Isak Niehaus | Brunel University (original) (raw)

Papers by Isak Niehaus

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Nov 5, 2012

Oxford Bibliographies Online Datasets, Jan 11, 2012

Anthropology Southern Africa, Apr 3, 2021

Social researchers associate paradoxical developments in post-apartheid South Africa — such as in... more Social researchers associate paradoxical developments in post-apartheid South Africa — such as increased hardship at a time of heightened expectations — with a proliferation in witchcraft accusations. This article examines this postulate in greater depth, drawing upon multi-temporal ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a village of Bushbuckridge since 1990. The evidence I gathered does not confirm any dramatic increase in accusations of witchcraft but does show significant changes in the pattern of who is being accused. More specifically, villagers now increasingly suspect male cognates of practicing witchcraft, and sons regularly accuse their fathers. I relate these changes to processes of de-industrialisation and to the AIDS epidemic that have both dashed young men’s expectations of progress in the period after political liberation. The ambiguous position of elderly men as marginal yet historically powerful persons resonates with the status of witches. Villagers imagine that by having used witchcraft to attain status, health and prosperity in the past, fathers unwittingly sacrificed the futures of their sons.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Mar 1, 2009

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, May 3, 2011

Anthropology Southern Africa, Apr 3, 2015

This article reproduces, with minor editorial changes, a previously unpublished paper presented b... more This article reproduces, with minor editorial changes, a previously unpublished paper presented by Agnes Winifred Hoernlé to the New Education Fellowship Conference in Johannesburg in 1934. Hoernlé argues that education is vitally important in preparing the next generation of Africans for life in a complex emerging civilisation, in which European social patterns are imposed on African ones. Hoernlé acknowledges that many Africans live in towns and on white-owned farms under conditions far removed from tribal life. In this context, she argues, education should not aim to (re)produce cultural autonomy, but should rather “stimulate a healthy spirit of South African citizenship, which can animate both Blacks and Whites.” Hoernlé sees African kinship systems and African traditions, such as bridewealth and age-sets, as possessing great strength and vitality, even in modern conditions. In her opinion, Africans can be transformed into a civilised people, without ceasing to be true Africans. She condemns Whites for failing to understand these traditions, but also for denying African children access to scientific knowledge. In his introduction to the article, Isak Niehaus suggests that Hoernlé's address shows an early quest to understand cultural differences within an emerging industrial society, rather than seeing cultures as singular and different from each other and in functionally integrated terms.

Contributions to Indian Sociology, Feb 1, 2012

Contemporary ethnographers and anthropological researchers face a dual challenge. On the one hand... more Contemporary ethnographers and anthropological researchers face a dual challenge. On the one hand, we are admonished to guard against treating our units of study as self-contained, island-like entities, immune from broader forces and from connections with global impact (Appadurai 2000; Hannerz 1996). On the other, Marshall Sahlins sounds a stern warning about ‘endangered specificities’ in the social sciences today, suggesting that the imposition of external analytical frameworks might well cloud out, or even annihilate, valid local cultural constructs, perspectives and understandings (Sahlins 1996; Smith 2002). Our challenge is to situate our units of study within broader analytical frames without losing sight of local contours and dynamics. It is to tread softly and to steer a careful balance, elucidating both the generalities and particularities of our research information. This endnote aims to meet this challenge by comparing suicide in South Africa and South Asia. Rather than to assume South Asian exceptionalism, I endeavour to explore to what extent the South Asian instances described in this volume might contribute to a more general anthropology of suicide. Sustained ethnographic comparison is possibly the most

Journal of Southern African Studies, Sep 1, 2000

... Erik Bähre, Diane Bruce, Peta Katz, Richard Lee, Robert Thornton, Dick Werbner, Pnina Werbner... more ... Erik Bähre, Diane Bruce, Peta Katz, Richard Lee, Robert Thornton, Dick Werbner, Pnina Werbner and Caroline White encourage d me to ... Political activists such as Philip Chiloane and JohnstoneMlambo, who stayed in Bushbuckridge in the 1970s, failed to build signifi cant ...

Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022

Oxford University Press eBooks, 2014

This article asks, with reference to the life story of one man, called Ace Ubisi, whether biograp... more This article asks, with reference to the life story of one man, called Ace Ubisi, whether biographies contain any valuable lessons for understanding men's sexuality, particularly of masculine promiscuity, at a more general theoretical level. In particular, I ask whether they shed light on the relative importance of "sexual culture" (Caldwell et al. 1987, 1988, 1989; Heald 1995; Niehaus 2002a; Thornton 2003) as opposed to political and economic factors, in explaining men's sexual conduct and proclivity to have multiple sexual partners. The latter include the high demand for family labour in small-scale agriculture, women's subordination, the separation of households by migrant labour, as well as the provision of quasi-marital services to men by women in towns with inadequate housing (Packard & Epstein 1991; White 1990; Gausset 2001)'. Ace Ubisi is one of the thirty-six men from Impalahoek, a village in the Bushbuckridge magisterial district of the South African lowveld, whose life stories I recorded over the past two years2. During apartheid the village formed part of the former Northern Sotho Bantustan (or "homeland") of Lebowa. Bushbuckridge was incorporated into the newly constituted Limpopo Province after South Africa's first democratic elections of 1994, but

