‘Anthropologists Are Talking’: About Anthropology and Post-Apartheid South Africa

In 2010, South Africa hosted the first World Cup in soccer ever to take place on the African continent. Twenty years after the fall of Apartheid, South Africa presents a series of fractured and contradictory images to the outside world. It is, on the one hand, an economic powerhouse in sub-Saharan Africa, but on the other hand a society in which socio-economic inequalities have continued to flourish and increase. What can anthropology tell us about contemporary South Africa? As part of an ongoing series in public anthropology, Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Postdoctoral Fellow Sindre Bangstad sat down for a public conversation with Professors John L. and Jean Comaroff in The House of Literature in Oslo, Norway, on 28 September 2010.     

Public Reason and the Limits of Liberal Anti-Racism in Latvia

My paper is a critical analysis of anti-racist and tolerance promotion initiatives in Latvia. First, I trace the historical and geopolitical conditions that enable the emergence of two discursive positions that are central to arguments about racism – that of liberally inclined tolerance activists and that of Latvians with politically objectionable nationalist sensibilities. Subsequently, I argue that, plagued by developmentalist thinking, anti-racist and tolerance promotion initiatives fail in their analysis of contemporary racism. They posit backward attitudes as the main hindrance to the eradication of racism and displace racism as a constitutive feature of modern political forms onto individual and collective sensibilities. Instead of the fast track diagnosis of racism that animates liberal anti-racism, I suggest that an analysis of racism should integrate attention to the common elements of modern racism across political regimes and the historical particularities that shape public and political subjectivities in concrete places.     

Experiments with Light

This article describes an unlikely collaboration between a high school chemistry teacher and a high school English teacher who attempted to teach scientific concepts through poetry. Inspired by poet John Updike's (1960) "Cosmic Gall," these two teachers crafted writing tasks aimed at teaching science content through literary devices. The result was an inspiring account and unlikely marriage of academic disciplines.     

Locating the post-national activist: migration rights,civil society and the practice of post-nationalism

Theorists of post-nationalism examine the (re)configuration of national identity, membership and rights. Yet while normative scholarship has conceptualized post-nationalism as an ongoing practice of discursive contestation over the role of national group membership in liberal democratic societies, more empirical studies have tended to overlook these features to predominantly focus instead on top-down legal and political institution-building as evidence of post-nationalism. In this article I argue in favour of an empirical conceptualization of post-nationalism which more effectively captures micro-level practices of discursive contestation. Specifically I posit that post-national activists, or actors engaging in post-national practices of contestation from within the state, are a key focus of analysis for scholars of post-nationalism. I develop this claim through the analysis of data collected with individuals working on civil society campaigns for migration rights in Europe, Australia and the USA who – I demonstrate – embody many of the characteristics of the post-national activist.     

Nationalism as meaningful life projects: identity construction among politically active Tamil families in Norway

Abstract

For many years Northern Ireland has been a divided society where members of the two main religious groups, Catholics and Protestants, have limited opportunities to interact due to segregation in their social lives. Attempts have been made to encourage religious mixing through integration in schools, housing, and workplaces predicated on the theory that bringing people together can improve community relations and remove prejudices – known as the ‘contact hypothesis’. However, little is known about those who enter into mixed-religion partnerships often against the wishes of their families and communities. This paper examines the characteristics and attitudes of mixed-religion couples and suggests that they differ in their socio-demographic characteristics and in their attitudes from those who marry within their own religion. These findings add to the weight of evidence from other countries in conflict suggesting that intermarriage has a role to play in contributing to less sectarian views and improved community relations.     

National ceremonies: the pursuit of authenticity

Abstract

This article asks what, if any, impact national ceremonies have on the formation of national identities. Why are some ceremonies perceived as national and persistent through time, while others fail to achieve that status? It argues that national ceremonies can only be examined as specific types of situations – performances, rather than rituals – characterized by the relationship between performers and their audiences. Following Jeffery Alexander's cultural pragmatics theory, national ceremonies are seen as successful only when a performance is perceived as authentic. A ceremony's authenticity is, at best, a quality of experience among its audience. Only when the audience is transformed into willing participants through a performance's mise-en-scène can a national ceremony be seen as a ritual-like performance. The paper will conclude that the efficacy of these performances is temporary, and that even when a performance succeeds in creating a community of shared experience, that community dissolves with the end of the performance.     

Make Afrikaners great again! National populism,democracy and the new white minority politics in post-apartheid South Africa

This article on national populism in South Africa brings a view from the South to scholarship overwhelmingly concentrated on the north Atlantic and European world. While in white majority contexts, national populism seeks to capture formal political power, the white minority’s lack of political leverage in post-apartheid South Africa sees an assertion of white autonomy emerge in the civil society arena. The article examines the discursive strategies of the Solidarity Movement, a broad-based social movement which claims to represent the white minority, particularly white Afrikaans-speakers, amid black majority rule. It shows how through a reinvention of the past, recasting of race, and reformulation of nationalist narratives by neoliberal logics the Movement discursively undermines black majority rule, and seeks to create spaces in which white privilege, power and identities are maintained. These findings provide new insights into the relation between populism and democracy, and hold important lessons for the increasingly multicultural global North.     

Migrant warriors and transnational lives: constructing a Gurkha diaspora

The Nepalese Gurkhas have often been regarded as brave warriors in the scheme of British military recruitment since the 1800s. Today, their descendants have settled in various parts of South East and South Asia. How can one conceive of a Gurkha diaspora, and what are the Gurkhas and their families’ experiences of belonging in relation to varied migratory routes? This paper locates Gurkhas as migrants by deliberating upon the connection between military service and migration paths. I employ the lens of methodological transnationalism to elucidate how the Gurkha diaspora is both constructed and experienced. Diasporic consciousness and formation undergo modification alongside subsequent cycles of migration for different members of a diaspora. The article thus evaluates the transnational lives of migrants, and how these are connected to re-territorialized dimensions of identity and belonging.     

Methodological analysis for determination of enzymatic digestibility of cellulosic materials

Accurate measurement of enzymatic cellulose digestibility (X) is important in evaluating the efficiency of lignocellulose pretreatment technologies, assessing the performance of reconstituted cellulase mixtures, and conducting economic analysis for biorefinery processes. We analyzed the effect of sugars contained in enzymes solutions, usually added as a preservative, and random measurement errors on the accuracy of X calculated by various methods. The analysis suggests that exogenous sugars at levels measured in several commercial enzyme preparations significantly bias the results and that this error should be minimized by accounting for these sugars in the calculation of X. Additionally, a method of calculating X equating the ratio of the soluble glucose equivalent in the liquid phase after hydrolysis to the sum of the soluble glucose equivalent in the liquid phase and the insoluble glucose equivalent in the residual solid after hydrolysis was found to be the most accurate, particularly at high conversion levels (>ca. 50%).