Social Anthropology 252 Exam Notes PDF

SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 252 EXAM NOTES These notes were made to be distributed for free. If someone sold these to you, you have been scammed. HOW TO READ THIS: Blue boxes contain information that will likely be important for multiple choice questions. The rest of the te...

SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 252 EXAM NOTES These notes were made to be distributed for free. If someone sold these to you, you have been scammed. HOW TO READ THIS: Blue boxes contain information that will likely be important for multiple choice questions. The rest of the text is for writing a good essay. THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND FOR THE EXAM: Do still try to read each mandatory reading once. They may let you understand the story the author is trying to tell in a way that a set of summary notes will never be able to. Make sure you watch the Thursday morning lectures that were uploaded to Sunlearn. Be careful to not use problematic language in the essay. Words like “native” are especially tricky. If a word feels suspect, put it in quotation marks. Manage your time well while writing. Good luck with the exam. I hope we all do well. PWG Meiring Lecture 11 Lobola, marriage and family alliances Who is this about? - Southern Bantu tribes What is this about? - Systems of bride wealth. Key themes: - Male Pastoralism & Female Agriculture - Hierarchical transactions Author: Adam Kuper - System of Hot & Cold categorisation Text: Wives for Cattle (1982) - Bride wealth & legitimate children - Cattle beget children Introduction: - The exchange of cattle for wives takes several forms but is visible across cultures in the region. - These systems were durable in the face of massive social change. - Aim of text: - Create greater understanding of Southern Bantu marriage systems to better understand these cultures. - Think about how systems adapt. - Different Bride wealth (BW) systems perform various differing functions but have formal similarities. - Differing systems linked by rule-governed transformations. - Early on, Anthro was filled with ideas of isolated, well-defined, timeless tribal cultures. - Author disagrees with this. - Text takes a regional comparative approach. - Avoids the problems of comparing cultures far away from each other. - Allows for the study of variation and historical change. - Analysis is mostly based on the period before industrialisation (before 1930s/1940s). - A re-analysis of classic ethnographies of Southern Africa. 1 Page The cattle-complex: - Hoernle quote: “We can never hope to understand the […] function of such customs as the lobola […] until we realize that we are in contact with ideas of cattle radically different from our own.” - Agriculture is more important as a food source and largely the role of women. - Pastoralism (raising cattle) is largely the role of men, more prestigious and ceremonially important. - Link goes further, among the Tswana: - Head of family buried in the cattle-byre. - Wife beneath the threshing floor. - Among the Lovedu, these lines are less a bit blurred but still exist. - Goats fulfilled similar role to cattle but were “poor-man’s cattle”. - Hunting and gathering: - Insignificant as a food source except for times of crisis. - Of ritual importance. - Large hunts took place: - Key moments in social/natural cycles. - Initiation ceremonies. - Prep for war. - Installation of new rulers. - Hunting = men. - Gathering = women. - Devalued as food source. - Women had to gather firewood. - Male herbalist had to gather medicinal plants = sexual ambiguity. 2 Page Exchanges: - Pastoral and agricultural goods could be exchanged. - Integral feature of traditional social and economic organization. - Appropriate exchange for cattle and cattle products is agricultural products or women. - Exchanges themselves associated with certain relationships: - Man offers wife’s parents meat. - Wife’s mother offers beer and porridge to man in turn. - Man pays beer to wife’s parents for wife’s agricultural labour. Hierarchical exchange: - Exchange between wife givers and wife takers not only part of marriage exchanges. - Superiors (Ancestors, chiefs, fathers and husbands) provide cattle and fields and make them fertile. - Living followers, children and wives give labour, meat and corn in return. - Ancestors are the main source of welfare. - National ancestors are responsible for rain, good harvests and war victory. - They are the original owners of land. Land now held by current ruler. - Family ancestors responsible for health (of man and beast), increasing property and family’s fertility. - Cattle are inherited. - Man’s herd is the property of family ancestors. - Tribal ancestors approached by ruler and familial ancestors approached by homestead head or his sister. - Each has certain responsibilities to the welfare of his people. - Ruler provides land and cattle to his followers according to how many wives they have. - They only have use of the land, but access rarely taken away. 3 Page - Giving cattle establishes political relationship. - Ruler expected