Leslie Bank
Biographic Data
| ID | 86492 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Leslie Bank |
| GIVEN NAMES | Leslie |
| FAMILY NAME | Bank |
| SIGNATURE | BANK L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Western Cape |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8506-7401 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 191 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Gluckman's exceptionalism
Life After Plastic-Wrapped Bodies: Covid, the State and the Crisis of Social Reproduction in Rural South Africa
This article explores the impact and implications of the South African state's adoption of a tough militarized, bio-medical, and essentially neo-colonial approach to the management of the COVID pandemic in the rural former Bantustans ("native reserves") of the country. It argues that, while the "war on COVID" produced new national legislation for all citizens, those living "with custom" in former homelands were said to possess cultural attributes…
Populism and the Africanists in East London in the 1940s and Early 1950s
This article considers popular political mobilisation in East London prior to the launch of the Defiance Campaign in the city in 1952, which ignited a racial war. It suggests that the failure of the municipal authority to assimilate urbanising Africans from regional mission stations and schools, especially in the 1940s, created a crisis of legitimacy for the white city fathers, who had previously promised to find a place for educated and ‘civilis…
Exhuming Bodies
The tightening of Covid restrictions in relation to the management of bodies and burial practices created great consternation in rural areas. Covid bodies were managed by mortuaries and funeral parlors which required that bodies be wrapped in multiple layers of plastic to avoid infection. Families of the deceased thus had very little access to the bodies of their loved ones prior to burial and could not wash them or communicate with them before t…
Covid and Custom in Rural South Africa: Culture, Healthcare and the State
This book explores the impact of Covid-19, and the associated state lockdown, on rural lives in a former homeland in South Africa. The 2020 Disaster Management Act saw the state sweep through rural areas, targeting funerals and other customary practices as potential "super-spreader" events. This unprecedented clampdown produced widespread disruption, fear, and anxiety. The authors build on path-breaking work concerning local responses to West Afr…
A State of (Greater) Exception? Funerals, Custom and the “War on Covid” in Rural South Africa
In the analysis of the implementation of the lockdown restrictions in South Africa, a great deal has been made of the unequal ways in which middle-class suburban communities, with access to large homes and biomedical support, have experienced the state of exception in comparison to the poor and unemployed in townships and shack areas. What has been less visible so far is the picture that is beginning to emerge from the rural areas and more margin…
Land Reform and Belonging in South Africa: A Place-making Perspective
Political debate around South African land reform peaks in the run up to the national elections. 2019 was no exception. Escalating urban 'land grabs' in 2017 had already increased emotion, tension and political urgency on the issue. However, the debate again carried surprisingly little weight at the polls. It was overshadowed by the burning issues of jobs, housing, crime, corruption and service delivery. We offer some insights into the racial and…
A tribute to Priscilla Hall (27 March 1939-11 July 2017)
Bridging the gap between the intellectual and the human: The awkward biography of anthropologist and scholar-activist Iona Simon Mayer (1923)
This article tracks the coming together of anti-apartheid activism, feminism and humanism in the life and work of the social anthropologist and scholar-activist Iona Simon Mayer (1923-). The article seeks to balance a recognition of the creative work that Iona achieved with her much-loved husband across decades of joint fieldwork, analysis and writing with her hitherto entirely unacknowledged independent contributions to African ethnography, clos…
Biography in post-apartheid South Africa: A call for awkwardness
Biography (with autobiography) has become the most popular type of non-fiction in South Africa, but the recent expansion of works has not inspired commentary. Here we describe four 'constellations' of biographies: political biographies of the individual-as-leader; social history biographies of the individual-as-exemplar; literary biographies of the individual-as-vessel-of-self; and critical studies biographies of the individual-as-fragmented-subj…
