David B Coplan
Biographic Data
| ID | 76356 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David B Coplan |
| GIVEN NAMES | David B |
| FAMILY NAME | Coplan |
| SIGNATURE | COPLAN D B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Witwatersrand |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 69 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 186 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 69 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Dissociation and Appropriation
Epilogue
Europeans now realize that their waters no longer protect ‘fortress Europe’ from uncontrolled African immigration. In response, European governments attempting to constrict the flow of African migrants toward Europe have created bottlenecks far from the Mediterranean borderlands themselves, through a process called ‘externalization.’ EurAfrican borders: Places, Spaces, Lives looks at migration with reference to the EU’s externalized migration man…
Notes on new and old world African drumming
Certainly the most lasting impression I brought home from my "hippie summer" of 1968 in Berkeley, California was of those fierce conga drum ensembles that gathered almost daily in lower Sproul Plaza. Then, as now, there was great variation in the quality of the playing. On one set of benches sat a motley crew of drum thumpers, banging away without Time; sound and fury signifying egotism and indiscipline. At a deliberate distance sat another ensem…
Community acceptability of minimally invasive autopsy (MIA) in children under five years of age in Soweto, South Africa
This interdisciplinary study, using qualitative and ethnographic research methods, collected data from 330 men and women in Soweto, South Africa, in order to understand the community acceptability of minimally invasive autopsy (MIA) in children who died under five years of age. The study found that the acceptability of MIAs depended on people’s socio-cultural belief systems regarding death and afterlife; on power and gender dynamics within househ…
What did I almost say
Comment on Werbner, Richard. 2015. Divination's grasp: African encounters with the almost said. Bloomington: Indiana University Press
Aids, politics, and music in South Africa
Obituary
Life in the field
People of the Early Caledon River Frontier and Their Encounters
When the early white settlers began crossing the Orange River during the early nineteenth century, they claimed to have found an empty land, and not to have encountered the San (‘Bushman’), Euro-Khoe (‘Bastaard’/Griqua and Koranna) and Bantu-speaking (Batswana and Basotho) inhabitants of the country. This was not at all so, and the undeniability of the encounter was soon made patent by the violent but sometimes collaborative relations that ensued…
Perspective from South Africa
association business, Committee on World Anthropologies, international meeting participation, foreign-based scholars
Introduction
This special issue represents a small milestone in the crossing of Africa into the sovereign territory of border studies. In June 2007, a first step in this direction was taken at the workshop on “African Borderlands Research: Emerging Agendas and Critical Reflections” at the African Studies Centre of the University of Edinburgh. There, the “African Borderland Research Network” ABORNE (www.aborne.org) was founded by fifteen participants as an int…
First meets third
The literature of the US‐Mexico borderlands constitutes a cross‐disciplinary theoretical platform for border studies as a field. In border studies elsewhere, however, very few scholars have carried their investigations beyond their “own” chosen borderland. Viewing the matter from the margin of Africa's deepest South, however, the centrality of the US southwest provides an unavoidable comparative challenge that must be faced. Still, a comparative …
Patterns of Residential Mobility Amongst Children in Greater Johannesburg–Soweto, South Africa
Frequent residential movement challenges children to adapt to change, amongst others, houses and neighbourhoods, friends and schools, and this may have either or both negative and positive influences on their health and well-being. However, there is currently little knowledge of the patterns of child residential mobility within South Africa’s urban environment. This paper uses address data of children in the Birth to Twenty cohort to analyse the …
Innocent Violence
The violent attacks on African immigrants and refugees in marginal settlements surrounding South Africa's largest cities in May 2008 occasioned a rush of mostly well-intentioned attempts by journalists, public intellectuals, and government officials to discover the causes and find the cures for the outbreak. This article interrogates the glosses of “xenophobia” and “social deprivation” that were all too quickly applied to explain the attacks in p…
Innocent violence
The violent attacks on African immigrants and refugees in marginal settlements surrounding South Africa's largest cities in May 2008 occasioned a rush of mostly well-intentioned attempts by journalists, public intellectuals, and government officials to discover the causes and find the cures for the outbreak. This article interrogates the glosses of ‘xenophobia’ and ‘social deprivation’ that were all too quickly applied to explain the attacks in p…
Erasing History
The white settler Cape Colony and later Republic and Province of the Orange Free State in central South Africa imposed a harsh regime of suppression on the African communities found within their territory. Chieftaincy was largely abolished and independent Bantu, Khoisan, and ‘Coloured’ (mixed race) communities were progressively destroyed and their inhabitants made to work on white farms and in the towns. The only exceptions were the tiny Native …
Siamese Twin Towns And Unitary Concepts In Border Inequality
