Joost Fontein | University of Edinburgh (original) (raw)
Papers by Joost Fontein
Journal of Southern African Studies, 2008
African Studies Quarterly, Mar 22, 2009
Based on fieldwork carried out between June 2005 and July 2006, this paper questions common asser... more Based on fieldwork carried out between June 2005 and July 2006, this paper questions common assertions which suggest that recent 'fast track' land reform in Zimbabwe did not fit with local understandings of land tenure. While fast track land reform was not officially planned as a form of 'land restitution', in Masvingo District members of different local clans who occupied areas of state land, earlier resettlement schemes or were allocated plots on resettled farms around Lake Mutirikwi, often made very specific claims to land which appealed to autochthonous knowledge of the landscape, invoking memories of past occupations and the burial of ancestors in the land. Such claims were reinforced by the official 'return' of the powers of chiefs over resettlement areas and often sat uneasily next to both the increasing participation of technocratic government planning departments such as AREX (Agricultural Research and Extension), and the waning authority of war veterans who initially spearheaded the land occupations of 2000. Dealing with contemporary events in the monumental presence of a large modern dam built under colonial rule in the 1960s, and set in the context of ZANU PF's revived, if severely narrowed, discourse of anti-colonial nationalist fervour and sovereignty, this case study points to the complexity of what has often been over-simplistically characterised as 'Zimbabwe's authoritarian turn', highlighting how for some 'new farmers' and others in the Masvingo area, fast track land reform was understood as a response to older, lingering imaginations of, and localised aspirations for, postcolonial stateness and 'modernity' in Zimbabwe.
It is also possible that your web browser is not configured or not able to display style sheets. ... more It is also possible that your web browser is not configured or not able to display style sheets. In this case, although the visual presentation will be degraded, the site should continue to be functional. We recommend using the latest version of Microsoft or Mozilla web browser to ...
Critical African Studies, 2015
Critical African Studies, 2015
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2014
Critical African Studies, 2013
Africa, 2010
ABSTRACT In recent years the status of African anthropology in the discipline as a whole has some... more ABSTRACT In recent years the status of African anthropology in the discipline as a whole has sometimes seemed very marginal. Relatively few jobs are advertised specifically for African anthropologists, and the theoretical agenda-setting heart of the discipline sometimes seems far away from the kind of empirically grounded, ethnography-based work that African anthropology has tended to excel in. This is not to say that Africanist/African anthropologists are not doing theoretically topical work, but there is a sense that African anthropology does not punch its weight in the discipline as it once did through the work of key anthropological ancestors such as Evans-Pritchard, Radcliffe-Brown or Meyer Fortes; or later in the work of the Manchester School. Part of African anthropology’s marginality in the discipline may be a result of, to put it at its crudest, a mixture of post-colonial guilt and post-modern uneasiness about the status of anthropological knowledge in general. If the former undermined the self-confidence of anthropology’s ability to represent any ‘other’, then the latter heralded a ‘reflexive’ approach that at times threatened to abandon any kind of useful representation at all. And if African anthropology is marginalized in our discipline, then this is compounded by the fact that there are still very few African or Africa-based anthropologists. In comparison to other disciplines within African Studies, African anthropology still seems very biased towards non-African, expatriate academics. Perhaps anthropology is still a dirty word in some African universities, but sketchy comparisons with other regional anthropologies (such as South Asian anthropology) suggest that this post-colonial condition is not at all inevitable. The problem then is twofold. African and Africa-based anthropologists increasingly need to set the agenda for African anthropology, and African anthropology in turn needs to play a more central role in the setting of anthropological agendas as a whole. It is in this broader context that this edited collection is extremely welcome. Its usefulness is threefold and relates directly to its stated concerns with history, critique and practice. Its first five chapters provide historical accounts of the colonial trajectories that anthropology has taken in different parts of the continent (Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Cameroon). The contribution here is a nuancing of anthropology’s colonial past in Africa. Anthropology was not always simply in the pocket of colonial administrations, nor was colonial