Sobukwe's children: Nationalism, neo-liberalism and the student protests at the University of Fort Hare and in South Africa
This article explores the provocation of the former vice-chancellor of the University of Fort Hare, Dr Mvuyo Tom — made at the university’s centenary celebrations in 2016 — that the #FeesMustFall (#FMF) movement was a misguided and destructive millenarian movement, similar to the great Xhosa Cattle Killing of the 1850s. The article interrogates this proposition by reflecting on the higher education and political dynamics at Fort Hare during the #…
Engaging Mafeje's Ghost: Fort Hare and the Virtues of 'Homeland' Anthropology
In 2015, in the year preceding the centenary of South Africa's oldest historically black university, the University of Fort Hare, the vice chancellor of the university, Dr. Mvuyo Tom, asked academics who were presenting inaugural lectures in that year to specifically reflect on their work and their disciplines in the light of the history of Fort Hare. In this article, which was first delivered as a lecture in May 2015, I take up the vice chancell…
Forgetting Apartheid: History, Culture and the Body of a Nun - Corrigendum
Forgetting Apartheid: History, Culture and the Body of a Nun
In 1952, the African National Congress (ANC) initiated its Defiance Campaign, opposing apartheid laws through organized civil disobedience and African nationalism. On Sunday 9 November, the city of East London became a site of political mobilization when 1,500 Xhosa-speaking ANC sympathizers peacefully protested in Bantu Square, the hub of a township named Duncan Village. Police arrived and fired on the crowd, igniting 'spontaneous riots'. An Afr…
City Slums, Rural Homesteads: Migrant Culture, Displaced Urbanism and the Citizenship of the Serviced House
This article deals with the connections between Cape Town migrants and their rural homes on the former Transkei coast, which is presented here as a hidden frontier of social change in post-apartheid South Africa. The paper explores how older migrant cultural forms, which developed in the apartheid migrant hostels and then moved to the shacklands of Hout Bay in Cape Town, have shifted their focus from away from agriculture to new forms of rural in…
Frontiers of freedom: Race, landscape and nationalism in the coastal cultures of South Africa
The idea that whiteness is not a natural category but one which requires construction, maintenance and investment has provoked a rich scholarship, including in South Africa. The scholarship on whiteness in southern Africa has been marked, in particular, by a failure to consider whiteness in relation to blackness, especially in the post-apartheid era. This article addresses this by focusing on the coast as a contested frontier of identity formatio…
Fatheringvolkekunde: Race and culture in the ethnological writings of Werner Eiselen, Stellenbosch University, 1926-1936
Werner Willi Max Eiselen (1899–1977) has been celebrated for having consolidated the liberal functionalist school of social anthropology in South Africa. In the standard androcentric narrative, David Hammond-Tooke (1997) argues that during his decade-long tenure as head of “Bantology” at Stellenbosch University between 1926 and 1936, and in close collaboration with Isaac Schapera (1905–2003), Werner Eiselen developed the tradition of social anthr…
"Broederbande" [brotherly bonds]: Afrikaner nationalist masculinity and African sexuality in the writings of Werner Eiselen's students, Stellenbosch University, 1930-1936
The importance of Willi Werner Max Eiselen (1899–1977) as the lecturer, supervisor and mentor of the first generation of volkekundiges at Stellenbosch University has been greatly underestimated. He supervised no fewer than 11 MA and doctoral theses in this field between 1930 and 1936, texts which are remarkable for the coherence of the backgrounds of their authors — male, rural, Christian, right-wing — and for the uniformity of their ethnological…
Salvage Anthropology in a City Without History: East London and Photographic Collections of Joseph Denfield, 1950–1969
This paper explores the personal and public photography taken in the 1960s by Joseph Denfield, a well-known South African ethnographic photographer and amateur historian in East London. We argue that his collection allows for a critical reflection on the narratives of the history and culture of East London during this period. Drawing attention to the economic, infrastructural, political and cultural changes that the city underwent from the 1950s …
Untangling the Lion's Tale: Violent Masculinity and the Ethics of Biography in the 'Curious' Case of the Apartheid-Era Policeman Donald Card