Border studies, however termed is now a well established scholarly field, and for many reasons the nearly 2000 miles of the United States Mexico border has always been at its centre. In recent decades, coinciding with the expansion of the European Union, European border studies have made perhaps an almost equal contribution to the field. Lesotho is a constitutional monarchy with a population of just under two million and a total land area of the …
Association for Africanist Anthropology
Sophiatown et le jazz sud-africain
I've Worked Longer Than I've Lived
This paper investigates the relationship between the social transformation of southern African Basotho agro-pastoralists into migrant workers and the musical–literary forms (‘auriture’) they created to express this transformation. Far from declining, such forms have undergone considerable innovation and elaboration in response to Basotho experience of rural dispossession and urban and mine labour migrancy. For the Basotho, the performance of exis…
Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrikaand the Liberation of the Spirit of South Africa1
Footprints of cultural artefacts travel across borderlands and boundaries of multiple inscription, from villages to towns and back again, between territories of the imagination and fetishised, arme
God rock Africa
Association for Africanist Anthropology
Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika
« Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika ». De l’esprit indépendant à la mobilisation politique. – « Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika » (Que Dieu bénisse l’Afrique), connu comme l’hymne africain, est un signifiant puissant pour le deuil, la rédemption et la célébration. Les tonalités méthodistes et les paroles du chant puisent leurs racines dans les contacts culturels avec les missionnaires. Ce chant occupe aussi une place importante dans le répertoire cérémonial de nombr…
Dire la race et l'espace dans une zone frontalière de l'Afrique du Sud
Les relations entre Basotho et Sud-Africains ne peuvent se comprendre sans faire référence à l'histoire de leur rencontre à partir des années 1820 et de la défaite de ces derniers face aux velléités coloniales en 1884. Malgré la déclaration d'indépendance en 1965 et la fin de l'apartheid en 1994, ces relations demeurent très ambivalentes : à la proximité historique nourrie d'importantes migrations de travail s'opposent toujours un déni légal sur …
Eloquent Knowledge
Oral literary forms such as sefela sung poetry of Basotho migrant workers in Southern Africa have important methodological and theoretical implications for cultural anthropology. The study of such performances privileges subjects' own self-conscious discourse and provides an internal, reflexive account of the experience of labor migration and its social consequences. As aesthetic formulations of experience these performances both draw upon and ar…
Fictions that Save
A river runs through it
Journal Article A river runs through it: The meaning of the Lesotho‐free state border Get access David B. Coplan David B. Coplan Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 100, Issue 398, 1 January 2001, Pages 81–116, https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/100.398.81 Published: 01 January 2001
God rock Africa
A chief by the people
The article explores the conflictual relationship among the Basotho chieftaincy, state, and nation in historical perspective. That history includes consideration of the recent and still unresolved political crisis in Lesotho. The current meaning ofSesotho, the 'whole life process' of the Basotho people, is examined in the context of the divergence between state and nation, between chiefs and people, between region and locality, and between modern…
The urbanisation of African music
Interest in the processes of change involved in the transformation of rural African recreational music into popular music under urban conditions has grown substantially over the past decade (see Nettl 1978; Mukuna 1980). This interest has largely focused on two complementary problem areas: what such change can tell us about the principles and dynamics of musical development, and what processes of musical change may reveal about human behaviour (s…
The African musician and the development of the Johannesburg entertainment industry, 1900-1960
This study is primarily concerned with the music and musicians of a selfconsciously urban community: Africans who were of Johannesburg and not merely in it. Its purposes are, firstly, to explore the role of certain forms of cultural expression in the emergence of urban African identity and social order, and secondly, to outline the nature of the conflict between the African performing community and white commercial and political agencies over con…
"Sounds of the "Third Way
It is in the production of audiences that the political and social reality of art can be found. --John Fiske (1989) Many of you will have already remarked on the word in the title of this article and perhaps prepared yourself for yet more ink spilled in the quest to define this rare, possibly mythical, concept of musical style. But it is my purpose here to develop rather than to authenticate the notion of tradition, and I shall not be concerned (…
Musical Understanding
ne of consequences of expanding presence of non-Western scholars in humanities is vitalizing criticism, on both epistemological and political grounds, of our ways and means of depicting colonized traditional peoples. In pursuing accurate representation of their participation in events, we must seek every available means of hearing and comprehending the voice of people. Ethnographically, people's voice consists in expression of what Clifford Geert…
I've Worked Longer Than I've Lived
This paper investigates the relationship between the social transformation of southern African Basotho agro-pastoralists into migrant workers and the musical–literary forms (‘auriture’) they created to express this transformation. Far from declining, such forms have undergone considerable innovation and elaboration in response to Basotho experience of rural dispossession and urban and mine labour migrancy. For the Basotho, the performance of exis…