interest in anthropology one-dimensional. Just as colonialisms manifest themselves in very different ways across East, West and Southern Africa, so different anthropologies’ imbrication in colonial regimes of rule varied across space and time. The point here is not to reduce (or exaggerate) African anthropologies’ colonial pasts but to complicate them. Mills’s discussion of Audrey Richards’s involvement in the establishment of the East Africa Institute illustrates how local politics and individual personalities were often key determinants in the relationship of anthropologists to colonial administration. Pankhurst (Chapter 2) discusses the plethora of different national research traditions (including Italian, French, German, British, American and Japanese) that have coalesced in their own specific historical and political contexts in Ethiopia, despite the country’s uniqueness ‘in having largely escaped the effects of colonization’ (p. 51). Muzvidziwa (Chapter 4) considers the waxing and waning fortunes of the teaching of anthropology in Zimbabwe, where a loyalty to empiricism and particularly an increasingly applied focus has given it new relevance in recent decades. This contrasts to the situation in Cameroon (Abega, Chapter 5) where a French philosophical orientation coalesced with problems of funding, teaching, and an ongoing mistrust of administrative/political authorities into a ‘crisis’ of declining anthropology-related publications. If ‘the presence of indigenous anthropologists from French-speaking African countries still looks modest’ (Abega, p. 132), then perhaps the greatest success of these historical chapters lies in their illustration of the significant role played by Africans in ‘shaping the views of foreign scholars’ (Pankhurst, p. 68). This theme is developed in greater detail in the second section of the book, where contributions discuss the historical marginalization of African voices in scholarship on Africa, in what amounts to an eloquent call for continued and deepened anthropological engagement by African and Africa-based scholars. Fabian (Chapter 6) uncovers a myriad of ways...
Social Anthropology, 2007
Social Anthropology, 2006
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2011
This article uses ethnographic material collected around Lake Mutirikwi in southern Zimbabwe, to ... more This article uses ethnographic material collected around Lake Mutirikwi in southern Zimbabwe, to explore how the affective presence of graves and ruins, which materialize past and present occupations and engagements with/in the landscape (by different clans, colonial and postcolonial state institutions, war veterans, chiefs, and spirit mediums, as well as white commercial farmers), are entangled in complex, localized contests over autochthony and belonging, even as they are finely implicated in wider reconfigurations of authority and state-craft. Situating these highly contested assertions, discourses, and practices in the context of national redefinitions of citizenship and belonging articulated by ZANU PF's rhetoric of 'patriotic history', this article explores how these contests are made real through the consequential materiality of milieu. Although the central hook will be the prominent role that graves, both ancestral 'mapa' and recent burials, have played in ongoing claims to land and authority, its main perspective will be on how different, overlapping, and intertwined notions of belonging are enabled, constrained, and structured through the materiality of place, thereby emphasizing the proximity of discourses and practices of belonging that derives from the shared nature of material landscapes. In this vein, the ruins and graves of past white occupation and interventions in the landscape comingle and coexist with the resurgent appeals of local clans to ancestral territories on occupied lands. The broader theoretical purpose of the article is to engage with recent debates over materiality and anthropology's so-called 'ontological turn' to make a case for focusing less on 'radical ontological difference' and more on material, historical, and conceptual proximities.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2012
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2013
Journal of Southern African Studies, 2008
UCL logo UCL LIBRARY SERVICES. UCL Eprints. ...
Journal of Southern African Studies, 2006
Based on recent research around Great Zimbabwe National Monument in southern Zimbabwe, this artic... more Based on recent research around Great Zimbabwe National Monument in southern Zimbabwe, this article considers the history of Great Zimbabwe's 'destruction' and 'desecration' from the perspective of the elders of the surrounding communities. Although ...
Journal of Religion in Africa, 2006
ABSTRACT This paper explores the nature of ongoing relationships between war veterans and spirit ... more ABSTRACT This paper explores the nature of ongoing relationships between war veterans and spirit mediums in Zimbabwe, as well as the continuing salience of a shared chimurenga legacy of co-operation by these two groups, and how it has been put to use, and acted out by ...
