Joost Fontein
Biographic Data
| ID | 94982 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joost Fontein |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joost |
| FAMILY NAME | Fontein |
| SIGNATURE | FONTEIN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6528-6992 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 246 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Nairobi Becoming
Echoing the edgy, disjunctive, ever-emergent city of Nairobi that it explores, Nairobi Becoming: Security, Uncertainty, Contingency strives to be several things-in-the-making. It is a historically and anthropologically minded examination of a shifting cityscape, an experimental, collaborative exercise in curated juxtaposition and assemblage, and an interdisciplinary, subjunctive urban ethnography. It brings together curated interventions by twent…
Joburg becoming? Or what it became
The city of Johannesburg -Joburg or Jozi, if you prefer -occupies a prominent place in a rapidly expanding body of literature on African cities
Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Goats, materials and uncertainty in Nairobi
Kiamaiko in Nairobi hosts one of the largest goat markets in East Africa. The goats come from across Kenya and the region, as do many of the people there, illustrating how regional movements of human and animal bodies are part of Nairobi's becoming, and making Kiamaiko an extremely diverse part of the city. Through a discussion of the working lives of people involved in Kiamaiko's goat meat industry, this article explores the material flows and b…
The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe 2000-2020
The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe 2000-2020
Innovative and challenging study that provides fresh insights on the anthropology of death and postcolonial politics. In 1898, just before she was hanged for rebelling against colonial rule, Charwe Nyakasikana, spirit medium of the legendary ancestor Ambuya Nehanda, famously prophesised that "my bones will rise again". A century later bones, bodies and human remains have come to occupy an increasingly complex place in Zimbabwe's postcolonial mili…
The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe, 2000-2020
Innovative and challenging study that provides fresh insights on the anthropology of death and postcolonial politics.
Mai Melissa
The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe 2000-2020
Innovative and challenging study that provides fresh insights on the anthropology of death and postcolonial politics. In 1898, just before she was hanged for rebelling against colonial rule, Charwe Nyakasikana, spirit medium of the legendary ancestor Ambuya Nehanda, famously prophesised that "my bones will rise again". A century later bones, bodies and human remains have come to occupy an increasingly complex place in Zimbabwe's postcolonial mili…
The case for oral histories of neoliberal Africa
There has been a dearth of oral histories of work and earning a living in Africa, especially during the neoliberal period from the 1980s. Compared to scholarship published more than half a century ago, there seems to be a decline of the use of oral histories to explore the history of the living under capitalism, despite the acceptance of oral histories as an important source and methodology for reconstructing experiences of people. At the same ti…
Encountering the Past
Among the many areas of interest shared by archaeology and anthropology is the study of human bones. Although some of the cruder approaches to describing human diversity from the form and capacity of crania have, rightly, fallen out of favor, this shared interest in bones and, in particular, how the living think about, feel about, and interact with bones of the dead persists and continues to animate both anthropological and archaeological scholar…
The management of the Matobo Hills in Zimbabwe. Perceptions of the indigenous communities on their involvement and use of traditional conservation practices
Political Accidents in Zimbabwe
‘Those who are not known, should be known by the country’
Since the early 2000s, scholars have criticised how Zimbabwe's ruling party has 'distorted' history to suit its political purposes through its rhetoric of 'patriotic history'. There remains a lacuna of studies focusing on what purchase 'patriotic history' has had in specific contexts, and what alternative commemorations it has sometimes afforded. Examining efforts in early 2010s by war veterans, relatives and survivors to monumentalise two wartim…
Damming the Zambezi