Unconquered territory
This article views the renewed attacks on white-owned commercial farms in the South African Free State as a recrudescence of a broader ethnographic history of conflict over territory, boundaries, and borders among a complex interfacing of ethnic and political groupings; principally the Basotho, Afrikaner settlers, and colonial British. The argument discusses disjunct or opposing conceptions held by blacks and whites of rights to occupy, dispose o…
Performance, Self-Definition, and Social Experience in the Oral Poetry of Sotho Migrant Mineworkers
Attempts to further the study of popular culture in Africa face the difficulty of defining “popular” as distinct from traditional or folk culture on the one hand, and elite or dominant culture on the other. The features that emerge most often from the discussion of these distinctions center on the relative degree of separation between performers and audiences, and on change from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft as a basis for social interaction (Bigs…
Introduction
This special issue represents a small milestone in the crossing of Africa into the sovereign territory of border studies. In June 2007, a first step in this direction was taken at the workshop on “African Borderlands Research: Emerging Agendas and Critical Reflections” at the African Studies Centre of the University of Edinburgh. There, the “African Borderland Research Network” ABORNE (www.aborne.org) was founded by fifteen participants as an int…
In the Time of Cannibals
Fieldsights
First meets third
The literature of the US‐Mexico borderlands constitutes a cross‐disciplinary theoretical platform for border studies as a field. In border studies elsewhere, however, very few scholars have carried their investigations beyond their “own” chosen borderland. Viewing the matter from the margin of Africa's deepest South, however, the centrality of the US southwest provides an unavoidable comparative challenge that must be faced. Still, a comparative …
Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrikaand the Liberation of the Spirit of South Africa1
Footprints of cultural artefacts travel across borderlands and boundaries of multiple inscription, from villages to towns and back again, between territories of the imagination and fetishised, arme
Land from the Ancestors
Between 1843 and 1869 the Basotho monarchy lost the better part of its cultivable land to the white settlers of the Orange Free State. While various political appeals for the return of this ‘Conquered Territory’ by the successor state of Lesotho since 1965 have proved unavailing, recent years have seen a rapid re-occupation of certain highland caves and their environs by pilgrims who identify them as ‘sacred to the ancestors’. Pilgrims to the sac…
History is Eaten Whole
For some time, historians and anthropologists have been collaborating on the excavation of Africa's history through the analysis of transcriptions of unwritten sources. A major obstacle has been the forms, the generic structures of African historical discourse, which constitute a style of historiography culturally contrasting with our own. This paper examines two central vehicles of this historiography: the temporal, situational, and generic elab…
Music, Ritual, and Falasha History
Ideology and Tradition in South African Black Popular Theater
The creative vitality and character of South African theater owes more to traditions of folk performance than many contemporary political dramatists realize. Conceived as aesthetic values and processes rather than as static cultural forms, African performance traditions offer a wealth of expressive resources. Black popular theater is rooted in the historical transformation of these traditions, and they are indispensible to the development of a cu…
What did I almost say
Comment on Werbner, Richard. 2015. Divination's grasp: African encounters with the almost said. Bloomington: Indiana University Press
Obituary
Life in the field
Erasing History
The white settler Cape Colony and later Republic and Province of the Orange Free State in central South Africa imposed a harsh regime of suppression on the African communities found within their territory. Chieftaincy was largely abolished and independent Bantu, Khoisan, and ‘Coloured’ (mixed race) communities were progressively destroyed and their inhabitants made to work on white farms and in the towns. The only exceptions were the tiny Native …
The African musician and the development of the Johannesburg entertainment industry, 1900-1960
This study is primarily concerned with the music and musicians of a selfconsciously urban community: Africans who were of Johannesburg and not merely in it. Its purposes are, firstly, to explore the role of certain forms of cultural expression in the emergence of urban African identity and social order, and secondly, to outline the nature of the conflict between the African performing community and white commercial and political agencies over con…
The urbanisation of African music
Interest in the processes of change involved in the transformation of rural African recreational music into popular music under urban conditions has grown substantially over the past decade (see Nettl 1978; Mukuna 1980). This interest has largely focused on two complementary problem areas: what such change can tell us about the principles and dynamics of musical development, and what processes of musical change may reveal about human behaviour (s…
Explorations in African Systems of Thought
Explorations in African Systems of Thought examines the problems currently faced by researchers in the analysis of systems of belief in African societies. In contrast to the prevailing emphasis on the analysis of partial systems of thought, such as witchcraft beliefs or spirit possession, the present collection of thirteen original essays stresses a more broadly analytic approach that relates the study of African systems of thought to other aspec…
In township tonight!
