Bernard Dubbeld
Biographic Data
| ID | 92333 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bernard Dubbeld |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bernard |
| FAMILY NAME | Dubbeld |
| SIGNATURE | DUBBELD B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stellenbosch University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3230-9411 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 35 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Obituary: Robert Wesley Pattman, 14 February 1955–13 August 2025
Robert Wesley Pattman, retired Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Stellenbosch University, passed away at the age of 70 on 13 August 2025 after a long ill
ChatGPT and the fate of the undergraduate essay in the humanities: Interpreting initial responses from Stellenbosch University
In early 2023, the use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT became apparent in undergraduate courses in South African universities. In the Humanities and Social Sciences, where most disciplines rely on essays for training and assessment, this development produced considerable anxiety and, over the following years, led to reconsiderations of teaching and learning in the humanities at Stellenbosch University. Amid the ongoing scramble to refashion assessments, it i…
Housing struggles as political practice in post-apartheid Cape Town: Reading Levenson's Delivery as Dispossession
Levenson's new book Delivery as Dispossession offers a careful reading of land occupations in Cape Town that takes us from landless communities in the city to courtrooms. His study focuses on two occupations in the Mitchell's Plain area with contrasting fates, which his empirically rich analysis explains in relation to the occupiers’ strategies and self-representation to the state. It is an important political sociology that contributes to how we…
Youth and the future of work: Introduction
This editorial introduces and frames the six papers of this special section. It begins by proposing that youth unemployment needs to be understood in relation to a range of patterns of “getting by” in the global south. We suggest that the many practices of work, including informal ones, discussed in the collection do not attest to a society in “need of development” but rather point towards the future of work, here and elsewhere. While taking tran…
Granting the future? The temporality of cash transfers in the South African Countryside
In the past five years, anthropologists from the global South have come to consider public cash transfer programs as an alternative to both work-centered policies and national development projects. These studies suggest that grants today go beyond the domain of traditional social policies and government bureaucracy and point to a new future in view of the scarcity of work. This future has become even closer with the pandemic of COVID-19, and with…
Thinking with Capital today: A Brief Introduction
This essay introduces the special issue entitled “Capital and Contemporary Critique: a Stellenbosch Seminar Series”. It situates the contributions by briefly engaging previous Marxist theorisations of South Africa and their criticisms. It argues that capitalism continues to shape contemporary social life, and requires analysis, albeit without repeating the shortcomings of older Marxist analyses
Democracy as technopolitical future: Delivery and discontent in a government settlement in the South African countryside
This paper is concerned with how democracy is understood and experienced in a KwaZulu-Natal municipal administration and one of the settlements it governs. Considering that democracy has a range of popular meanings, and that in South Africa it has been tied to the promise of a better life, I explore how municipal officials have identified democracy with a technopolitical future in which experts evaluate poor communities and implement infrastructu…
Enchanting the worn-out: The craft of selling second-hand things at Milnerton Market, Cape Town
This paper considers the trade in second-hand things at Milnerton Market, Cape Town. We describe the labour of traders in making these worn-out objects into saleable products, detailing the displays and discussions which are integral to their valorisation. We show that Milnerton becomes imagined by traders and customers as an alternative to routine shopping at malls and boutique stores. The critical work of protecting and maintaining this alterna…
Capital and the Shifting Grounds of Emancipatory Politics: The Limits of Radical Unionism in Durban Harbor, 1974–85
This article considers the transformation of work for stevedores (longshoremen) in Durban between 1974 and 1985 and its consequences for radical trade union politics. I detail the demise of “racial capitalism” in the port, with containerization requiring fewer, and differently skilled, dockworkers. I then show how radical unionist aspirations of emancipation from both capitalism and apartheid encountered limits that have become increasingly appar…
Friedman's wrestle with Wolpe and his aspiration to transcend Marxism
Steven Friedman’s book on Harold Wolpe is ambitious. Friedman attempts three things: first, an intellectual and political biography of Wolpe; second, a close reading of Wolpe’s arguments, their rec
Envisioning Governance: Expectations and Estrangements of Transformed Rule in Glendale, South Africa