to ensure land was fruitful. - Done with his special relationship with tribal ancestors. - Performs first fruit ceremony, ritually started planting period and rain-making rituals. - In return, subjects cultivated special fields for ruler and sent him tributes of beer, beef and trophies and meat from hunts. - Among Zulu and Lovedu, also sent wives. - Similar hierarchical exchanges between homestead head and dependants. - He was intermediary between them and ruler/family ancestors. - Divided fields he received between houses of wives. - As husband he was also responsible for impregnating wives. - Linked with more general ideas of fertilization. - Semen is linked to water. Both are fertilizing agents. - In return, wives cultivate special garden for him, gave him corn and firewood, and cooked for him. - Systemically visible: Above in hierarchy -> gives resources and fertility. - In return, those lower gave food and labour. 4 Page  - BW payments fit into the context of these exchanges. - Cattle and fertility come from ancestors and rulers. - Wive’s ancestors would withhold fertility if BW not paid in full. - Cattle received in payment for daughter ritually important. - Cattle exchange for blood of girl’s family. - The cattle exchanged also put the girl in close relationship with the ancestral spirits where the cattle came from. - Conception is the work of ancestors. - Milk of BW cows also important. - ‘White’ milk of family cows equivalent to ‘white’ semen of ancestors. Forms bodily substance of descendants. Hot and Cool: - On one hand, things and conditions can be ‘white’ and ‘cool’. - These are fertilizing agents. - Water, rain, semen, etc. - On the other, things can be ‘hot’ and ‘red’. - These are dangerous. Causes sterility and death. - Lightning, fire, blood, etc. - Thirdly, things can be ‘black’. - Things that are neither of the above. - Darkness, night, clouds, dry blood, bodily waste, etc. - Women and female sexuality regarded as ‘hot’ and dangerous. - Especially dangerous to men and cattle. - Women generally not allowed near cattle. - Strongest form of this danger represented by witches. - Strongly contrasted against ancestors. - Destroy fertility. - Represented as perverted women. - Compared with heat. - Ancestors and cattle are ‘white’. 5 Page - Conception involves these ideas of hot and cold. - Menstrual blood = ‘hot’ and ‘red’, dangerous to men. - Semen like water: ‘cool’,’ white’ and fertilizing. - Both considered different types of ‘blood’ that fight in the womb. - Maternal blood provides ‘red’ flesh and blood to child. - Paternal blood (semen) provides ‘white’ bones and hair. - Men should sleep with wives several nights in a row to ‘win the fight’ of conception. - Miscarriages means the man’s ‘blood’ was defeated. They are gravely polluting and lead to drought and famine. - Hot/cool do not simply contrast male/female. - Classifies states, not essential characteristics. - Men and women can both become ‘red’ through jealousy. - Jealousy leads to sorcery. - Men who recently had sex with women are ‘hot’. - Women are ‘cool’ before and after sexual maturity. - Mother’s milk is ‘cool’. - Cattle and cattle products always cool, healing and fertilizing. - Girl’s fertility brings cattle to her father. - Cattle (and ancestors) linked to female fertility. - Cattle sacrificed to ancestors if woman is having trouble delivering a baby. - If a cow crosses water or licks the mom, the child is born. 6 Page Cattle and Hoes: - Payment of BW necessary for the birth of a legitimate child. - BW gives husband the legal right to the child a woman births. - If no BW is paid, the child is not a full member of any community. - In the past, dire, topsy-turvy situations like conditions, BW could sometimes be paid in agricultural (feminine) products instead of cattle (masculine) because of the reversal in fortune. - Not always, in more recent cases where many cows died, men would take their potential fathers-in-law to their empty kraals and place a number of stones. Each stone represents a cow in debt, that would be paid back when better times came. - A Zulu story tells of a time where tools and ornaments made of metal (feminine) were used in BW payments. This brought calamity and was stopped. - In other, matrilineal cultures BW could be paid in farming tools (feminine). - Anomalous conditions, like a young man dying unmarried represents another transformation of this system. Among the Venda: - A young man dying would cause trouble for his family. - The dead man would be presented with a used old hoe (feminine) with a cotton string died near its hole to symbolise a wife. - A woman (who is not his sister) attaches the hoe in a space where the man’s spirit can see it. - A woman of the headman’s lineage pours beer on in the hoe’s hole and says that they have found him a wife and says that he no longer needs to worry them. - Here the beer seals the marriage to a hoe and the hoe becomes a symbol of sexual union. 