Journal of Southern African Studies, 2008
African Studies Quarterly, Mar 22, 2009
Based on fieldwork carried out between June 2005 and July 2006, this paper questions common asser... more Based on fieldwork carried out between June 2005 and July 2006, this paper questions common assertions which suggest that recent 'fast track' land reform in Zimbabwe did not fit with local understandings of land tenure. While fast track land reform was not officially planned as a form of 'land restitution', in Masvingo District members of different local clans who occupied areas of state land, earlier resettlement schemes or were allocated plots on resettled farms around Lake Mutirikwi, often made very specific claims to land which appealed to autochthonous knowledge of the landscape, invoking memories of past occupations and the burial of ancestors in the land. Such claims were reinforced by the official 'return' of the powers of chiefs over resettlement areas and often sat uneasily next to both the increasing participation of technocratic government planning departments such as AREX (Agricultural Research and Extension), and the waning authority of war veterans who initially spearheaded the land occupations of 2000. Dealing with contemporary events in the monumental presence of a large modern dam built under colonial rule in the 1960s, and set in the context of ZANU PF's revived, if severely narrowed, discourse of anti-colonial nationalist fervour and sovereignty, this case study points to the complexity of what has often been over-simplistically characterised as 'Zimbabwe's authoritarian turn', highlighting how for some 'new farmers' and others in the Masvingo area, fast track land reform was understood as a response to older, lingering imaginations of, and localised aspirations for, postcolonial stateness and 'modernity' in Zimbabwe.
It is also possible that your web browser is not configured or not able to display style sheets. ... more It is also possible that your web browser is not configured or not able to display style sheets. In this case, although the visual presentation will be degraded, the site should continue to be functional. We recommend using the latest version of Microsoft or Mozilla web browser to ...
Critical African Studies, 2015
Critical African Studies, 2015
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2014
Critical African Studies, 2013
Africa, 2010
ABSTRACT In recent years the status of African anthropology in the discipline as a whole has some... more ABSTRACT In recent years the status of African anthropology in the discipline as a whole has sometimes seemed very marginal. Relatively few jobs are advertised specifically for African anthropologists, and the theoretical agenda-setting heart of the discipline sometimes seems far away from the kind of empirically grounded, ethnography-based work that African anthropology has tended to excel in. This is not to say that Africanist/African anthropologists are not doing theoretically topical work, but there is a sense that African anthropology does not punch its weight in the discipline as it once did through the work of key anthropological ancestors such as Evans-Pritchard, Radcliffe-Brown or Meyer Fortes; or later in the work of the Manchester School. Part of African anthropology’s marginality in the discipline may be a result of, to put it at its crudest, a mixture of post-colonial guilt and post-modern uneasiness about the status of anthropological knowledge in general. If the former undermined the self-confidence of anthropology’s ability to represent any ‘other’, then the latter heralded a ‘reflexive’ approach that at times threatened to abandon any kind of useful representation at all. And if African anthropology is marginalized in our discipline, then this is compounded by the fact that there are still very few African or Africa-based anthropologists. In comparison to other disciplines within African Studies, African anthropology still seems very biased towards non-African, expatriate academics. Perhaps anthropology is still a dirty word in some African universities, but sketchy comparisons with other regional anthropologies (such as South Asian anthropology) suggest that this post-colonial condition is not at all inevitable. The problem then is twofold. African and Africa-based anthropologists increasingly need to set the agenda for African anthropology, and African anthropology in turn needs to play a more central role in the setting of anthropological agendas as a whole. It is in this broader context that this edited collection is extremely welcome. Its usefulness is threefold and relates directly to its stated concerns with history, critique and practice. Its first five chapters provide historical accounts of the colonial trajectories that anthropology has taken in different parts of the continent (Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Cameroon). The contribution here is a nuancing of anthropology’s colonial past in Africa. Anthropology was not always simply in the pocket of colonial administrations, nor was colonial interest in anthropology one-dimensional. Just