Andrew D Spiegel
Biographic Data
| ID | 81734 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andrew D Spiegel |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andrew D |
| FAMILY NAME | Spiegel |
| SIGNATURE | SPIEGEL A D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cape Town |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9432-7992 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 264 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Identity politics and social justice
Identity politics has become a widely used term, commonly to describe the activities of socio-political movements the purpose of which is to achieve social justice. Such widespread use has often been at the expense of a more thorough analysis of its efficacy as a conceptual tool, and of whether the political actions to which it refers are adequate for that purpose. This article, an introduction to a collection of essays focused on that question, …
Uneven “genocide” memorialisation
Ethnographic evidence versus theoretical models
Conceptualising what was seen as the proletarianisation of Southern Africa’s working people was a significant analytical preoccupation of the social sciences in the 1970s. Considering that the region’s political economy was dependent on migrant labour, anthropologists and others sought to understand the relationship between labour-sending and wage labour–utilising facets of what was described as the regional social formation. On the coat-tails of…
Encountering, explaining and refuting essentialism
Essentialism manifests itself in a diversity of forms and is used in multiple ways. Yet it is always potentially dangerous - even when it is mobilised strategically and in apparently worthy forms for purposes of overcoming oppressive structures. As the first in a collection of articles focused on various manifestations of essentialism, this article offers a brief historical outline of how social anthropology deployed essentialist thinking, even a…
Sheep, herbs and blood on the beach
South Africa's 2018/2019 summer holidays were marked by a flurry of media reports describing, some in vivid, graphic detail, the ritual slaughter of a sheep on a popular Cape Town beach by a group of #MustFall activists. Their action was in response to reports of a private security company, ostensibly working at the behest of nearby local commercial outlets and residents, having forced Black people off the beach. Focusing on various media reports…
South A frica, Anthropology in
Anthropology in South Africa has always been politically implicated, albeit in diverse ways. The entry describes anthropology's formal establishment in response to early twentieth‐century concerns about “the native question” and how that fashioned a discipline focused on black South Africans, which was split between two perspectives on segregationism and apartheid policy: volkekunde , a racist‐inspired anthropology that underpinned apartheid's co…
W ilson, M onica (1908–82)
Monica Wilson (née Hunter), South Africa's leading twentieth‐century social anthropologist, was driven to reinterpret South African history by her childhood experiences, in a multiracial Presbyterian missionary school, of colonially biased South African history. Initially in collaboration with Godfrey Wilson, until his untimely death, she developed and applied her ethnographic skills and anthropological insights in order to realize that goal. The…
Reconfiguring the culture of kinship
One product of the vicissitudes of apartheid-era labour migration, of persistent constraints on urban settlement and of continuing post-apartheid oscillating migration between South Africa's cities and countryside has been extensive domestic fluidity for many South African working people. As a consequence, they have repeatedly created new social networks across the urban-rural social field. In making sense of those networks by reconfiguring their…
Patrick Alister McAllister (1948–2016)
2017). Patrick Alister McAllister (1948–2016) Anthropology Southern Africa: Vol. 40, Change and continuity in Southern African marriages, pp. 69-71
Obituary
Martin Elgar West 1946–2015
2015). Martin Elgar West 1946–2015. Anthropology Southern Africa: Vol. 38, No. 3-4, pp. 375-377
South Africa
volkekunde paralleled the division between the country's English-medium and Afrikaansmedium universities.When, from the 1960s onward, the apartheid government established new universities for exclusively black (but ethnically divided) students-in order to exclude the small number of black students from the older, now almost exclusively white English-medium universities-most of the anthropology taught at those new institutions tended to be volkeku…
Distraction from the real difficulties
Increasingly, North based graduate students are seeking South based institutional homes whilst undertaking ethnographic research. Looking from a place in the global South, the article considers how requests to host such students influence, and are influenced by, both local and northern research ethics procedures. In particular the article focuses on the globalisation of the Institutional Review Board principle in defining much of the internationa…