Donald Card (1928–) is a former policeman in South Africa who became the subject of international media attention on 21 September 2004. In a highly publicised and symbolic ceremony of reconciliation inaugurating the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory Project, he handed back to Mandela two notebooks containing 78 hitherto unknown letters written by Mandela on Robben Island. A starkly contrasting image of Card as a torturer had, however, come to light…
Home Spaces, Street Styles: Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City
Towards an anthropology of urbanism the Xhosa in town revisited modernism, space and identity rebellion, fractured urbanism and the fear of fire the style of the comrades changing migrant cultures re-modelling the house the rhythms of the yards post-apartheid suburb or hyper-ghetto conclusion
The Making of a Woman Anthropologist: Monica Hunter at Girton College, Cambridge, 1927-1930
This article is based on an approach towards the history of anthropology that privileges the personal and that recognises the decisive contribution of women social anthropologists in the interwar years in particular. Monica Hunter Wilson was one of the leading women ethnographers of this Golden Age (to use Hammond-Tooke's term) and this article explores the background to her anthropological career. That background has usually been associated with…
The 'Intimate Politics' of Fieldwork: Monica Hunter and her African Assistants, Pondoland and the Eastern Cape, 1931-1932
Monica Hunter's Reaction to Conquest (1936) is a celebrated example of interwar anthropology that has long influenced the conception of African societies and is today still widely recognised as a precocious and pioneering study. This article explores the human story behind the book by returning to the sites where Hunter collected her ethnographic data during her two years of fieldwork in 1931 and 1932. At each of these sites of knowledge producti…
The Rhythms of the Yards: Urbanism, Backyards and Housing Policy in South Africa
Modernist planners became thieves of memory. Faustian in their eagerness to erase all traces of the past in the interest of forward momentum, of growth in the name of progress, their drive-by-windscreen surveys of neighbourhoods that they have already decided to condemn to the bulldozer, have been, in their own way, as deadly as the recent drive by gang shootings in Los Angeles. Modernist planners embracing the ideology of development as progress…
Going Nowhere Slowly? Land, Livelihoods and Rural Development in the Eastern Cape
Colonial dichotomies continue to operate quite freely in the present ... Of these dichotomies, that between "modernity" and "tradition" has proved to be the most enduring. The first axis – modernity – is associated with progress, development, "the West", science and technology, high standards of living, rationality and order; the other axis – tradition – is associated with stasis or even stagnation, underdevelopment, conventional tools and techno…
Beyond Red and School: Gender, Tradition and Identity in the Rural Eastern Cape
Rural development policies in South Africa changed in the 1990s. The new framework combined poverty alleviation strategies with an attempt to shift rural communities away from subsistence-oriented agriculture to more market-oriented development options. While many of those who are currently assessing the impact of these policies in rural areas have focused on the extent to which they have contributed towards the creation of 'sustainable livelihoo…
Living Together, Moving Apart: Home-made Agendas, Identity Politics and Urban-Rural Linkages in the Eastern Cape, South Africa
(2001). Living Together, Moving Apart: Home-made Agendas, Identity Politics and Urban-Rural Linkages in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Journal of Contemporary African Studies: Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 129-147
The Great Debate and the Origins of South African Historiography
The fundamental preoccupation with race in later historical writing in South Africa has its origins in the Great Debate between liberals and their enemies in the early nineteenth century. Standard overviews of South African historiography date the emergence of racially structured histories to the second half of the nineteenth century. For Saunders, the making of the South African past and its thematic ordering in terms of race only began in the 1…
Angry men and working women: Gender, violence and economic change in Qwaqwa in the 1980s
The paper attempts to contextualise and explain an extraordinary incident of public violence which occurred in Qwaqwa in the mid‐1980s and which involved a collective assault on working women by unemployed men in the bantustan town of Phuthaditjhaba. To explain this event, the paper explores the changing material context and cultural constructions of households in this bantustan over time. The central argument developed below is that, while the a…