Evans-Pritchard's classical text Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (1937) lay the fo... more Evans-Pritchard's classical text Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (1937) lay the foundations for contemporary scholarly understandings of witchcraft. Yet the author's central contention that witchcraft presents a logical explanation for misfortune has been less inspirational than his suggestion than that witchcraft accusations express regularly recurring socio-structural conflicts [2]. This idea was developed most fully by Marwick (1970) who argued that witchcraft accusations present a social "strain-gauge". This formulation is based on two closely related assumptions. First, that at a general level, the distribution of witchcraft accusations, between persons standing in various relationships, reveals tension points in the social structure. Anthropologists and historians have contended that witchcraft accusations indicate different sorts of tensions in different social contexts. Witchcraft accusations have been shown to cluster between different matrilineal segments among the Chewa of Northern Rhodesia (Marwick 1965), agnates and affines among the Zulu of South Africa (Gluckman I960), youths and elders among the Gisu of Uganda (Heald 1986), competing work parties among the Hewa of New Guinea (Steadman 1985), commoners and new state elites in Cameroon (Geschiere 1988), and between men and women in colonial Peru (Silverbladt 1987). Second, the social strain hypothesis assumes that tense relations are the prime determinants of whom the accused shall be. For example, Macfarlane argues that in sixteenth century Essex witchcraft accusations arose from quarrels over gifts and loans, rather than strange events. "Although there was sometimes an emphasis on the strangeness of an event, for instance when a woman's body was sometimes covered with lice which 'were long, and lean, and not like other lice', strangeness, in itself, was not enough to produce a suspicion of witchcraft" (Macfarlane 1970:296) [3], This article critically reexamines the relationship between social tensions and witchcraft. It draws on fieldwork conducted between 1990 and 1995 in Green Valley, a village situated in the lowveld of Mpumalanga, South Africa. In 1991 Green Valley had a population of approximately 20 000 Northern Sotho and Tsonga-speakers [4]. In the article I aim to focus on how individuals subjectively inferred the existence of witchcraft and the identity of alleged witches, rather than to explore the quantitative distribution of witchcraft accusations. From this perspective, I suggest that social tensions by themselves are less accurate predictors of witchcraft attributions and accusations than the literature may lead us to believe. Anthropologists and historians, who propose that social tensions are the prime determinants of witchcraft accusations, often view witchcraft as an idiom of social relations and processes. Questions of evidence are deemed to be peripheral. It is either assumed that proof is impossible, or alternatively, that tension is the only proof of witchcraft. They hereby downplay the views social actors have of their own situations. This is an important oversight as it is emic understandings which motivate, guide, and justify action. For believers, who regard the existence of witches as a reality, questions of i

Anthropology Today, Apr 1, 2005

Anthropology Southern Africa, Dec 21, 2016

In this article I consider the significance of marriage from the vantage point of children's affi... more In this article I consider the significance of marriage from the vantage point of children's affiliation to domestic units during the era of South Africa's AIDS pandemic. Drawing on multi-temporal fieldwork in Impalahoek, a village in the Bushbuckridge municipality of the South African Lowveld, I suggest that AIDS-related diseases and deaths have led to the further erosion of marriage, and to the greater absence of fathers in the lives of children. However, these changes have not precipitated a crisis in childcare. A survey of 22 households shows that orphaned children are generally cared for by related adults, such as matrikin and older female siblings. These arrangements are a product of a long history of improvisations, necessitated by experiences of oscillating labour migration. Moreover, they are facilitated by a diffusion of parental obligations, which is a central tenet of Northern Sotho and Shangaan models of kinship. I argue that in an economy of high unemployment and dependence upon state instituted social security systems, marriage does not appear to be decisive to children's welfare.

Anthropology Southern Africa, Apr 3, 2014

In this article I seek to account for the special appeal of rugby to white, particularly Afrikane... more In this article I seek to account for the special appeal of rugby to white, particularly Afrikaner, men in South Africa, by treating rugby as a social phenomenon. I suggest that at a metaphorical level formulaic elements of the sport resonate with those of modern military and bureaucratic institutions that were so prominent in the history of Afrikaners. However, whilst rugby embodies historical memories, Afrikaner men's participation in the sport is also geared towards the present. With reference to the autobiographies of three Springbok rugby captains, I argue that participation in the sport has become an important arena for dramatizing their contribution to nation building. In the micro-world of rugby, players perceive themselves as warriors who lay their bodies on the line for a new democratic nation.