This article explores how, in the village of Glendale in KwaZulu-Natal, residents and local government officials – including councillors and municipal technicians – ‘see’ the post-apartheid state. I show how residents of the village regard the government – despite extensive state intervention – as inadequate, complaining especially of their ‘invisible’ and ‘impersonal’ character. Indeed, for them, democracy has brought anything but ‘direct rule’.…
Clearing the Ground for Social Theory in South Africa
The Method and Politics of Reading From the Particular: Introducing ‘Subjects of Stellenbosch’
Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad ... In this structure [the historical materialist] recognizes the sign of Messianic cessation of happening, or put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to b…
Sobers Only: Drunkenness and Race in the Entry to Stellenbosch Bottle Stores
This article is based on ethnographic research in four bottle stores in Stellenbosch. Prior to beginning the research, we believed it would yield fascinating accounts of interactions across race and class; instead we discovered how these stores are organised to prevent this interaction from occurring. We focus on one particular store that is especially efficient at preventing interaction, describing the organisation of the store and how people in…
Dissecting sameness: South Africa and the politics of nonracialism
A claim to a basic human sameness underwrote a powerful political argument, that of nonracialism, for emancipation from Apartheid. This argument asserted that difference was inseparable from inequality, and thus that advancing human sameness helped undo the work of the Apartheid state and of racial capitalism. But does sameness continue to hold as an emancipatory orientation in post-Apartheid South Africa? Does silencing race by ending racial cat…
Marx, labour and emancipation in South African sociology: A Preliminary Rethinking
In a university and disciplinary environment where knowledge is increasingly commodified, this paper sketches a reconstruction of the mature Marx's analysis of capitalism. I argue that his understanding remains methodologically powerful and helps to ground sociological analyses of the present. While accepting that there are good grounds for questioning the relevance of Marx in the wake of the South African political transition and the Post-Fordis…
The possibility of a critical anthropology after apartheid: Relevance, Intervention, Politics
This paper, prompted by an Anthropology Southern Africa conference around the theme ‘Public Anthropology’, argues that any post-apartheid anthropology that abandons criticality as a core disciplinary principle risks dispelling any radical content that anthropology may have to offer South African society. Anthropological practice that, in the name of activism or application, misrecognises the necessary and complicated relationship between thought …
Breaking the Buffalo: The Transformation of Stevedoring Work in Durban Between 1970 and 1990
In Durban, South Africa, stevedoring workers were the most physically powerful workers of all, and were known as onyathi in Zulu, or buffalo, which aptly described the physical and collective nature of their work. Throughout the century, the stevedoring industry was especially labour-intensive, necessitating teams of workers. As in most industries in South Africa, African workers built and maintained the docks. These buffalo developed the linkage…
Breaking the Buffalo: The Transformation of Stevedoring Work in Durban Between 1970 and 1990
In Durban, South Africa, stevedoring workers were the most physically powerful workers of all, and were known as onyathi in Zulu, or buffalo, which aptly described the physical and collective nature of their work. Throughout the century, the stevedoring industry was especially labour-intensive, necessitating teams of workers. As in most industries in South Africa, African workers built and maintained the docks. These buffalo developed the linkage…
Granting the future? The temporality of cash transfers in the South African Countryside
In the past five years, anthropologists from the global South have come to consider public cash transfer programs as an alternative to both work-centered policies and national development projects. These studies suggest that grants today go beyond the domain of traditional social policies and government bureaucracy and point to a new future in view of the scarcity of work. This future has become even closer with the pandemic of COVID-19, and with…
Democracy as technopolitical future: Delivery and discontent in a government settlement in the South African countryside
This paper is concerned with how democracy is understood and experienced in a KwaZulu-Natal municipal administration and one of the settlements it governs. Considering that democracy has a range of popular meanings, and that in South Africa it has been tied to the promise of a better life, I explore how municipal officials have identified democracy with a technopolitical future in which experts evaluate poor communities and implement infrastructu…
Capital and the Shifting Grounds of Emancipatory Politics: The Limits of Radical Unionism in Durban Harbor, 1974–85
This article considers the transformation of work for stevedores (longshoremen) in Durban between 1974 and 1985 and its consequences for radical trade union politics. I detail the demise of “racial capitalism” in the port, with containerization requiring fewer, and differently skilled, dockworkers. I then show how radical unionist aspirations of emancipation from both capitalism and apartheid encountered limits that have become increasingly appar…
The possibility of a critical anthropology after apartheid: Relevance, Intervention, Politics