There are now very many large dams, most constructed in the second half of the 20th century. Over 50,000 by the year 2000, and still more are being planned and constructed, albeit at a slower rate
The Silence of Great Zimbabwe
This book examines the politics of landscape and heritage by focusing on the example of Great Zimbabwe National Monument in southern Zimbabwe. The controversy that surrounded the site in the early part of the 20th century, between colonial antiquarians and professional archaeologists, is well reported in the published literature. Based on long term ethnographic field work around Great Zimbabwe, as well as archival research in NMMZ, in the Nationa…
Crossing Africa and Beyond
In collating this special issue in honour of a much-missed colleague, our purpose is to reflect upon some of Charles Jedrej's unique, if too often under-recognized, contributions to Africanist anth
Remaking Mutirikwi
Finalist for the African Studies Association 2016 Melville J. Herskovits Award A detailed ethnographic and historical study of the implications of fast-track land reform in Zimbabwe from the perspective of those involvedin land occupations around Lake Mutirikwi, from the colonial period to the present day. The Mutirikwi river was dammed in the early 1960s to make Zimbabwe's second largest lake. This was a key moment in the Europeanisation of Muti…
Note on Fieldwork, Notes & Sources
Remaking Mutirikwi
The Mutirikwi river was dammed in the early 1960s to make Zimbabwe's second largest lake. This was a key moment in the Europeanisation of Mutirikwi's landscapes, which had begun with colonial land appropriations in the 1890s. But African landscapes were not obliterated by the dam. They remained active and affective. At independence in 1980, local clans reasserted ancestral land claims in a wave ofsquatting around Lake Mutirikwi. They were soon ev…
Rain, uncertainty and power in southern Zimbabwe
In Zimbabwe, and across the region, rainfall and drought have long been measures of contested political legitimacy in ways not limited to the politics of food, famine and agricultural production. Around Lake Mutirikwi in southern Zimbabwe, this is true not only for spirit mediums, chiefs and other ‘traditionalist’ authorities for whom rainmaking practices are well-established means of demonstrating ‘autochthony’, sovereignty and legitimacy, but a…
Corporealities of violence in southern and eastern Africa
In a recent discussion on the display and concealment of bodies during Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, Nigel Eltringham asserts a common anthropological truism that ‘violence is discursive’, and that ‘the victim’s body is a key vehicle of that discourse’ (2015, 161). This point preambles his argument that scholars should pay ‘the same attention...to post-mortem disposal as has been given to ante-mortem degradation’ (2015, 172) in contexts of violent conf…
She appeared to be in some kind of trance
This is a personal account of a recent criminal trial in the United Kingdom that the author was involved in as an expert witness, involving a young Zimbabwean woman who attacked her mother with a knife, when she (as she, her mother, and relatives claimed) was possessed by an evil spirit as the result of another family member's witchcraft. Evidence for her abnormal state of consciousness was corroborated by police evidence that described her as "i…
The vitality and efficacy of human substances
In recent years, there has been a proliferation of scholarly work devoted to the 'materialities of death' in Africa and beyond. Aligned with a burst of activity exploring the changing nature of dea
Reclaiming Great Zimbabwe
Someone once commented (I don’t remember who) that they were amazed that there were still new books to write about Great Zimbabwe, given how much was already published. At the time, as I was writin
Graves, ruins, and belonging
This article uses ethnographic material collected around Lake Mutirikwi in southern Zimbabwe, to explore how the affective presence of graves and ruins, which materialize past and present occupations and engagements with/in the landscape (by different clans, colonial and postcolonial state institutions, war veterans, chiefs, and spirit mediums, as well as white commercial farmers), are entangled in complex, localized contests over autochthony and…
The substance of bones
Anticipating TheTsunami
Using ethnographic material alongside newspaper and NGO reports, this article explores popular responses to ZANU PF's devastating Operation Murambatsvina, commonly dubbed Zimbabwe'stsunami, which targeted informal markets and 'illegal' housing across Zimbabwe between May and August of 2005, making an estimated 700,000 people homeless and indirectly affecting a quarter of Zimbabwe's population. The article argues that central to experiences of the…