7 Page Lecture 12 Local Music Who is this about? Lesotho migrant workers and the women who stayed behind. What is this about? Sefela as a tool of resistance. Key themes: - Basotho migrant labour. - Sefela and identity construction. - Relationship between men and women in Lesotho. Author: David Coplan - Ethnomusicology (see lecture on Sunlearn). Text: Eloquent Knowledge: Note: Lesotho Migrants' Songs and the Anthropology of This is a hard reading to understand with little musical understanding, so some explanations won’t make much sense. Take from it what you can and google things you Experience (1987) don’t understand. Introduction: - Lesotho is entirely surrounded by SA. - Depended on the export of labour for survival. - Required an internal, culturally reflexive account of the experience of labour migration. - Essential because the role of workers’ knowledge and self-conceptions is core to determining the quality of their participation of the political economy of Southern Africa. - This consciousness shapes their perceptions and thus have an effect on social forces. - Even undirected interviews place our concerns over theirs. - Oral literature gives symbolic statements about common experiences, reflect popular consciousness, give us history "from below" and ethnography from within. - Basotho male migrants and their women composed and recomposed long texts in musical performances. - Serve as a reflection on experience. - Symbolism gives insight into Sotho historical culture and social value. - Oral literary forms have important methodological implications for anthro. 8 Page - Such as sefela, sung poetry of Basotho migrant workers. Sotho social history and oral genres: - Basotho have been migrating to work in South Africa since the 1820s. - During the colonial period, taxation, an agricultural policy that unfairly restrained Sotho competition with Free State farmers, and the self-aggrandizement of the Koena aristocracy gradually transformed Lesotho from a granary to a labour reserve. - Before the railway was extended in 1906, Basotho walked the 200 miles and more to Kimberley and other workplaces. - On these journeys were usually done in groups. Basotho men used their rich language resources and verbal art to create a new genre called sefela sa litsamaea-naha le lipa-rola-thota ("songs of the inveterate travellers"). - Shebeens started to appear in Lesotho. - The women left behind could make income brewing beer and entertaining men home from the mines. - Like other Bantu-speaking peoples, Basotho renowned for "heroic" or "praise" poetry. - Reduction in the power of chieftaincies during colonial period led to a making praise poetry. - “The death of oral poetry” in Lesotho greatly exaggerated. - Oral genres (distinct, codified, culturally recognized modes of aesthetic verbal expression) exist through performance and not as some timeless, unchanging tradition. - Thus, are subject to the same historical transformations of other social institutions. - The continued spread of sefela (plural – lifela) as a distinct genre from praise poetry is proof of this. - Why’d Basotho create a new genre to express changing experience instead of adapting praise poetry like the Xhosa did? - Answer lies in contrasting power relationship between Basotho and Xhosa migrants and their chiefs. - Xhosa lost their independence in 19th century. Their chiefs became South African government employees rather than autonomous representatives. - Little different from other bureaucratic authorities. 9 Page  - The eulogistic idiom (figuratively relating to the death of their autonomy) of Xhosa praise poetry could then be extended to mine authorities (black or white). - Could incorporate satire or protest reflective of migrant social experience and position in the organisation of labour. - Basotho chiefs maintained some autonomy under British protection. - Became part of social forces pushing men into labour migration. - Sefela grew out of the self-aggrandizement of the chiefly class. - Lifela were composed not in praise/protest of bureaucrats, but in support of the migrants' own identity and status as citizens of an autonomous state. - Where commoners might still attempt to hold their leaders socially accountable. - Origins of Sefela: - Less in chiefs' praises, more in the praises of commoners and young male initiation graduates, and in the secret songs of the initiation lodge. - The word Sefela itself is most commonly used to mean a Christian hymn. - The missionaries borrowed the word form Sesotho. - Linked to normal sefela because both are morally animated emotional cries of the heart. - Sefela find roots in songs sung on day of graduation from initiation. - Initiation songs and the composition of self-praises are taught to the initiates at the lodge by an elder instructor. - Personal verses provide initiate with new name and consists of a combination of farewells to the past, self-praises and construction of a poetic image of one’s identity. - These are pre-experential (before experience). - Lifela are post-experential (after experience) compositions. - Lifela composers were more likely to undergo traditional initiation than others. - Work in South Africa seen as a test of manly courage and endurance, like the cattle-raiding and warfare of earlier historical periods 10 - Initiation thus prepared them for migrant labour. Page  - Sefela songs composed against the backdrop of praise poetry's cultural resources and political prestige. - Metaphors in lifela incorporate/rework the images of praise poetry or war anthems. Cloaking the performer and his words in the symbolic authority of "tradition" and the precolonial Sotho state. - In performance, metaphors are the means for showing the deep cultural knowledge needed for "eloquence” in Sesotho. - This cultural authority legitimates the performer's social critique, heroic self-image and dissatisfaction with the collaborative domination of the local bureaucratic elite, mine management, and the SA regime. - Example: *For more examples and explanations, see pages 415-417 of the text. I’m not including it here because I don’t think it’s necessary for any possible essay question, but it might be worth having an idea of it just in case. Social process and expressive process in lifela: - Part based on study of border towns where large numbers of repatriated, unemployed, vacationing, or aspiring migrants reside, many awaiting the call from the local labour recruitment centre. - Lifela poets may perform alone at any social gathering, where a cash reward is expected from an appreciative audience. - The main lifela performance event is a competition. - Two or more poets put equal sums into pool in support of their claims to eloquence. Winner takes all. - Length of uninterrupted song, musical (rhythm and sound) patterning, verbal skill, figurative inventiveness, and the ability to transform experience into aesthetic communication through the good deployment of cultural knowledge are the main criteria of evaluation. - Veteran performers serve as judges when there is money involved, but poets 11 insist that the victor is obvious to everyone, even the losers. Page  - Usually informal and impromptu. - May take place in mining compound or back home in Lesotho. - In the border towns, good opponents (both male and female) can be found in shebeens. - Renowned male performers disliked performing there, as they were too loud. - There women create their own poetic songs, which are also sefela. - Every performance is a reordering of materials used in previous recitations combined with original passages composed on the spot. - Most poets begin their careers mostly reciting what they have learned from their seniors, gradually replacing it with material of their own. - Long lifela often contain images and passages donated by teachers or "stolen" from other poets they competed against. - In a sense, poets have just one sefela: a poetic autobiography made up of materials learned, stolen, original, and recomposed, continually lengthened and recombined throughout their performing lives - Thus, a long and eloquent sefela is a performance simultaneously deeply cultural, widely shared, and highly individual. - To the listener, the depth of a sefela is understood based on: - Immediate meaning. - Experiences shared with performer. - Their experience with lifela performance. - How intimately they know the performer. - True meaning can only be found by listening. - The poets' notion of "music" denotes a smoothly rhythmic verbal flow more than pitch stabilization or melodic patterning. - This rhythmic continuity is the aesthetic embodiment of the emotional communication Basotho regard as essential to social agreement. It is these emotional dynamics and their musical expression that govern the spontaneous progression of linked images in a sefela performance, rather than the content or structure of the text. - The "formulaic" lines that underline internally cohesive metaphoric or narrative 12 story in lifela is often emotionally reflexive. Page  - As the defining characteristic of Sotho music, rhythmic performance creates a unity between sounding and hearing, sensation and understanding, linking individual and collective experience. - Sefela is a “poetic song” that is sung and not told, opposed to praise poetry. - Poetic song -> melodic, figurative verbal play in which meanings are created through the performative integration of prosody and image. - Lifela performance avoids any physical actions that might divert attention from the sounds/texts themselves. - Same as initiation songs. Experience, consciousness, and text: - While Sotho migrants spend a lot of time in SA, his "real life" consists only of the time spent in Lesotho. - They rarely talk about their time at the mines. - Sefela stands out as a public form of communication where men express their feelings about the experience of labour migration. - Lifela are not all about mine work. - The alienation and contradiction of migrancy, a system in which the survival of a patriarchal household depends upon the forced absence of its male head, are articulated through the use of cultural knowledge in lifela. - These songs are part of the effort to maintain a positive self-concept despite the social displacement and dehumanization inherent in the migratory labour system. - Going to the mines requires a conscious act of self-reformulation to the culture of the mines. - Identity again reconstructed when entering Lesotho again. - Lifela songs provide a powerful vehicle both for changing self-identity at the mines and for reconstructing an identity continuous with life in Lesotho upon their return. - Departure for the mines introduces the central theme of lifela, one which encompasses and integrates themes of geography, politics, romantic and heroic adventure, urban life, worldly wisdom, and self-image. - This is the theme of travel is core in the genre's very name. There is little 13 sequential relationship between narrative episodes. Traveling is the only theme Page that holds them together.  - An important aspect of the theme of travel is the tragedy of forced migration. - Lean and ill from poverty and overwork, the migrant must keep traveling. - A "foreign native" in South Africa and a stranger to his wife and children in Lesotho. - The lack of ownership of land and corruption of their leaders is another theme. - Trains are another reoccurring them. - Migrants thunder over the countryside in steam locomotives. Fierce devourers of the distance, rushing headlong over the white man's land. - Trains are takers of men and bringers of wealth, symbols of the iron resolve spirit of the traveling man. - Other popular themes include the lore of Sotho magic and medicine. - A topic used by poet to establish their qualifications as men of cultural knowledge, entitled to make observations on the morality of social relations. - Spiritual catharsis is often expressed in references to Christianity as well as to the ancestors. - Christian ideology figures most prominently in passages concerned with morality and order in Lesotho, and with the migrant's own need for moral, emotional, and spiritual sustenance. - Any aspect of the migrant experience could be used as an extended metaphor. - Sotho miners view the mine as a sentient being that they engage in a relationship of reciprocal cannibalism. - Poets might talk about funny/ironic accounts of the seamier side of urban life. Working women's oral poetry: - The insecurity felt by male migrants in relation to the reliability of the rural home support system is mirrored in the social attitudes of Basotho women. - In some ways, women had it worse back home. - 40 to 60 percent of married women were married to absent miners. - Only marriage can give women access to fields and livestock. - Wives are responsible for their management in their husbands' absence. - Women were accountable to husbands who may not appreciate their problems. - Husbands would issue instructions without providing necessary resources. 14 - Able-bodied males were scarce in the villages, and a woman could not look to her or Page her husband's kinsmen for assistance. - Men were deprived of authority at mines and returned determined to reassert control over their homesteads and wives. - Women did not have the resources to risk asserting themselves. - A wife who managed in her husband’s absence might not appreciate the sudden and dictatorial interference. - Basotho women's consciousness can be categorized in terms of two complementary, non-class-specific perspectives: - The reality of Basotho married life no longer provides security or fulfilment for women. - They still regard the "traditional" family as a worthy ideal. They desire such a marriage, despite the structural dependency and subordination it prescribes, but complain that it is either unavailable or unworkable under conditions of male labour migration. - The second perspective also maintains that traditional marriage is structurally unworkable but goes much further. - Women of this viewpoint insist that the normative family model is inherently incapable of fulfilling women's individual needs and aspirations, subjects them to restrictions and social dependency, gives them responsibilities without authority, and makes little use of their productive potential. - Both perspectives are found among both middle-class and working-class women and are expressed by women poets. - What makes these poets unique is their social identity as persons able and willing to reflect upon women's experience in the context of public performance. - Who then are the "women of eloquence"? - Some are wives of migrant labourers, others have lost their men through divorce, abandonment, or death. - Others are unmarried, preferring a precarious independence to subordination to a domineering man. - Many are themselves migrants, spending extended periods eluding "influx control" (policy that bans women from migrating) and working in South Africa. 