This paper, prompted by an Anthropology Southern Africa conference around the theme ‘Public Anthropology’, argues that any post-apartheid anthropology that abandons criticality as a core disciplinary principle risks dispelling any radical content that anthropology may have to offer South African society. Anthropological practice that, in the name of activism or application, misrecognises the necessary and complicated relationship between thought …
Enchanting the worn-out: The craft of selling second-hand things at Milnerton Market, Cape Town
This paper considers the trade in second-hand things at Milnerton Market, Cape Town. We describe the labour of traders in making these worn-out objects into saleable products, detailing the displays and discussions which are integral to their valorisation. We show that Milnerton becomes imagined by traders and customers as an alternative to routine shopping at malls and boutique stores. The critical work of protecting and maintaining this alterna…
Thinking with Capital today: A Brief Introduction
This essay introduces the special issue entitled “Capital and Contemporary Critique: a Stellenbosch Seminar Series”. It situates the contributions by briefly engaging previous Marxist theorisations of South Africa and their criticisms. It argues that capitalism continues to shape contemporary social life, and requires analysis, albeit without repeating the shortcomings of older Marxist analyses
Dissecting sameness: South Africa and the politics of nonracialism
A claim to a basic human sameness underwrote a powerful political argument, that of nonracialism, for emancipation from Apartheid. This argument asserted that difference was inseparable from inequality, and thus that advancing human sameness helped undo the work of the Apartheid state and of racial capitalism. But does sameness continue to hold as an emancipatory orientation in post-Apartheid South Africa? Does silencing race by ending racial cat…
Marx, labour and emancipation in South African sociology: A Preliminary Rethinking
In a university and disciplinary environment where knowledge is increasingly commodified, this paper sketches a reconstruction of the mature Marx's analysis of capitalism. I argue that his understanding remains methodologically powerful and helps to ground sociological analyses of the present. While accepting that there are good grounds for questioning the relevance of Marx in the wake of the South African political transition and the Post-Fordis…
Breaking the Buffalo: The Transformation of Stevedoring Work in Durban Between 1970 and 1990
In Durban, South Africa, stevedoring workers were the most physically powerful workers of all, and were known as onyathi in Zulu, or buffalo, which aptly described the physical and collective nature of their work. Throughout the century, the stevedoring industry was especially labour-intensive, necessitating teams of workers. As in most industries in South Africa, African workers built and maintained the docks. These buffalo developed the linkage…
The possibility of a critical anthropology after apartheid: Relevance, Intervention, Politics
This paper, prompted by an Anthropology Southern Africa conference around the theme ‘Public Anthropology’, argues that any post-apartheid anthropology that abandons criticality as a core disciplinary principle risks dispelling any radical content that anthropology may have to offer South African society. Anthropological practice that, in the name of activism or application, misrecognises the necessary and complicated relationship between thought …
Marx, labour and emancipation in South African sociology: A Preliminary Rethinking
In a university and disciplinary environment where knowledge is increasingly commodified, this paper sketches a reconstruction of the mature Marx's analysis of capitalism. I argue that his understanding remains methodologically powerful and helps to ground sociological analyses of the present. While accepting that there are good grounds for questioning the relevance of Marx in the wake of the South African political transition and the Post-Fordis…
The Method and Politics of Reading From the Particular: Introducing ‘Subjects of Stellenbosch’
Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad ... In this structure [the historical materialist] recognizes the sign of Messianic cessation of happening, or put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to b…
Sobers Only: Drunkenness and Race in the Entry to Stellenbosch Bottle Stores
This article is based on ethnographic research in four bottle stores in Stellenbosch. Prior to beginning the research, we believed it would yield fascinating accounts of interactions across race and class; instead we discovered how these stores are organised to prevent this interaction from occurring. We focus on one particular store that is especially efficient at preventing interaction, describing the organisation of the store and how people in…
Dissecting sameness: South Africa and the politics of nonracialism
A claim to a basic human sameness underwrote a powerful political argument, that of nonracialism, for emancipation from Apartheid. This argument asserted that difference was inseparable from inequality, and thus that advancing human sameness helped undo the work of the Apartheid state and of racial capitalism. But does sameness continue to hold as an emancipatory orientation in post-Apartheid South Africa? Does silencing race by ending racial cat…
Clearing the Ground for Social Theory in South Africa
Envisioning Governance: Expectations and Estrangements of Transformed Rule in Glendale, South Africa