Between tortured bodies and resurfacing bones
Bones occupy a complex place in Zimbabwe's postcolonial milieu. From ancestral bones rising again in the struggle for independence, and later land, to resurfacing bones of unsettled war dead or the troubling remains of gukurahundi victims, it is clear that bones are intertwined in postcolonial politics in ways that go far beyond, yet necessarily implicate, contests over memory, commemoration and the representation of the past. As both extensions …
The vitality and efficacy of human substances
In recent years, there has been a proliferation of scholarly work devoted to the 'materialities of death' in Africa and beyond. Aligned with a burst of activity exploring the changing nature of dea
Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
She appeared to be in some kind of trance
This is a personal account of a recent criminal trial in the United Kingdom that the author was involved in as an expert witness, involving a young Zimbabwean woman who attacked her mother with a knife, when she (as she, her mother, and relatives claimed) was possessed by an evil spirit as the result of another family member's witchcraft. Evidence for her abnormal state of consciousness was corroborated by police evidence that described her as "i…
Languages of land, water and 'tradition' around Lake Mutirikwi in southern Zimbabwe
This paper focuses on the deployment of a vocabulary of water and land in the rhetoric of power, resistance, and the politics of identity of clans and individuals around Lake Mutirikwi in southern Zimbabwe. When the Mutirikwi (Kyle) Dam was built during the colonial period of the 1960s, local communities lost a great deal of land, both beneath it and around it. Peoples' memories and claims over land that has, in effect, disappeared - alienated by…
Silence, Destruction and Closure at Great Zimbabwe
Based on recent research around Great Zimbabwe National Monument in southern Zimbabwe, this article considers the history of Great Zimbabwe's ‘destruction’ and ‘desecration’ from the perspective of the elders of the surrounding communities. Although each clan puts forwards competing claims over Great Zimbabwe, their narratives of the processes that have led to its ‘desecration’ are remarkably similar. Using notions of ‘destruction’, ‘closure’, an…
Goats, materials and uncertainty in Nairobi
Kiamaiko in Nairobi hosts one of the largest goat markets in East Africa. The goats come from across Kenya and the region, as do many of the people there, illustrating how regional movements of human and animal bodies are part of Nairobi's becoming, and making Kiamaiko an extremely diverse part of the city. Through a discussion of the working lives of people involved in Kiamaiko's goat meat industry, this article explores the material flows and b…
The Power of Water
A recent report by the Integrated Regional Information Networks (hereafter IRIN) entitled Running Dry: The Humanitarian Impact of the Global Water Crisis epitomises a growing consensus that exists
Shared Legacies of the War
This paper explores the nature of ongoing relationships between war veterans and spirit mediums in Zimbabwe, as well as the continuing salience of a shared chimurenga legacy of co-operation by these two groups, and how it has been put to use, and acted out by both in the context of Zimbabwe's recent fast track land reform project. In emphasising this continuity, the paper also considers whether a corresponding disparity between the ideology of th…
Social History & African Environments
William Beinart and Joann McGregor (eds), Social History & African Environments. Oxford: James Currey(hard covers £45.00, ISBN 0 85255 951 8; paperback £18.95, ISBN 0 85255 950 X). 2003, 275 pp. - Volume 74 Issue 4
Political Accidents in Zimbabwe
Corporealities of violence in southern and eastern Africa
In a recent discussion on the display and concealment of bodies during Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, Nigel Eltringham asserts a common anthropological truism that ‘violence is discursive’, and that ‘the victim’s body is a key vehicle of that discourse’ (2015, 161). This point preambles his argument that scholars should pay ‘the same attention...to post-mortem disposal as has been given to ante-mortem degradation’ (2015, 172) in contexts of violent conf…
The case for oral histories of neoliberal Africa