The 'Intimate Politics' of Fieldwork: Monica Hunter and her African Assistants, Pondoland and the Eastern Cape, 1931-1932
Monica Hunter's Reaction to Conquest (1936) is a celebrated example of interwar anthropology that has long influenced the conception of African societies and is today still widely recognised as a precocious and pioneering study. This article explores the human story behind the book by returning to the sites where Hunter collected her ethnographic data during her two years of fieldwork in 1931 and 1932. At each of these sites of knowledge producti…
Going Nowhere Slowly? Land, Livelihoods and Rural Development in the Eastern Cape
Colonial dichotomies continue to operate quite freely in the present ... Of these dichotomies, that between "modernity" and "tradition" has proved to be the most enduring. The first axis – modernity – is associated with progress, development, "the West", science and technology, high standards of living, rationality and order; the other axis – tradition – is associated with stasis or even stagnation, underdevelopment, conventional tools and techno…
The making of the Qwaqwa 'mafia'? Patronage and protection in the migrant taxi business
Men with Cookers: Transformations in Migrant Culture, Domesticity and Identity in Duncan Village, East London
This article is concerned with understanding current transformations in migrant culture and identity in South African urban areas. It approaches the topic by revisiting Philip and lana Mayer’s classic study of migrant culture and identity in the Duncan Village township of East London. The article uses the their work as the starting point from which to construct a detailed historical analysis of the tranformations in amaqaba migrant culture in the…
City Slums, Rural Homesteads: Migrant Culture, Displaced Urbanism and the Citizenship of the Serviced House
This article deals with the connections between Cape Town migrants and their rural homes on the former Transkei coast, which is presented here as a hidden frontier of social change in post-apartheid South Africa. The paper explores how older migrant cultural forms, which developed in the apartheid migrant hostels and then moved to the shacklands of Hout Bay in Cape Town, have shifted their focus from away from agriculture to new forms of rural in…
Fatheringvolkekunde: Race and culture in the ethnological writings of Werner Eiselen, Stellenbosch University, 1926-1936
Werner Willi Max Eiselen (1899–1977) has been celebrated for having consolidated the liberal functionalist school of social anthropology in South Africa. In the standard androcentric narrative, David Hammond-Tooke (1997) argues that during his decade-long tenure as head of “Bantology” at Stellenbosch University between 1926 and 1936, and in close collaboration with Isaac Schapera (1905–2003), Werner Eiselen developed the tradition of social anthr…
The Rhythms of the Yards: Urbanism, Backyards and Housing Policy in South Africa
Modernist planners became thieves of memory. Faustian in their eagerness to erase all traces of the past in the interest of forward momentum, of growth in the name of progress, their drive-by-windscreen surveys of neighbourhoods that they have already decided to condemn to the bulldozer, have been, in their own way, as deadly as the recent drive by gang shootings in Los Angeles. Modernist planners embracing the ideology of development as progress…
Evolution and Racial Theory: The Hidden Side of Wilhelm Bleek
The social life of Paraffin: Gender, domesticity and the politics of value in a South African township
Biography in post-apartheid South Africa: A call for awkwardness
Biography (with autobiography) has become the most popular type of non-fiction in South Africa, but the recent expansion of works has not inspired commentary. Here we describe four 'constellations' of biographies: political biographies of the individual-as-leader; social history biographies of the individual-as-exemplar; literary biographies of the individual-as-vessel-of-self; and critical studies biographies of the individual-as-fragmented-subj…
End of an Era: Africa's Development Policy Parallax
Land Reform and Belonging in South Africa: A Place-making Perspective
Political debate around South African land reform peaks in the run up to the national elections. 2019 was no exception. Escalating urban 'land grabs' in 2017 had already increased emotion, tension and political urgency on the issue. However, the debate again carried surprisingly little weight at the polls. It was overshadowed by the burning issues of jobs, housing, crime, corruption and service delivery. We offer some insights into the racial and…
