I Niehaus
Biographic Data
| ID | 16043 |
|---|---|
| NAME | I Niehaus |
| GIVEN NAMES | I |
| FAMILY NAME | Niehaus |
| SIGNATURE | NIEHAUS I |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brunel University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9573-0238 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 62 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 323 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 62 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Modern Art and Radcliffe‐Brown's Scientific Aesthetics
L'art moderne a sans doute constitué une source d'inspiration majeure pour l'approche structuro-fonctionnaliste défendue par A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. cette hypothèse est contre-intuitive quand on sait qu'il est réputé pour avoir défendu une méthode scientifique positiviste, plutôt qu'humaniste, de l'étude de la vie sociale. C'est sans compter sur le fait qu'il n'existait pas de fossé infranchissable entre les sciences et les arts au début du XXe si…
Caroline Frances White (1941–2025)
Caroline Frances White (1941–2025). Anthropology Southern Africa. Ahead of Print. Caroline Frances White (1941–2025). Anthropology Southern Africa. Ahead of Print.
Joking, joke telling and the making of mutuality in the South African Lowveld
In this article I endorse the contention that humour presents a window onto the complicated social relationships and consciousness of speakers and listeners. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in Bushbuckridge, South Africa, I observe that improvised joking and the telling of standard jokes have proliferated over the past three decades. I suggest that we can understand both forms of humour as bids to construct intimate interpersonal relat…
Blood, ancestral spirits and witches
In this article, I express profound scepticism about recent theories that de-emphasise the centrality of procreation and shared blood in the determination of kinship. These theorists posit that in many ethnographic situations the incarnation of spirits, the sharing of names, coming of age in the same house, and joint consumption of certain foods may be more important criteria. Contra these theorists I suggest that these are more likely to be comp…
Memorandum on the problem of farm labour (1937)
In 1937, Max Gluckman submitted a memorandum to a commission of inquiry into the shortage of farm labour in South Africa. In the memorandum, he criticised the presumption that the government should induce African male migrants from the reserves to work on white-owned farms and sugar plantations as “wrong”. Gluckman observed that African men preferred more prestigious and better paid work in the mines and towns. Rather than increase the number of …
On the mobility of ghosts
In studies of Southern Africa, ancestors and possessing spirits have received far greater attention than ghosts. It is only in recent years that fragmentary references to ghosts have begun to appear in the ethnographic record. In this article, I seek to redress this imbalance by documenting stories and accounts of encounters with ghosts in the South African lowveld. I turn to studies of ghosts in Asia and elsewhere as an analytical starting point…
Chapter 1 Kuru, Aids, and Witchcraft
Gluckman’s Legacy
Werbner, Richard. (2020), Anthropology after Gluckman: The Manchester School, Colonial and Postcolonial Transformations (Manchester: Manchester University Press
Savages Have No Crime
During 1931, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown gave a popular talk at Columbia University in New York. He maintained that, unlike in the West, savage societies - a term commonly used at the time - had no criminal class and had succeeded in enforcing conformity to social norms. In this article, I suggest that, despite its defects, the talk highlights central themes in Radcliffe-Brown's thinking about conformity, social sanctions and the law. Drawing on archi…
Blaming the father
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…
The 'ethnographic life' of Max Gluckman
In recent years, we have seen a growing body of literature on the lives and works of key institutions and scholars that have shaped the history of social anthropology in southern Africa. This study
Seeing Through Dreams
In Bushbuckridge, South Africa, persons receiving Highly Active Antiretroviral Treatment (HAART) for AIDS often recounted their experiences of vivid, frightening dreams. Drawing on the results of long-term fieldwork and on biographical interviews, I explore the meanings of these dreams in local discourses. Contrary to the biomedical fraternity, which depicted such dreams as a simple biochemical side-effect of the compound Efavirenz, research part…
H elman, C ecil (1944–2009)