There has been a dearth of oral histories of work and earning a living in Africa, especially during the neoliberal period from the 1980s. Compared to scholarship published more than half a century ago, there seems to be a decline of the use of oral histories to explore the history of the living under capitalism, despite the acceptance of oral histories as an important source and methodology for reconstructing experiences of people. At the same ti…
Reclaiming Zimbabwe's Unfinished Business
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Social History & African Environments
William Beinart and Joann McGregor (eds), Social History & African Environments. Oxford: James Currey(hard covers £45.00, ISBN 0 85255 951 8; paperback £18.95, ISBN 0 85255 950 X). 2003, 275 pp. - Volume 74 Issue 4
Reclaiming Zimbabwe's Unfinished Business
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Silence, Destruction and Closure at Great Zimbabwe
Based on recent research around Great Zimbabwe National Monument in southern Zimbabwe, this article considers the history of Great Zimbabwe's ‘destruction’ and ‘desecration’ from the perspective of the elders of the surrounding communities. Although each clan puts forwards competing claims over Great Zimbabwe, their narratives of the processes that have led to its ‘desecration’ are remarkably similar. Using notions of ‘destruction’, ‘closure’, an…
Languages of land, water and 'tradition' around Lake Mutirikwi in southern Zimbabwe
This paper focuses on the deployment of a vocabulary of water and land in the rhetoric of power, resistance, and the politics of identity of clans and individuals around Lake Mutirikwi in southern Zimbabwe. When the Mutirikwi (Kyle) Dam was built during the colonial period of the 1960s, local communities lost a great deal of land, both beneath it and around it. Peoples' memories and claims over land that has, in effect, disappeared - alienated by…
Shared Legacies of the War
This paper explores the nature of ongoing relationships between war veterans and spirit mediums in Zimbabwe, as well as the continuing salience of a shared chimurenga legacy of co-operation by these two groups, and how it has been put to use, and acted out by both in the context of Zimbabwe's recent fast track land reform project. In emphasising this continuity, the paper also considers whether a corresponding disparity between the ideology of th…
Suffering for Territory
In Zimbabwe, matangwena is often used in the vernacular to refer to the makeshift, ramshackle shelters that squatters typically live in before building more established homes. In a small way, this word illustrates how important the subject of Donald Moore's excellent book is. This term for squatters comes from the history of Rekayi Tangwena who famously led the people of Kaerezi, in the 1960s and 1970s, in resistance against eviction from ancestr…
Colonization of unfamiliar landscapes
The Power of Water
A recent report by the Integrated Regional Information Networks (hereafter IRIN) entitled Running Dry: The Humanitarian Impact of the Global Water Crisis epitomises a growing consensus that exists
African gifts of the spirit
The Silence of Great Zimbabwe
Almost all metrics, used to measure strife and human suffering, indicate times are very difficult in Zimbabwe.In the past year, reporters from the The New York Times and The Guardian have documented "super-hyper-inflation" with percentages in the millions, outbreaks of Cholera, and political unrest associated with widespread accusations of voting irregularities in favor of long-time president and elder of the dominant Zimbabwe African National Un…
Anticipating TheTsunami
Using ethnographic material alongside newspaper and NGO reports, this article explores popular responses to ZANU PF's devastating Operation Murambatsvina, commonly dubbed Zimbabwe'stsunami, which targeted informal markets and 'illegal' housing across Zimbabwe between May and August of 2005, making an estimated 700,000 people homeless and indirectly affecting a quarter of Zimbabwe's population. The article argues that central to experiences of the…
Between tortured bodies and resurfacing bones
Bones occupy a complex place in Zimbabwe's postcolonial milieu. From ancestral bones rising again in the struggle for independence, and later land, to resurfacing bones of unsettled war dead or the troubling remains of gukurahundi victims, it is clear that bones are intertwined in postcolonial politics in ways that go far beyond, yet necessarily implicate, contests over memory, commemoration and the representation of the past. As both extensions …
The substance of bones
Preserving the Cultural Heritage of Africa