Forgetting Apartheid: History, Culture and the Body of a Nun
In 1952, the African National Congress (ANC) initiated its Defiance Campaign, opposing apartheid laws through organized civil disobedience and African nationalism. On Sunday 9 November, the city of East London became a site of political mobilization when 1,500 Xhosa-speaking ANC sympathizers peacefully protested in Bantu Square, the hub of a township named Duncan Village. Police arrived and fired on the crowd, igniting 'spontaneous riots'. An Afr…
"Broederbande" [brotherly bonds]: Afrikaner nationalist masculinity and African sexuality in the writings of Werner Eiselen's students, Stellenbosch University, 1930-1936
The importance of Willi Werner Max Eiselen (1899–1977) as the lecturer, supervisor and mentor of the first generation of volkekundiges at Stellenbosch University has been greatly underestimated. He supervised no fewer than 11 MA and doctoral theses in this field between 1930 and 1936, texts which are remarkable for the coherence of the backgrounds of their authors — male, rural, Christian, right-wing — and for the uniformity of their ethnological…
The failure of ethnic nationalism: Land, power and the politics of clanship on the South African high veld 1860-1990
During the 1980s a great deal was written about the role of missionaries, anthropologists, colonial officials and intellectuals in the 'invention' of ethnic and tribal categories in Africa. Today few scholars would question the complicity of colonial agents in the construction of ethnic or tribal identities. Despite these interventions, however, there is a growing realisation that processes of ethnicity formation are contingent on other factors a…
Sobukwe's children: Nationalism, neo-liberalism and the student protests at the University of Fort Hare and in South Africa
This article explores the provocation of the former vice-chancellor of the University of Fort Hare, Dr Mvuyo Tom — made at the university’s centenary celebrations in 2016 — that the #FeesMustFall (#FMF) movement was a misguided and destructive millenarian movement, similar to the great Xhosa Cattle Killing of the 1850s. The article interrogates this proposition by reflecting on the higher education and political dynamics at Fort Hare during the #…
Frontiers of freedom: Race, landscape and nationalism in the coastal cultures of South Africa
The idea that whiteness is not a natural category but one which requires construction, maintenance and investment has provoked a rich scholarship, including in South Africa. The scholarship on whiteness in southern Africa has been marked, in particular, by a failure to consider whiteness in relation to blackness, especially in the post-apartheid era. This article addresses this by focusing on the coast as a contested frontier of identity formatio…
Salvage Anthropology in a City Without History: East London and Photographic Collections of Joseph Denfield, 1950–1969
This paper explores the personal and public photography taken in the 1960s by Joseph Denfield, a well-known South African ethnographic photographer and amateur historian in East London. We argue that his collection allows for a critical reflection on the narratives of the history and culture of East London during this period. Drawing attention to the economic, infrastructural, political and cultural changes that the city underwent from the 1950s …
The Return of the Noble Savage: The Changing Image of Africans in Cape Colonial Art, 1800–1850
Untangling the Lion's Tale: Violent Masculinity and the Ethics of Biography in the 'Curious' Case of the Apartheid-Era Policeman Donald Card
Donald Card (1928–) is a former policeman in South Africa who became the subject of international media attention on 21 September 2004. In a highly publicised and symbolic ceremony of reconciliation inaugurating the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory Project, he handed back to Mandela two notebooks containing 78 hitherto unknown letters written by Mandela on Robben Island. A starkly contrasting image of Card as a torturer had, however, come to light…
On Family Farms and Commodity Groups: Rural Livelihoods, Households and Development Policy in the Eastern Cape
In recent years, and especially with the realisation that many of the GEAR-driven initiatives for encouraging growth and development in the former homelands, have not delivered on their promises, a new emphasis has crept into policy debates: Food security and self-reliance are now placed much higher on the rural development agenda in South Africa. Many have welcomed the emphasis on food security and speak increasingly of an agriculture-led growth…
Britain's Coastline: History from the Air
