Tears of the Dead
The Social Biography of an African Family
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3910695 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Elizabeth Schmidt (0000-0001-8056-1534), Richard Werbner (0000-0002-3493-6742) |
| Year | 1993 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 422 |
| Publication date | 1993-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | REVIEW |
| Review of | Tears of the Dead: The Social Biography of an African Family, Dick Werbner, 2019 |
| Venue | The International Journal of African Historical Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0361-7882 • E-ISSN: 2326-3016 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/219569 |
| OpenAlex | W2000899210 |
| Language | EN |
This social biography illuminates 100 years of family history in Western Zimbabwe from the colonial period to the present. At the heart of the book are the life histories of several generations of Kalanga men and women in a single extended family, the family of Lupondo. Lupondo's family are active agents throughout the book, marshalling their own concepts of character, family morality and public authority to contend with the colonial world and its post-colonial heritage. Tears of the Dead is their own heritage, from generation to generation, both of endurance and of empowerment in the face of large scale eviction, displacement from home, the threat of imposed resettlement, guerrilla war and near starvation in a food blockade. Going beyond the critical analysis of political and social history, the book, as a narrative study, discloses the force of rhetoric in family discourse, showing how different family members use distinctive styles of narrative to fit their rapport with the anthropologist, their personal image or sense of self and their place in the family. More broadly, the focus is on the moral imagination through which family members themselves accounted for the impact of colonialism and its aftermath in the rise of quasi-nationalism during decolonialization
Art history · Biography · Genealogy · Sociology · Tears · African history and culture studies · African studies and sociopolitical issues · History · Medicine
Hyenas of the Limpopo
The Perfidy of Gaze and the Pain of Uncertainty
Domestic Matters
Trance against the State
Ethnography in/of Transnational Processes
Zimbabwe's Migrants and South Africa's Border Farms
The Political Life of an Epidemic
Agonistic Dysfunction on Facebook in Zimbabwe
Silence, the Unsaid and the Unsayable in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins
Zimbabwe
Rain, uncertainty and power in southern Zimbabwe
Rebuilding the liberation war base
Spiritual Temporalities of the Liberation War in Zimbabwe
Contested archaeological approaches to mass grave exhumations in Zimbabwe
The Historiography of Land in Zimbabwe
Post-Colonial Violence in Zimbabwe and the Significance of Peacebuilding Premised on Civilian Survival Strategies
Dialogical subjectivities for hard times
Reinvoking the past in the present
Historical writing about everyday life
Still here
Against the Flow
Introduktion Til Voldens Antropologi
Bakgomong
Blood, ancestral spirits and witches
Breaking out of the straitjacket of tradition
Modernity and ethnicity in a frontier society
Si Ye Pambili - which way forward
Healing the wounds of war
War, violence and healing in Zimbabwe
CAMPFIRE is not for Ndebele Migrants
Culture, environment & the enemies of complexity
State, peasantry and resettlement in Zimbabwe
Suffering of silenced people in northern Rwanda
Death, trauma and ritual
Can spirits play a role in peace and reconciliation projects? Perspectives on traditional reconciliation in Zimbabwe
Waiting for the Portuguese
Livestock livelihoods compromised
Images of History and the Nation
The zimbabwean liberation-war novel in shona
On the psychology of oppression
Contesting the social geometry of state power
Crossing the Boundary
The Sabotage of Patriarchy in Colonial Rhodesia, Rural African Women's Living Legacy to Their Daughters
Emergent Forms of Life
The body is his, pulse and motion”
Self-Presentation and Common Cultural Structures in Ngoma Rituals of Southern Africa
Accidental Neoliberalism and the Performance of Management
Tanganyikan Nationalism as ‘Women's Work’
Where Have All The Babies Gone
Processus et résultats des politiques appliquées par les programmes de gestion des ressources naturelles en Afrique australe
Catch the Cockerel Before Dawn
Dissident perspectives on Zimbabwe's post-Independence war
Understanding Recent African Wars
On the mobility of ghosts
Ways of Death
Rethinking the Man Question
Unsettled Settlers
Second Liberation
Beating the Bounds
The Composite State
The Politics of Pity
Elizabeth Colson (1917-2016)
The Names of Fear
Guerrilla Veterans in Post-war Zimbabwe
Race and Diplomacy in Zimbabwe
Witchcraft and a Life in the New South Africa
Toward an Anthropology of Fragments, Instabilities, and Incomplete Transitions
Circumcision, Death, and Strangers
Nostalgic for modernity
Playful places, serious times
Para onde foram os bebês? Em busca de uma Antropologia de bebês (e de seus cuidadores)
Anthropology As Cultural Critique
The traffic in heads
Youth Mobilisation as Social Navigation. Reflections on the concept of dubriagem
Unstable Biographies. The Ethnography of Memory and Historicity in an Angolan Prophetic Movement
Containing Witchcraft
Witchcraft in Statecraft
| Highly cited | No |
|---|