Like the question in its title, this book has an aura of something that is not quite sure of itself. Beautifully presented, one's first impression is of a coffee-table book, full of enticing images punctuating short, accessible commentaries by a diverse collection of heritage professionals, museum curators, and scholars. But closer reading of the introductory chapters reveals more ambitious purposes. In the preface John Mack locates the volume in…
Graves, ruins, and belonging
This article uses ethnographic material collected around Lake Mutirikwi in southern Zimbabwe, to explore how the affective presence of graves and ruins, which materialize past and present occupations and engagements with/in the landscape (by different clans, colonial and postcolonial state institutions, war veterans, chiefs, and spirit mediums, as well as white commercial farmers), are entangled in complex, localized contests over autochthony and…
Pioneers, settlers, aliens, exiles
The vitality and efficacy of human substances
In recent years, there has been a proliferation of scholarly work devoted to the 'materialities of death' in Africa and beyond. Aligned with a burst of activity exploring the changing nature of dea
She appeared to be in some kind of trance
This is a personal account of a recent criminal trial in the United Kingdom that the author was involved in as an expert witness, involving a young Zimbabwean woman who attacked her mother with a knife, when she (as she, her mother, and relatives claimed) was possessed by an evil spirit as the result of another family member's witchcraft. Evidence for her abnormal state of consciousness was corroborated by police evidence that described her as "i…
Remaking Mutirikwi
Finalist for the African Studies Association 2016 Melville J. Herskovits Award A detailed ethnographic and historical study of the implications of fast-track land reform in Zimbabwe from the perspective of those involvedin land occupations around Lake Mutirikwi, from the colonial period to the present day. The Mutirikwi river was dammed in the early 1960s to make Zimbabwe's second largest lake. This was a key moment in the Europeanisation of Muti…
Note on Fieldwork, Notes & Sources
Remaking Mutirikwi
The Mutirikwi river was dammed in the early 1960s to make Zimbabwe's second largest lake. This was a key moment in the Europeanisation of Mutirikwi's landscapes, which had begun with colonial land appropriations in the 1890s. But African landscapes were not obliterated by the dam. They remained active and affective. At independence in 1980, local clans reasserted ancestral land claims in a wave ofsquatting around Lake Mutirikwi. They were soon ev…
Rain, uncertainty and power in southern Zimbabwe
In Zimbabwe, and across the region, rainfall and drought have long been measures of contested political legitimacy in ways not limited to the politics of food, famine and agricultural production. Around Lake Mutirikwi in southern Zimbabwe, this is true not only for spirit mediums, chiefs and other ‘traditionalist’ authorities for whom rainmaking practices are well-established means of demonstrating ‘autochthony’, sovereignty and legitimacy, but a…
Corporealities of violence in southern and eastern Africa
In a recent discussion on the display and concealment of bodies during Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, Nigel Eltringham asserts a common anthropological truism that ‘violence is discursive’, and that ‘the victim’s body is a key vehicle of that discourse’ (2015, 161). This point preambles his argument that scholars should pay ‘the same attention...to post-mortem disposal as has been given to ante-mortem degradation’ (2015, 172) in contexts of violent conf…
The Silence of Great Zimbabwe
This book examines the politics of landscape and heritage by focusing on the example of Great Zimbabwe National Monument in southern Zimbabwe. The controversy that surrounded the site in the early part of the 20th century, between colonial antiquarians and professional archaeologists, is well reported in the published literature. Based on long term ethnographic field work around Great Zimbabwe, as well as archival research in NMMZ, in the Nationa…
Crossing Africa and Beyond
In collating this special issue in honour of a much-missed colleague, our purpose is to reflect upon some of Charles Jedrej's unique, if too often under-recognized, contributions to Africanist anth
Political science (27 works) · Sociology (27 works) · African studies and sociopolitical issues (25 works) · History (22 works) · Law (19 works) · African history and culture studies (16 works) · Politics (15 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (14 works) · Geography (12 works) · Aesthetics (11 works)