Victor Turner and liminality
2011). Victor Turner and liminality: An introduction. Anthropology Southern Africa: Vol. 34, Thinking Victor Turner's 'Liminality' from southern Africa today, pp. 1-4
Categorical difference versus continuum
Turner's distinction between liminal and liminoid is not commonly drawn upon, liminality being seen and applied to all ‘betwixt and between’ social situations. Yet Turner's distinction, once appropriately revised, offers a more nuanced means to understand such situations. The criteria Turner originally used to construct the distinction have, however, created a tendency towards its being used to perpetuate a crude and by now passé primitive-versus…
Fortress Sa’? A Response to Sharp and Pillay (At 24[5])
Racism as epithet in the context of post-apartheid's demographic parity goals
Nearly twenty years after the capitulation of the apartheid state, South Africa's post-apartheid government continues to find it necessary to seek means to direct change in the demographic profile of the country's leading institutions towards a situation where it reflects the national demographic profile. Among those is legislation to achieve what is known as employment equity—which has been criticised for being a reverse form of racism. The arti…
Reproducing criticality
For many who were drawn to the discipline during South Africa's apartheid years, social anthropology offered a means for a cohort of primarily middle class persons to crystallise an otherwise inchoate criticality about the regime, in large part by providing opportunity for what has been called exposé. For a while after the collapse of apartheid, such exposé seemed to have become passé because it was assumed that the new democratic government woul…
From exposé to care
Social anthropologists working in South Africa during the late apartheid period expressed their abhorrence of the apartheid system in the preamble to the association that they formed. Many set as their goal the work of ‘exposé anthropology’, using anthropology to reveal the iniquitous consequences of apartheid. Apartheid's formal collapse and the institution of a democratic constitutional regime has reduced the need for such exposé, but current p…
Women, difference and urbanisation patterns in Cape Town, South Africa
A point apparently often lost to policy makers is that those for whom policy is designed have very diverse life experiences. The article focuses on two women's experiences of urbanisation: experiences that are extremely different from one another, despite the common political-economic context in which they occurred. It considers these extreme examples in order to demonstrate that a simple disaggregation by gender is insufficient for understanding…
Walking memories and growing amnesia in the land claims process
Memory is often constructed around images drawn from landscape. But memory can also be constituted through the process of traversing landscape—as if memory is inscribed in and through people's feet. What happens then, when a landscape changes? What kinds of change inhibit the making of memory by walking the land? The article addresses the above issues and questions by examining how a representative group of land restitution claimants attempted to…
Globalising tendencies and travelling theories
Continuities, culture and the commonplace
1997). Continuities, culture and the commonplace. African Studies: Vol. 56, No. 2, pp. 9-29
Devaluing diversity
Domestic diversity and fluidity among some African households in Greater Cape Town
(1996). Domestic diversity and fluidity among some African households in Greater Cape Town. Social Dynamics: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 7-30
Vulnerability to impoverishment in South African rural areas
Opening ParagraphSince 1960 several million Africans have been relocated in South Africa, mainly from the common (or 'white') area to the so-called 'homelands'. This process of relocation is still under way, and precise enumeration of the numbers of people who have been and will be affected is impossible. Estimates vary according to the definition of 'relocation': it is apparent, for instance, that official sources define the process as narrowly …
Domestic diversity and fluidity among some African households in Greater Cape Town
(1996). Domestic diversity and fluidity among some African households in Greater Cape Town. Social Dynamics: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 7-30
Women and wages
The argument of this article is based on a close comparison of two Bantustan areas in South Africa: the Matatiele district in the Transkei and Qwaqwa in the Orange Free State. Such comparisons are rarely, if ever, attempted, but we contend that they are potentially very useful in illuminating the complexities of social relationships in South Africa's rural periphery. In this article we concentrate on gender relationships. All the Bantustans share…
Encountering, explaining and refuting essentialism