This article explores how, in the village of Glendale in KwaZulu-Natal, residents and local government officials – including councillors and municipal technicians – ‘see’ the post-apartheid state. I show how residents of the village regard the government – despite extensive state intervention – as inadequate, complaining especially of their ‘invisible’ and ‘impersonal’ character. Indeed, for them, democracy has brought anything but ‘direct rule’.…
Capital and the Shifting Grounds of Emancipatory Politics: The Limits of Radical Unionism in Durban Harbor, 1974–85
This article considers the transformation of work for stevedores (longshoremen) in Durban between 1974 and 1985 and its consequences for radical trade union politics. I detail the demise of “racial capitalism” in the port, with containerization requiring fewer, and differently skilled, dockworkers. I then show how radical unionist aspirations of emancipation from both capitalism and apartheid encountered limits that have become increasingly appar…
Friedman's wrestle with Wolpe and his aspiration to transcend Marxism
Steven Friedman’s book on Harold Wolpe is ambitious. Friedman attempts three things: first, an intellectual and political biography of Wolpe; second, a close reading of Wolpe’s arguments, their rec
Enchanting the worn-out: The craft of selling second-hand things at Milnerton Market, Cape Town
This paper considers the trade in second-hand things at Milnerton Market, Cape Town. We describe the labour of traders in making these worn-out objects into saleable products, detailing the displays and discussions which are integral to their valorisation. We show that Milnerton becomes imagined by traders and customers as an alternative to routine shopping at malls and boutique stores. The critical work of protecting and maintaining this alterna…
Democracy as technopolitical future: Delivery and discontent in a government settlement in the South African countryside
This paper is concerned with how democracy is understood and experienced in a KwaZulu-Natal municipal administration and one of the settlements it governs. Considering that democracy has a range of popular meanings, and that in South Africa it has been tied to the promise of a better life, I explore how municipal officials have identified democracy with a technopolitical future in which experts evaluate poor communities and implement infrastructu…
Thinking with Capital today: A Brief Introduction
This essay introduces the special issue entitled “Capital and Contemporary Critique: a Stellenbosch Seminar Series”. It situates the contributions by briefly engaging previous Marxist theorisations of South Africa and their criticisms. It argues that capitalism continues to shape contemporary social life, and requires analysis, albeit without repeating the shortcomings of older Marxist analyses
Youth and the future of work: Introduction
This editorial introduces and frames the six papers of this special section. It begins by proposing that youth unemployment needs to be understood in relation to a range of patterns of “getting by” in the global south. We suggest that the many practices of work, including informal ones, discussed in the collection do not attest to a society in “need of development” but rather point towards the future of work, here and elsewhere. While taking tran…
Granting the future? The temporality of cash transfers in the South African Countryside
In the past five years, anthropologists from the global South have come to consider public cash transfer programs as an alternative to both work-centered policies and national development projects. These studies suggest that grants today go beyond the domain of traditional social policies and government bureaucracy and point to a new future in view of the scarcity of work. This future has become even closer with the pandemic of COVID-19, and with…
Housing struggles as political practice in post-apartheid Cape Town: Reading Levenson's Delivery as Dispossession
Levenson's new book Delivery as Dispossession offers a careful reading of land occupations in Cape Town that takes us from landless communities in the city to courtrooms. His study focuses on two occupations in the Mitchell's Plain area with contrasting fates, which his empirically rich analysis explains in relation to the occupiers’ strategies and self-representation to the state. It is an important political sociology that contributes to how we…
Obituary: Robert Wesley Pattman, 14 February 1955–13 August 2025
Robert Wesley Pattman, retired Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Stellenbosch University, passed away at the age of 70 on 13 August 2025 after a long ill
ChatGPT and the fate of the undergraduate essay in the humanities: Interpreting initial responses from Stellenbosch University
In early 2023, the use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT became apparent in undergraduate courses in South African universities. In the Humanities and Social Sciences, where most disciplines rely on essays for training and assessment, this development produced considerable anxiety and, over the following years, led to reconsiderations of teaching and learning in the humanities at Stellenbosch University. Amid the ongoing scramble to refashion assessments, it i…
Political science (15 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Law (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · South African History and Culture (10 works) · Economics (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Political economy (6 works) · Social science (5 works) · African history and culture studies (4 works)