The making of the Qwaqwa 'mafia'? Patronage and protection in the migrant taxi business
Squatting and the politics of urban restructuring in Transkei: The case of Cala
Ethnography and the Historical Imagination
La caza costera tradicional de ballenas o "pesca de ballenas" se inicia en la zona de Talcahuano en la primera mitad del siglo XIX y luego se extiende hacia el sur de Chile, llegando hasta la Isla Grande de Chiloé.En este trabajo nos interesa escribir una etnografía de la caza costera en Tumbes e isla Santa María, denominada en la literatura de la época "pesca de ballenas".Los datos sobre estas operaciones provienen de una serie de informes escri…
Between Traders and Tribalists: Implosion and the Politics of Disjuncture in a South African Homeland
Journal Article BETWEEN TRADERS AND TRIBALISTS: IMPLOSION AND THE POLITICS OF DISJUNCTURE IN A SOUTH AFRICAN HOMELAND Get access LESLIE BANK LESLIE BANK Research Officer The author is a Research Officer in the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University, Grahamstown. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 93, Issue 370, January 1994, Pages 75–98, https://doi.org/10.1093/ox…
Angry men and working women: Gender, violence and economic change in Qwaqwa in the 1980s
The paper attempts to contextualise and explain an extraordinary incident of public violence which occurred in Qwaqwa in the mid‐1980s and which involved a collective assault on working women by unemployed men in the bantustan town of Phuthaditjhaba. To explain this event, the paper explores the changing material context and cultural constructions of households in this bantustan over time. The central argument developed below is that, while the a…
Slavery Without Slaves: Robert Shell's Social History of Cape Slave Society
(1995). Slavery Without Slaves: Robert Shell's Social History of Cape Slave Society. South African Historical Journal: Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 182-193
The failure of ethnic nationalism: Land, power and the politics of clanship on the South African high veld 1860-1990
During the 1980s a great deal was written about the role of missionaries, anthropologists, colonial officials and intellectuals in the 'invention' of ethnic and tribal categories in Africa. Today few scholars would question the complicity of colonial agents in the construction of ethnic or tribal identities. Despite these interventions, however, there is a growing realisation that processes of ethnicity formation are contingent on other factors a…
Traditional Leaders in South Africa’s New Democracy
(1996). Traditional Leaders in South Africa’s New Democracy. The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law: Vol. 28, No. 37-38, pp. 407-430
The Great Debate and the Origins of South African Historiography
The fundamental preoccupation with race in later historical writing in South Africa has its origins in the Great Debate between liberals and their enemies in the early nineteenth century. Standard overviews of South African historiography date the emergence of racially structured histories to the second half of the nineteenth century. For Saunders, the making of the South African past and its thematic ordering in terms of race only began in the 1…
The social life of Paraffin: Gender, domesticity and the politics of value in a South African township
The Return of the Noble Savage: The Changing Image of Africans in Cape Colonial Art, 1800–1850
Men with Cookers: Transformations in Migrant Culture, Domesticity and Identity in Duncan Village, East London
This article is concerned with understanding current transformations in migrant culture and identity in South African urban areas. It approaches the topic by revisiting Philip and lana Mayer’s classic study of migrant culture and identity in the Duncan Village township of East London. The article uses the their work as the starting point from which to construct a detailed historical analysis of the tranformations in amaqaba migrant culture in the…
The Politics of Mythology: The Genealogy of the Philip Myth
Political myths have played a crucial role in legitimising apartheid and white domination in South Africa. This article explores the history of one such political myth: the mythology surrounding the nineteenth century missionary leader John Philip. I foreground the links between the Philip myth and the changing political and ideological contexts within which it was mobilised over the course of 150 years. While the roots of the Philip myth lie in …
Evolution and Racial Theory: The Hidden Side of Wilhelm Bleek
End of an Era: Africa's Development Policy Parallax
Living Together, Moving Apart: Home-made Agendas, Identity Politics and Urban-Rural Linkages in the Eastern Cape, South Africa