Essentialism manifests itself in a diversity of forms and is used in multiple ways. Yet it is always potentially dangerous - even when it is mobilised strategically and in apparently worthy forms for purposes of overcoming oppressive structures. As the first in a collection of articles focused on various manifestations of essentialism, this article offers a brief historical outline of how social anthropology deployed essentialist thinking, even a…
Changing patterns of migrant labour and rural differentation in Lesotho∗
This paper considers the changing nature of rural differentiation in Lesotho as recruitment of labour migrants becomes increasingly selective and limited and as a new system of land tenure is implemented. The operation and effect of the present labour “stabilization” policies of the South African mines is discussed as are the provisions of the Lesotho Land Act 1979. Rural differentiation in Lesotho of the mid 1970s is then analyzed in terms of th…
Victor Turner and liminality
2011). Victor Turner and liminality: An introduction. Anthropology Southern Africa: Vol. 34, Thinking Victor Turner's 'Liminality' from southern Africa today, pp. 1-4
From exposé to care
Social anthropologists working in South Africa during the late apartheid period expressed their abhorrence of the apartheid system in the preamble to the association that they formed. Many set as their goal the work of ‘exposé anthropology’, using anthropology to reveal the iniquitous consequences of apartheid. Apartheid's formal collapse and the institution of a democratic constitutional regime has reduced the need for such exposé, but current p…
The fluidity of household composition in matatiele, Transkei
Questions related to the study of household composition in South Africa are explored using data from a longitudinal study carried out in a Sotho-speaking village in Matatiele District of the Transkei. These questions primarily concern the fluidity of household composition and the methodological problems this poses
Categorical difference versus continuum
Turner's distinction between liminal and liminoid is not commonly drawn upon, liminality being seen and applied to all ‘betwixt and between’ social situations. Yet Turner's distinction, once appropriately revised, offers a more nuanced means to understand such situations. The criteria Turner originally used to construct the distinction have, however, created a tendency towards its being used to perpetuate a crude and by now passé primitive-versus…
Continuities, culture and the commonplace
1997). Continuities, culture and the commonplace. African Studies: Vol. 56, No. 2, pp. 9-29
Reconfiguring the culture of kinship
One product of the vicissitudes of apartheid-era labour migration, of persistent constraints on urban settlement and of continuing post-apartheid oscillating migration between South Africa's cities and countryside has been extensive domestic fluidity for many South African working people. As a consequence, they have repeatedly created new social networks across the urban-rural social field. In making sense of those networks by reconfiguring their…
Towards an Understanding of Tradition
The ambiguities of betterment
South Africa
volkekunde paralleled the division between the country's English-medium and Afrikaansmedium universities.When, from the 1960s onward, the apartheid government established new universities for exclusively black (but ethnically divided) students-in order to exclude the small number of black students from the older, now almost exclusively white English-medium universities-most of the anthropology taught at those new institutions tended to be volkeku…
Introduction
(1996). Introduction: Domestic fluidity in South Africa. Social Dynamics: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 5-6
Walking memories and growing amnesia in the land claims process
Memory is often constructed around images drawn from landscape. But memory can also be constituted through the process of traversing landscape—as if memory is inscribed in and through people's feet. What happens then, when a landscape changes? What kinds of change inhibit the making of memory by walking the land? The article addresses the above issues and questions by examining how a representative group of land restitution claimants attempted to…
Black Mountain
Cohesive Cosmologies or Pragmatic Practices ? Tenancy in Matatiele (Transkei) and Dualist Approaches in Southern African Anthropology
A. D. Spiegel - Cosmologies intégrées ou pratiques de circonstance ? La tenure foncière au Matatiele (Transkei) et les approches dualistes de l'anthropologie sud-africaine. Bien que les approches dualistes de l'économie politique de l'Afrique du Sud soient maintenant passées de mode, le dualisme continue de prévaloir dans les analyses qui montrent que les gens adhèrent aux valeurs du système pré-industriel pour résister à l'anomie du capitalisme …
The articulation of modes of production
The Articulation of Modes of Production - essays from Economy and Society edited by Harold Wolpe. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. (R16.05
Sheep, herbs and blood on the beach