as colonialisms manifest themselves in very different ways across East, West and Southern Africa, so different anthropologies’ imbrication in colonial regimes of rule varied across space and time. The point here is not to reduce (or exaggerate) African anthropologies’ colonial pasts but to complicate them. Mills’s discussion of Audrey Richards’s involvement in the establishment of the East Africa Institute illustrates how local politics and individual personalities were often key determinants in the relationship of anthropologists to colonial administration. Pankhurst (Chapter 2) discusses the plethora of different national research traditions (including Italian, French, German, British, American and Japanese) that have coalesced in their own specific historical and political contexts in Ethiopia, despite the country’s uniqueness ‘in having largely escaped the effects of colonization’ (p. 51). Muzvidziwa (Chapter 4) considers the waxing and waning fortunes of the teaching of anthropology in Zimbabwe, where a loyalty to empiricism and particularly an increasingly applied focus has given it new relevance in recent decades. This contrasts to the situation in Cameroon (Abega, Chapter 5) where a French philosophical orientation coalesced with problems of funding, teaching, and an ongoing mistrust of administrative/political authorities into a ‘crisis’ of declining anthropology-related publications. If ‘the presence of indigenous anthropologists from French-speaking African countries still looks modest’ (Abega, p. 132), then perhaps the greatest success of these historical chapters lies in their illustration of the significant role played by Africans in ‘shaping the views of foreign scholars’ (Pankhurst, p. 68). This theme is developed in greater detail in the second section of the book, where contributions discuss the historical marginalization of African voices in scholarship on Africa, in what amounts to an eloquent call for continued and deepened anthropological engagement by African and Africa-based scholars. Fabian (Chapter 6) uncovers a myriad of ways...
Social Anthropology, 2007
Social Anthropology, 2006
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2011
This article uses ethnographic material collected around Lake Mutirikwi in southern Zimbabwe, to ... more This article uses ethnographic material collected around Lake Mutirikwi in southern Zimbabwe, to explore how the affective presence of graves and ruins, which materialize past and present occupations and engagements with/in the landscape (by different clans, colonial and postcolonial state institutions, war veterans, chiefs, and spirit mediums, as well as white commercial farmers), are entangled in complex, localized contests over autochthony and belonging, even as they are finely implicated in wider reconfigurations of authority and state-craft. Situating these highly contested assertions, discourses, and practices in the context of national redefinitions of citizenship and belonging articulated by ZANU PF's rhetoric of 'patriotic history', this article explores how these contests are made real through the consequential materiality of milieu. Although the central hook will be the prominent role that graves, both ancestral 'mapa' and recent burials, have played in ongoing claims to land and authority, its main perspective will be on how different, overlapping, and intertwined notions of belonging are enabled, constrained, and structured through the materiality of place, thereby emphasizing the proximity of discourses and practices of belonging that derives from the shared nature of material landscapes. In this vein, the ruins and graves of past white occupation and interventions in the landscape comingle and coexist with the resurgent appeals of local clans to ancestral territories on occupied lands. The broader theoretical purpose of the article is to engage with recent debates over materiality and anthropology's so-called 'ontological turn' to make a case for focusing less on 'radical ontological difference' and more on material, historical, and conceptual proximities.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2012
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2013
Journal of Southern African Studies, 2008
UCL logo UCL LIBRARY SERVICES. UCL Eprints. ...
Journal of Southern African Studies, 2006
Based on recent research around Great Zimbabwe National Monument in southern Zimbabwe, this artic... more Based on recent research around Great Zimbabwe National Monument in southern Zimbabwe, this article considers the history of Great Zimbabwe's 'destruction' and 'desecration' from the perspective of the elders of the surrounding communities. Although ...
Journal of Religion in Africa, 2006
ABSTRACT This paper explores the nature of ongoing relationships between war veterans and spirit ... more ABSTRACT This paper explores the nature of ongoing relationships between war veterans and spirit mediums in Zimbabwe, as well as the continuing salience of a shared chimurenga legacy of co-operation by these two groups, and how it has been put to use, and acted out by ...