On conquest and anthropology in South Africa
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11422342 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Anjuli Webster (0000-0002-8638-7853, University of the Witwatersrand, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 398-414 |
| Publication date | 2018-09-02 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | South African Journal on Human Rights (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0258-7203 • E-ISSN: 1996-2126 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02587203.2018.1543840 |
| OpenAlex | W2904807893 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
Despite Archie Mafeje’s insistence in 1998 that anthropology is incompatible with the intellectual and political project of independent Africans,11 A Mafeje ‘Anthropology and independent Africans: suicide or end of an era?’ (1998) 2 African Sociological Review 1. anthropology remains a robust discipline in South Africa. Mafeje’s critique did not simply examine the historical political and pragmatic complicity of anthropology in colonial administration, but identified and interrogated anthropology’s epistemological collaboration in conquest and colonialism in Africa. In this paper, I take up Mafeje’s critique of anthropology, reading it into a history of the discipline at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. I argue that despite apparent paradigm shifts in anthropological praxis over the last century, the underlying settler colonial schema and internal tropes of the discipline endure largely intact in the present. To support this contention, I trace continuities in anthropological praxis from the ‘colonial past’ into the ‘constitutional present’, delineating the silencing of conquest and settler colonialism by anthropology
Ancient history · Anthropology of art · Applied anthropology · Archaeology · Colonialism · Complicity · CONQUEST · Decoloniality · Four field approach · Political science · Politics · Praxis · Sociocultural anthropology · Sociology · African cultural and philosophical studies · Anthropology · History · Law · South African History and Culture
Entre a vida e a morte
Teaching Through Making
Bernard Magubane’s critique of anthropology in southern Africa
Azanian Political Thought and the Undoing of South African Knowledges
South African Social Science and the Azanian Philosophical Tradition
Re-Imagining Reproduction
What is anthropology that decolonising scholarship should be mindful of it
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2019 - 2027 (9) |
| Highly cited | No |