South Africa's 2018/2019 summer holidays were marked by a flurry of media reports describing, some in vivid, graphic detail, the ritual slaughter of a sheep on a popular Cape Town beach by a group of #MustFall activists. Their action was in response to reports of a private security company, ostensibly working at the behest of nearby local commercial outlets and residents, having forced Black people off the beach. Focusing on various media reports…
Distraction from the real difficulties
Increasingly, North based graduate students are seeking South based institutional homes whilst undertaking ethnographic research. Looking from a place in the global South, the article considers how requests to host such students influence, and are influenced by, both local and northern research ethics procedures. In particular the article focuses on the globalisation of the Institutional Review Board principle in defining much of the internationa…
Ethnographic evidence versus theoretical models
Conceptualising what was seen as the proletarianisation of Southern Africa’s working people was a significant analytical preoccupation of the social sciences in the 1970s. Considering that the region’s political economy was dependent on migrant labour, anthropologists and others sought to understand the relationship between labour-sending and wage labour–utilising facets of what was described as the regional social formation. On the coat-tails of…
Obituary
Racism as epithet in the context of post-apartheid's demographic parity goals
Nearly twenty years after the capitulation of the apartheid state, South Africa's post-apartheid government continues to find it necessary to seek means to direct change in the demographic profile of the country's leading institutions towards a situation where it reflects the national demographic profile. Among those is legislation to achieve what is known as employment equity—which has been criticised for being a reverse form of racism. The arti…
Reproducing criticality
For many who were drawn to the discipline during South Africa's apartheid years, social anthropology offered a means for a cohort of primarily middle class persons to crystallise an otherwise inchoate criticality about the regime, in large part by providing opportunity for what has been called exposé. For a while after the collapse of apartheid, such exposé seemed to have become passé because it was assumed that the new democratic government woul…
Changing patterns of migrant labour and rural differentation in Lesotho∗
This paper considers the changing nature of rural differentiation in Lesotho as recruitment of labour migrants becomes increasingly selective and limited and as a new system of land tenure is implemented. The operation and effect of the present labour “stabilization” policies of the South African mines is discussed as are the provisions of the Lesotho Land Act 1979. Rural differentiation in Lesotho of the mid 1970s is then analyzed in terms of th…
The articulation of modes of production
The Articulation of Modes of Production - essays from Economy and Society edited by Harold Wolpe. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. (R16.05
Spinning off the developmental cycle
Recent interest in the effects of labour migration on life in rural labour exporting communities in southern Africa has focused attention on the cyclical sequences of household development as a prism through which to view the links between wages and rural resources. This paper shows that the idea has, at times, been applied inappropriately. The result has been reduced concern with a classical class analysis. One should not however lose sight of s…
Vulnerability to impoverishment in South African rural areas
Opening ParagraphSince 1960 several million Africans have been relocated in South Africa, mainly from the common (or 'white') area to the so-called 'homelands'. This process of relocation is still under way, and precise enumeration of the numbers of people who have been and will be affected is impossible. Estimates vary according to the definition of 'relocation': it is apparent, for instance, that official sources define the process as narrowly …
The fluidity of household composition in matatiele, Transkei
Questions related to the study of household composition in South Africa are explored using data from a longitudinal study carried out in a Sotho-speaking village in Matatiele District of the Transkei. These questions primarily concern the fluidity of household composition and the methodological problems this poses
The ambiguities of betterment
Towards an Understanding of Tradition
Women and wages
The argument of this article is based on a close comparison of two Bantustan areas in South Africa: the Matatiele district in the Transkei and Qwaqwa in the Orange Free State. Such comparisons are rarely, if ever, attempted, but we contend that they are potentially very useful in illuminating the complexities of social relationships in South Africa's rural periphery. In this article we concentrate on gender relationships. All the Bantustans share…
Cohesive Cosmologies or Pragmatic Practices ? Tenancy in Matatiele (Transkei) and Dualist Approaches in Southern African Anthropology