The author's pioneering social history of black South Africa's urban music, dance, and theatre established itself as a classic soon after its publication in 1985. As the first substantial history of black performing arts in South Africa, this book was championed by a broad range of scholars and treasured by fans of South African music. In vivid detail, Coplan comprehensively explores more than three centuries of the diverse history of South Afric…
Ideology and Tradition in South African Black Popular Theater
The creative vitality and character of South African theater owes more to traditions of folk performance than many contemporary political dramatists realize. Conceived as aesthetic values and processes rather than as static cultural forms, African performance traditions offer a wealth of expressive resources. Black popular theater is rooted in the historical transformation of these traditions, and they are indispensible to the development of a cu…
Performance, Self-Definition, and Social Experience in the Oral Poetry of Sotho Migrant Mineworkers
Attempts to further the study of popular culture in Africa face the difficulty of defining “popular” as distinct from traditional or folk culture on the one hand, and elite or dominant culture on the other. The features that emerge most often from the discussion of these distinctions center on the relative degree of separation between performers and audiences, and on change from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft as a basis for social interaction (Bigs…
Retying the Blood Knot
(1987). RETYING THE BLOOD KNOT: FUGARD ON BROADWAY. South African Theatre Journal: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 114-117
African Culture; The Rhythms of Unity
Africa, according to the contributors to this anthology, is one cultural river with numerous tributaries articulated by their specific responses to history and the environment. They concentrate on the similarities in behavior, perceptions, and technologies of African culture that tie those tributaries together. The fourteen original essays by leading scholars of African studies are organized in four general divisions which consider the ethno-cult…
In Township Tonight! South Africa's Black City Music and Theatre
Eloquent Knowledge
Oral literary forms such as sefela sung poetry of Basotho migrant workers in Southern Africa have important methodological and theoretical implications for cultural anthropology. The study of such performances privileges subjects' own self-conscious discourse and provides an internal, reflexive account of the experience of labor migration and its social consequences. As aesthetic formulations of experience these performances both draw upon and ar…
Musical Understanding
ne of consequences of expanding presence of non-Western scholars in humanities is vitalizing criticism, on both epistemological and political grounds, of our ways and means of depicting colonized traditional peoples. In pursuing accurate representation of their participation in events, we must seek every available means of hearing and comprehending the voice of people. Ethnographically, people's voice consists in expression of what Clifford Geert…
Structure, secrets, and Sesotho
Lesotho's economic and political dependency on South Africa affects every aspect of Basotho social and cultural life. In response, the concept of Sesotho, Basotho language and culture, has been reflexively ideo-logized to refer to anything that Basotho regard as their own, unadulterated by ‘external’ influences. Sesotho has become a koma, a sacred secret, a cognitive and behavioural defence against the loss of Basotho cultural identity and the li…
The Praises of Dingana (Izibongo Zikadingana)
Popular Musics of the Non-Western World
Iscathamiya
The Venanda Lovely Boys
Noise Khanyile
Dried Millet Breaking
Music, Ritual, and Falasha History
Homeland 2
Fictions that Save
Fictions that Save
Jùjú
History is Eaten Whole
For some time, historians and anthropologists have been collaborating on the excavation of Africa's history through the analysis of transcriptions of unwritten sources. A major obstacle has been the forms, the generic structures of African historical discourse, which constitute a style of historiography culturally contrasting with our own. This paper examines two central vehicles of this historiography: the temporal, situational, and generic elab…
Power and the Praise Poem
The invention of oral man - anthropology, lietrary theory and a Western intellectual tradition maps of experience - songs and poetry in Southern Africa the development of forms - Ndebele royal praises the development of forms - the Chopi Migodo Swazi royal praises - the invention of tradition Paiva - the history of a song the possession of the dispossessed - songs as history among Tumbuka women of chameleons and clowns - the case of Jack Mapanje
Sociology (35 works) · History (28 works) · Political science (28 works) · Art (26 works) · South African History and Culture (25 works) · Law (20 works) · African history and culture studies (18 works) · Anthropology (17 works) · Geography (16 works) · History (16 works)