Cecil Helman was an important contributor to the development of medical anthropology. After studying medicine in South Africa and social anthropology in the United Kingdom, Helman worked as a general practitioner in London. He also pursued an interest in the arts, taught courses in medical anthropology, and researched South African and Brazilian folk healing. Helman is known for the accessibility of his writings. His textbook, Culture, Health and…
Anthropology at the dawn of apartheid
In this article, I focus on different strategies of anthropological engagement with government and potential funders. I do so by considering the diverse nature of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski's encounters with South African authorities, between 1919 and 1934. I suggest that Radcliffe-Brown saw South Africa as an integrated society in which segregation was impossible, and advocated the sympathetic scientific understanding of cul…
Marriage, kinship and childcare in the aftermath of Aids
In this article I consider the significance of marriage from the vantage point of children’s affiliation to domestic units during the era of South Africa’s AIDS pandemic. Drawing on multi-temporal fieldwork in Impalahoek, a village in the Bushbuckridge municipality of the South African lowveld, I suggest that AIDS-related diseases and deaths have led to the further erosion of marriage and to the greater absence of fathers in the lives of children…
Making and unmaking public health in Africa
This excellent volume explores the diverse meanings of public health in Africa. Our current vision of public health – as work by modern governments to protect and promote the health of citizens – is most fully embodied in twentieth-century European welfare and socialist states. But in Africa, as the contributors show, we cannot take these meanings for granted. In the introduction Prince argues that pre-colonial understandings of health extended b…
The indigenous system of social relations (1934), with an introduction by Isak Niehaus
This article reproduces, with minor editorial changes, a previously unpublished paper presented by Agnes Winifred Hoernlé to the New Education Fellowship Conference in Johannesburg in 1934. Hoernlé argues that education is vitally important in preparing the next generation of Africans for life in a complex emerging civilisation, in which European social patterns are imposed on African ones. Hoernlé acknowledges that many Africans live in towns an…
Moralising Magic? A Brief History of Football Potions in a South African Homeland Area, 1958 - 2010
In this article I show how a brief history of the use of an exceptionally wide variety of potions with assumed mystical effects by football teams in the Bushbuckridge area of South Africa provides a unique vantage point for understanding men's experiences of political and economic transformations associated with the homeland system. Historically, the advent of football coincided with the establishment of the Lebowa and Gazankulu homelands in the …
Warriors of the rainbow nation? South African rugby after apartheid
In this article I seek to account for the special appeal of rugby to white, particularly Afrikaner, men in South Africa, by treating rugby as a social phenomenon. I suggest that at a metaphorical level formulaic elements of the sport resonate with those of modern military and bureaucratic institutions that were so prominent in the history of Afrikaners. However, whilst rugby embodies historical memories, Afrikaner men's participation in the sport…
Treatment Literacy, Therapeutic Efficacy, and Antiretroviral Drugs
Health activists often see the uptake of antiretroviral drugs and adherence to antiretroviral treatment as the outcome of 'treatment literacy.' Organizations have invested considerable resources into educating the public in conventional scientific understandings of HIV and AIDS. Drawing on the results of fieldwork in South Africa and the life history of a man living with AIDS, I highlight the complex and unstable relationship that exists between …
Kuru, Aids, and Witchcraft
This article examines the significance of witchcraft accusations during the South African AIDS epidemic. In search of broader intercontextual understanding, I compare experiences of AIDS in Bushbuck ridge, where I have done fieldwork, with anthropological studies of kuru, a transmissible degenerative disease, in Papua New Guinea. Whereas scientists blamed the spread of kuru on the practice of cannibalism, those who were affected attributed it to …
Averting danger
In this article, I provide a new interpretation of taboos in the Southern African lowveld – particularly those pertaining to sex, pregnancy, abortion, death and widowhood. I argue that an appropriate starting point for understanding such taboos is to focus analytical attention on emic understandings of the body. Residents of Bushbuckridge in South Africa saw bodies as permeable, partible and constantly engaged in the transfer and exchange of aura…