(2001). Living Together, Moving Apart: Home-made Agendas, Identity Politics and Urban-Rural Linkages in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Journal of Contemporary African Studies: Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 129-147
Beyond Red and School: Gender, Tradition and Identity in the Rural Eastern Cape
Rural development policies in South Africa changed in the 1990s. The new framework combined poverty alleviation strategies with an attempt to shift rural communities away from subsistence-oriented agriculture to more market-oriented development options. While many of those who are currently assessing the impact of these policies in rural areas have focused on the extent to which they have contributed towards the creation of 'sustainable livelihoo…
Going Nowhere Slowly? Land, Livelihoods and Rural Development in the Eastern Cape
Colonial dichotomies continue to operate quite freely in the present ... Of these dichotomies, that between "modernity" and "tradition" has proved to be the most enduring. The first axis – modernity – is associated with progress, development, "the West", science and technology, high standards of living, rationality and order; the other axis – tradition – is associated with stasis or even stagnation, underdevelopment, conventional tools and techno…
On Family Farms and Commodity Groups: Rural Livelihoods, Households and Development Policy in the Eastern Cape
In recent years, and especially with the realisation that many of the GEAR-driven initiatives for encouraging growth and development in the former homelands, have not delivered on their promises, a new emphasis has crept into policy debates: Food security and self-reliance are now placed much higher on the rural development agenda in South Africa. Many have welcomed the emphasis on food security and speak increasingly of an agriculture-led growth…
The Rhythms of the Yards: Urbanism, Backyards and Housing Policy in South Africa
Modernist planners became thieves of memory. Faustian in their eagerness to erase all traces of the past in the interest of forward momentum, of growth in the name of progress, their drive-by-windscreen surveys of neighbourhoods that they have already decided to condemn to the bulldozer, have been, in their own way, as deadly as the recent drive by gang shootings in Los Angeles. Modernist planners embracing the ideology of development as progress…
The 'Intimate Politics' of Fieldwork: Monica Hunter and her African Assistants, Pondoland and the Eastern Cape, 1931-1932
Monica Hunter's Reaction to Conquest (1936) is a celebrated example of interwar anthropology that has long influenced the conception of African societies and is today still widely recognised as a precocious and pioneering study. This article explores the human story behind the book by returning to the sites where Hunter collected her ethnographic data during her two years of fieldwork in 1931 and 1932. At each of these sites of knowledge producti…
The Making of a Woman Anthropologist: Monica Hunter at Girton College, Cambridge, 1927-1930
This article is based on an approach towards the history of anthropology that privileges the personal and that recognises the decisive contribution of women social anthropologists in the interwar years in particular. Monica Hunter Wilson was one of the leading women ethnographers of this Golden Age (to use Hammond-Tooke's term) and this article explores the background to her anthropological career. That background has usually been associated with…
Home Spaces, Street Styles: Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City
Towards an anthropology of urbanism the Xhosa in town revisited modernism, space and identity rebellion, fractured urbanism and the fear of fire the style of the comrades changing migrant cultures re-modelling the house the rhythms of the yards post-apartheid suburb or hyper-ghetto conclusion
Untangling the Lion's Tale: Violent Masculinity and the Ethics of Biography in the 'Curious' Case of the Apartheid-Era Policeman Donald Card
Donald Card (1928–) is a former policeman in South Africa who became the subject of international media attention on 21 September 2004. In a highly publicised and symbolic ceremony of reconciliation inaugurating the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory Project, he handed back to Mandela two notebooks containing 78 hitherto unknown letters written by Mandela on Robben Island. A starkly contrasting image of Card as a torturer had, however, come to light…
Sociology (32 works) · Political science (30 works) · Politics (24 works) · Law (22 works) · South African History and Culture (22 works) · History (21 works) · Archaeology (19 works) · Gender Studies (19 works) · History (19 works) · Law (17 works)