the history of land issues, resettlement and development projects in the village of Chatha, guided by input from the lecturers, members of the Chatha Communal Property Association as well as be involved in ongoing interaction with community members of the settlement. The transformation of the town of Keiskammahoek over time will be investigated and related to historical events and processes of political, economic and cultural change.