Contingent citizens
Contingent citizens: professional aspiration in a South African hospital." Anthropology Southern Africa, 43(3), pp. 211–212
The Life and Time of Monica Wilson
Desire Work
Desire Work: Ex-Gay and Pentecostal Masculinity in South Africa." Ethnos, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2
Witches and Zombies of the South African Lowveld
Anthropological studies generally interpret discourses about witches and zombies in sub-Saharan Africa as critical commentary on the emergence of new forms of wealth, the commodification of labour, and the crisis of reproduction. Drawing on data collected in the Bushbuckridge area of the South African lowveld, I point to the limitations of these arguments and suggest that we can more fully capture the diverse and contradictory meanings of witches…
Witch-hunting and political legitimacy
With reference to the history of the village of Green Valley in the South Africanbantustanof Lebowa over the past six decades, this article examines the complex relation-ship between witch-hunting and political action. I argue against common notions in anthropological literature that political actors engage in witch-hunting in an attempt to mystify exploitation or to intimidate opponents. Such notions overemphasise the instrumental dimensions of …
Death before Dying
This article explores some of the social and cultural factors that have undermined effective treatment and care for persons living with AIDS in South Africa. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bushbuckridge, I observe that AIDS stigma has been both pervasive and intense. However, contrary to conventional wisdom, I argue that the association of AIDS with sexual promiscuity has not been the major source of its stigma. Instead, I suggest…
Renegotiating Masculinity in the South African Lowveld
Sexual preferences prejudices and stereotypes bedevil the study of male-male sex and the transmission of HIV in Southern Africa. This is particularly so in the context of the growing tide of homophobia sweeping through our sub-continent. Robert Mugabe president of Zimbabwe and Sam Nujoma his Namibian counterpart regularly describe same sex erotic relations as an un-African disease introduced by disreputable European settlers. Both repeatedly thre…
Disharmonious spouses and harmonious siblings
Ethnographic studies on Southern Africa have recorded intense levels of marital instability and domestic disorganisation. Yet little attention has been focused on new forms of households that have emerged in this context. With reference to case material on the town of Phuthaditjhaba in Qwaqwa, this paper suggests that co-operative relations between siblings have become a central principle underlying household formation
Bodies, Heat, and Taboos
The meta-narrative of modernity often posits an inevitable shift from to modalities of personhood. This presumes that with growing commodificatiion, persons are no longer enmeshed in networks of reciprocal exchange, but acquire a sense of individual autonomy, and perceive the body as bounded from external influences. The villagers in the Bushbuckridge area of Africa, however, continue to perceive the body as permeable and partible. They believe t…
Doing Politics in Bushbuckridge
In the South African national elections of 2004 the ruling ANC (African National Congress) increased its majority, particularly within the poorer, black, rural voting districts. Drawing on ethnographic research that I conducted in Impalahoek - a village in the Bushbuckridge municipality of the Limpopo Province - this paper investigates reasons for this pattern of voting. With reference to a survey of 87 households I show that unemployment, crime …
Dr. Wouter Basson, Americans, and Wild Beasts
This article investigates HIV/AIDS as a cosmological problem among Northern Sotho and Tsonga-speakers in the South African lowveld. Based on in-depth interviews with 70 informants (35 men and 35 women) I show how the attribution of blame for HIV/AIDS articulates gendered concerns. I suggest that women blamed men and envious nurses for spreading the virus and that these discourses expressed women's ideological association with the domestic domain.…
Towards a Dubious Liberation
This article investigates how masculine sexuality featured as a political issue during the liberation struggle in Impalahoek, a village on the South African lowveld. The starting point of my analysis is the repressive regime in primary and high schools during the period of Bantu Education, from 1953 to 1986. I show that whilst teachers strictly prohibited and harshly punished all forms of sexuality between students, male teachers freely engaged i…
Witchcraft as subtext