A. D. Spiegel - Cosmologies intégrées ou pratiques de circonstance ? La tenure foncière au Matatiele (Transkei) et les approches dualistes de l'anthropologie sud-africaine. Bien que les approches dualistes de l'économie politique de l'Afrique du Sud soient maintenant passées de mode, le dualisme continue de prévaloir dans les analyses qui montrent que les gens adhèrent aux valeurs du système pré-industriel pour résister à l'anomie du capitalisme …
Polygyny as myth
The nature and extent of "bonyatsi" (marital infidelity) in Lesotho is presented through the images of population. Because the practice is not morally normative, it cannot be readily explained as part of an earlier custom or as arising from the exigencies of dependency on migrant labor, but as images of the past which are regarded as their own "traditional extramarital relations." This gives meaning and cultural continuity to the present practice…
A trilogy of tyranny and tribulation
(1992). A trilogy of tyranny and tribulation: Village politics and administrative intervention in Matatiele during the early 1980s. Journal of Contemporary African Studies: Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 31-54
Southern Africa Revisited
Tradition and Transition in Southern Africa
Speaking for themselves, William Beinart Social existence and the practice of personal integrity - narratives of resistance on the South African gold mines, Dunbar Moodie Kalela, Beni, Asafo, Ingoma and the rural-urban dichotomy, John Argyle Migration, incapsulation and ethnicity - Italian villagers in London, Robin Palmer The origins of the Indlavini - male associations and migrant labour in the Transkei, William Beinart Using ritual to resist d…
Black Mountain
Devaluing diversity
Domestic diversity and fluidity among some African households in Greater Cape Town
(1996). Domestic diversity and fluidity among some African households in Greater Cape Town. Social Dynamics: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 7-30
Introduction
(1996). Introduction: Domestic fluidity in South Africa. Social Dynamics: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 5-6
Continuities, culture and the commonplace
1997). Continuities, culture and the commonplace. African Studies: Vol. 56, No. 2, pp. 9-29
Globalising tendencies and travelling theories
Walking memories and growing amnesia in the land claims process
Memory is often constructed around images drawn from landscape. But memory can also be constituted through the process of traversing landscape—as if memory is inscribed in and through people's feet. What happens then, when a landscape changes? What kinds of change inhibit the making of memory by walking the land? The article addresses the above issues and questions by examining how a representative group of land restitution claimants attempted to…
From exposé to care
Social anthropologists working in South Africa during the late apartheid period expressed their abhorrence of the apartheid system in the preamble to the association that they formed. Many set as their goal the work of ‘exposé anthropology’, using anthropology to reveal the iniquitous consequences of apartheid. Apartheid's formal collapse and the institution of a democratic constitutional regime has reduced the need for such exposé, but current p…
Women, difference and urbanisation patterns in Cape Town, South Africa
A point apparently often lost to policy makers is that those for whom policy is designed have very diverse life experiences. The article focuses on two women's experiences of urbanisation: experiences that are extremely different from one another, despite the common political-economic context in which they occurred. It considers these extreme examples in order to demonstrate that a simple disaggregation by gender is insufficient for understanding…
Reproducing criticality
For many who were drawn to the discipline during South Africa's apartheid years, social anthropology offered a means for a cohort of primarily middle class persons to crystallise an otherwise inchoate criticality about the regime, in large part by providing opportunity for what has been called exposé. For a while after the collapse of apartheid, such exposé seemed to have become passé because it was assumed that the new democratic government woul…
Fortress Sa’? A Response to Sharp and Pillay (At 24[5])
Racism as epithet in the context of post-apartheid's demographic parity goals
Nearly twenty years after the capitulation of the apartheid state, South Africa's post-apartheid government continues to find it necessary to seek means to direct change in the demographic profile of the country's leading institutions towards a situation where it reflects the national demographic profile. Among those is legislation to achieve what is known as employment equity—which has been criticised for being a reverse form of racism. The arti…
Sociology (32 works) · Political science (20 works) · Anthropology (19 works) · Geography (17 works) · South African History and Culture (16 works) · History (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (11 works) · History (11 works)