Anthropologists have documented pervasive discourses about witchcraft in South Africa. The issue of witchcraft gained prominence during the latter years of apartheid when youths called ‘Comrades’ sought to cleanse rural villages in the north‐eastern provinces of witches. However, after apartheid witchcraft has only made a few brief incursions into the South African public sphere. I suggest that the absence of witchcraft in formal political discus…
Perversion of Power
During recent years, fears of witchcraft and the violent punishment of witches have become commonplace in the Bushbuckridge region of the South African lowveld. My fieldwork in a village of Bushbuckridge highlights the crucial importance of sexuality in witchcraft discourses. Narratives about the sexual practices of witches formed part of the same moral system as those about the unacceptable sexual conduct of ordinary villagers. But there were al…
Anthropology and Whites in South Africa
Confronting uncertainty
Anthropological theory has privileged consideration of the regularities of everyday life and has paid far less attention to irregular events that disrupt the social order. In this article, I contribute to ongoing theoretical attempts to redress this imbalance. While I acknowledge the potential historical importance of irregular and extraordinary events, I do not see them as entirely free-floating. Here I concur with Marshall Sahlins, who convinci…
The ANC's Dilemma
Cet essai s'interroge sur la politique symbolique de trois chasses au sorcier dans un royaume du lowfeld sud-africain dans les annees 90. Pendant les dernieres annees de l'Apartheid, de jeunes gens, connus sous le nom de Camarades, assumaient l'avant-garde dans les luttes politiques. Ils s'etaient embarques dans des campagnes de chasse au sorcier pour eliminer le mal et ainsi obtenir une certaine legitimite en tant que mouvement politique. Depuis…
Relocation into Phuthaditjhaba and Tseki
Anthropology at the dawn of apartheid
In this article, I focus on different strategies of anthropological engagement with government and potential funders. I do so by considering the diverse nature of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski's encounters with South African authorities, between 1919 and 1934. I suggest that Radcliffe-Brown saw South Africa as an integrated society in which segregation was impossible, and advocated the sympathetic scientific understanding of cul…
Domestic dynamics and wage labour
Averting danger
In this article, I provide a new interpretation of taboos in the Southern African lowveld – particularly those pertaining to sex, pregnancy, abortion, death and widowhood. I argue that an appropriate starting point for understanding such taboos is to focus analytical attention on emic understandings of the body. Residents of Bushbuckridge in South Africa saw bodies as permeable, partible and constantly engaged in the transfer and exchange of aura…
Ethnicity and the boundaries of belonging
During the 1980s, revisionist studies of ethnicity in southern Africa emphasized how colonial regimes constructed ethnic groups for their own purposes, such as for divide and rule tactics. Drawing on more recent theories on ethnicity, this article re‐examines Shangaan identity in the multi‐ethnic South African lowveld. It highlights the agency of the subordinate to adopt terms of their own definition as the basis for collective assertion, and als…
Treatment Literacy, Therapeutic Efficacy, and Antiretroviral Drugs
Health activists often see the uptake of antiretroviral drugs and adherence to antiretroviral treatment as the outcome of 'treatment literacy.' Organizations have invested considerable resources into educating the public in conventional scientific understandings of HIV and AIDS. Drawing on the results of fieldwork in South Africa and the life history of a man living with AIDS, I highlight the complex and unstable relationship that exists between …
Maternal Incest as Moral Panic
During 2008, rumours about revolting incestuous encounters between sons and their mothers circulated in the Bushbuckridge municipality of the South African lowveld. This article views these rumours as expressing moral panic, paying particular attention to the historical contexts of their emergence and circulation, and to their temporal orientation. I locate these rumours in the periphery of South Africa's de-industrialising economy, marked by inc…
Marriage, kinship and childcare in the aftermath of Aids
In this article I consider the significance of marriage from the vantage point of children’s affiliation to domestic units during the era of South Africa’s AIDS pandemic. Drawing on multi-temporal fieldwork in Impalahoek, a village in the Bushbuckridge municipality of the South African lowveld, I suggest that AIDS-related diseases and deaths have led to the further erosion of marriage and to the greater absence of fathers in the lives of children…
Warriors of the rainbow nation? South African rugby after apartheid
In this article I seek to account for the special appeal of rugby to white, particularly Afrikaner, men in South Africa, by treating rugby as a social phenomenon. I suggest that at a metaphorical level formulaic elements of the sport resonate with those of modern military and bureaucratic institutions that were so prominent in the history of Afrikaners. However, whilst rugby embodies historical memories, Afrikaner men's participation in the sport…
From Witch-hunts to Thief-hunts
This article explores continuities and changes between two forms of political mobilisation in the Bushbuckridge region of South Africa: violent attacks on alleged witches by young men during the late 1980s, and the punishment of thieves and rapists by anti-crime squads since 2009. I suggest that within local knowledge witches, thieves and rapists have important affinities. As ‘absented persons’ they perpetrate negative reciprocity and feed upon o…
A witch has no horn
Domestic dynamics and wage labour
Relocation into Phuthaditjhaba and Tseki
Witch-hunting and political legitimacy
With reference to the history of the village of Green Valley in the South Africanbantustanof Lebowa over the past six decades, this article examines the complex relation-ship between witch-hunting and political action. I argue against common notions in anthropological literature that political actors engage in witch-hunting in an attempt to mystify exploitation or to intimidate opponents. Such notions overemphasise the instrumental dimensions of …
Disharmonious spouses and harmonious siblings
Ethnographic studies on Southern Africa have recorded intense levels of marital instability and domestic disorganisation. Yet little attention has been focused on new forms of households that have emerged in this context. With reference to case material on the town of Phuthaditjhaba in Qwaqwa, this paper suggests that co-operative relations between siblings have become a central principle underlying household formation
Witches of the Transvaal Lowveld and their Familiars. Conceptions of Duality, Power and Desire
In the Transvaal lowveld of South Africa witches are commonly associated with animals. With reference to fieldwordk conducted in the village of Green Valley, this article considers the symbolic meanings of the relationship between witches and two witch-familiars-the apelike tokolose and the snakelike mam-lambo. I argue that this relationship resonates with the duality between a person's body and its animal-like instincts and desires. Whereas the …
A witch has no horn
The ANC's Dilemma
Cet essai s'interroge sur la politique symbolique de trois chasses au sorcier dans un royaume du lowfeld sud-africain dans les annees 90. Pendant les dernieres annees de l'Apartheid, de jeunes gens, connus sous le nom de Camarades, assumaient l'avant-garde dans les luttes politiques. Ils s'etaient embarques dans des campagnes de chasse au sorcier pour eliminer le mal et ainsi obtenir une certaine legitimite en tant que mouvement politique. Depuis…
Towards a Dubious Liberation
This article investigates how masculine sexuality featured as a political issue during the liberation struggle in Impalahoek, a village on the South African lowveld. The starting point of my analysis is the repressive regime in primary and high schools during the period of Bantu Education, from 1953 to 1986. I show that whilst teachers strictly prohibited and harshly punished all forms of sexuality between students, male teachers freely engaged i…
Witchcraft, Power and Politics
Ethnicity and the boundaries of belonging
During the 1980s, revisionist studies of ethnicity in southern Africa emphasized how colonial regimes constructed ethnic groups for their own purposes, such as for divide and rule tactics. Drawing on more recent theories on ethnicity, this article re‐examines Shangaan identity in the multi‐ethnic South African lowveld. It highlights the agency of the subordinate to adopt terms of their own definition as the basis for collective assertion, and als…
Perversion of Power
During recent years, fears of witchcraft and the violent punishment of witches have become commonplace in the Bushbuckridge region of the South African lowveld. My fieldwork in a village of Bushbuckridge highlights the crucial importance of sexuality in witchcraft discourses. Narratives about the sexual practices of witches formed part of the same moral system as those about the unacceptable sexual conduct of ordinary villagers. But there were al…
Bodies, Heat, and Taboos
The meta-narrative of modernity often posits an inevitable shift from to modalities of personhood. This presumes that with growing commodificatiion, persons are no longer enmeshed in networks of reciprocal exchange, but acquire a sense of individual autonomy, and perceive the body as bounded from external influences. The villagers in the Bushbuckridge area of Africa, however, continue to perceive the body as permeable and partible. They believe t…
Renegotiating Masculinity in the South African Lowveld
Sexual preferences prejudices and stereotypes bedevil the study of male-male sex and the transmission of HIV in Southern Africa. This is particularly so in the context of the growing tide of homophobia sweeping through our sub-continent. Robert Mugabe president of Zimbabwe and Sam Nujoma his Namibian counterpart regularly describe same sex erotic relations as an un-African disease introduced by disreputable European settlers. Both repeatedly thre…
Muchongolo Dance Contests
This article argues that Geertz's concern with cultural performances as stories people tell about themselves continues to be a valid focus of anthropological inquiry. Like Balinese cockfights, muchongolo dancing contests in the Bushbuckridge municipality of South Africa offer metacommentary on everyday life and struggles in the form of a competition. Through the juxtaposition of movements and costumes with the actions of spectators outside the da…
Ellis, Stephen & ter Haar, Gerrie. — Worlds of Power
In recent years religion has played a prominent role in international debates about how the world should be governed. In this ambitious monograph Ellis and ter Haar contend that Africa has stood at the heart of these developments and endeavour to show the myriad of different ways in which religious beliefs have shaped political action on the continent. They defend Geertz’s view that we should first attempt to understand religious meanings before …
Dr. Wouter Basson, Americans, and Wild Beasts
This article investigates HIV/AIDS as a cosmological problem among Northern Sotho and Tsonga-speakers in the South African lowveld. Based on in-depth interviews with 70 informants (35 men and 35 women) I show how the attribution of blame for HIV/AIDS articulates gendered concerns. I suggest that women blamed men and envious nurses for spreading the virus and that these discourses expressed women's ideological association with the domestic domain.…
Witches and Zombies of the South African Lowveld
Anthropological studies generally interpret discourses about witches and zombies in sub-Saharan Africa as critical commentary on the emergence of new forms of wealth, the commodification of labour, and the crisis of reproduction. Drawing on data collected in the Bushbuckridge area of the South African lowveld, I point to the limitations of these arguments and suggest that we can more fully capture the diverse and contradictory meanings of witches…
David Hammond-Tooke
Biographical Lessons
Leçons bibliographiques. Vies, sexes et culture chez les Bushbuckridge, Afrique du Sud.Cet article montre que les histoires vécues nous permettent de comprendre la sexualité masculine à un niveau théorique plus général. Je présente ici la vie d'un homme de 38 ans habitant à Bushbuckridge en Afrique du Sud, en m'intéressant plus particulièrement à certaines de ses expériences : socialisation sexuelle, scolarité, initiation, migration professionnel…
Doing Politics in Bushbuckridge
In the South African national elections of 2004 the ruling ANC (African National Congress) increased its majority, particularly within the poorer, black, rural voting districts. Drawing on ethnographic research that I conducted in Impalahoek - a village in the Bushbuckridge municipality of the Limpopo Province - this paper investigates reasons for this pattern of voting. With reference to a survey of 87 households I show that unemployment, crime …
Medicine murder in colonial Lesotho
Death before Dying
This article explores some of the social and cultural factors that have undermined effective treatment and care for persons living with AIDS in South Africa. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bushbuckridge, I observe that AIDS stigma has been both pervasive and intense. However, contrary to conventional wisdom, I argue that the association of AIDS with sexual promiscuity has not been the major source of its stigma. Instead, I suggest…
Ethnographic Sorcery - By Harry G. West
Beyond the utility of violence
This article points to the limitations of utilitarian theories of violence, as evident in the works of anthropologists who insist that all acts of violence either serve instrumental purposes (such as advancing one's own position) or expressive purposes (such as communicating key social ideas). Against the totalizing claims of such theories, the article observes that most homicides that occurred in the South African lowveld village where I conduct…
Reasonable radicals and citizenship in Botswana
Sociology (47 works) · Political science (34 works) · History (33 works) · Law (29 works) · Gender Studies (25 works) · History (20 works) · Law (19 works) · South African History and Culture (19 works) · Politics (16 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (15 works)