15 Page  - Others migrated from rural areas to major towns in in search of the income for them and their children to survive on. - What both types share is participation in the economic and social institution of the shebeen. - Since female migration to SA was illegal, there was an overdependence on male migrant wages and a lack of social alternatives to generate their own cash income. - The SA government, the Lesotho government, and male Basotho attitudes have openly conspired to prevent female migration. - Threatens the divided-family system that both the migratory labour system and male domestic power are based on. - Women found jobs in domestic service or in beer brewing, sale of liquor, and petty trading based in shebeens. - Cooperative labour and investment in shebeen activities are part of the female support networks that play a major role in their socioeconomic survival and adaptation. - Shebeens let women get money from the migratory labourers and to use it to establish their own social networks and sense of personal autonomy. - As mentioned above, women did their own lifela in shebeens. - One example has passages that represent the poet's emotional response to the social exclusion, insecurity, and status deprivation attached to her identity as a letekatse (woman who supports herself without a man, whether through sex work or other means). - Women's poems are often sharply critical of men and their antisocial behaviour. - Men commonly represented by “Russians” (Basotho gangsters who terrorize the urban labour recruitment centres of Lesotho and urban Sotho communities of South Africa). - Another example emphasises the importance of emotional sisterhood and female social networks for working women. *For more examples and explanations, see pages 425-428 of the text. Once again, it probably isn’t important but a quick read through couldn’t hurt. 16 Page Conclusion: - Speculation that artistic forms of cultural creativity involve perceiving a situation or idea in two self-consistent, but mutually incompatible frames of reference may apply to Basotho oral poetry. - Men's lifela establish a multiple dialogue between: - The poet and his society. - Between Sesotho culture and the culture at the mines. - Between identity as a Mosotho and as a migrant. - Lifela performance helps to bring home the contradictions between: - The symbolically reconstituted past and the uncertain constitution of the present. - Between life at home and at the mines. - Between family solidarity and long-term separation. - Between autonomous self-image and identity as a labour unit. - Between ideal relationships and the reality of migrant and village life. - Between the migrants' thirst to determine their own destiny and the dry well of alternatives. - In brief, we have a situation in which performance as a social process actively constitutes social reality as it imaginatively encodes it. - While poets deal explicitly with external forces and events as they are personally affected by them, their fundamental concern is with the central contradictions of structure and meaning in Sotho historical and social experience. - Social facts, such as increasing landlessness in Lesotho, are assimilated into the central metaphors from which social reality and moral attitudes are constructed. - In poetic performance and migrancy, the traveller reproduces and enriches society by leaving it, provided his riches are brought home. - Unlike the praise poet, whose subject is the chief, the sefela poet is at once culture hero and marginal man. - In women’s lifela, a mix of protest, and bravado reveal a consciousness of the overall injustices of the South African political economy as well as of their marginalisation 17 within it. Page - Focusing on the social uses of metaphor, an anthropology of performance has developed in direct relation to an anthropology of experience, providing models for the analysis of verbal art in social context. - The productivity of these models depends less on their ability to demonstrate how fundamental cultural concepts and values are replicated at various levels of social structure and action, and more on the ways that forms of symbolic objects are used to describe and deal with structural and conceptual contradictions. - Sefela as an expressive genre is essentially "liminoid": a form of aesthetic communicative play that exists in antistructural relation to normative institutions and the configurations of social power they represent. - Sefela demonstrates how people struggling to deal with exploitative and disintegrative social conditions may create for themselves a sense of personal autonomy from within which they may truly act. - For Basotho migrants, this autonomy is built upon the positive redefinition, through performance, of their human value, in opposition to their identity as mere labour units in the political economy of Southern Africa. - For the migrants' women, sefela provides a medium of collective self-expression and emotional reflection on the quality of their lives, their hopes, and their inalienable human dignity. - The study of such forms as sefela may illuminate migrant workers' consciousness and the cognitive sources of the African struggle for self- determination in Southern Africa. 18 Page Lecture 14 Whites in South Africa Who is this about? - White South Africans in Wyndal (Franschhoek) What is this about? - The effects of domination on the dominant. Key themes: - Afrikaners vs English Whites - Rationalising Apartheid - Waiting Author: Vincent Crapanzano - Afrikaner nationalism Text: Waiting (1985) - Fear - Not using cultural relativism and looking down on those studied. Introduction - Ruth Visser: - Visser was an open-minded shopkeeper Wynda (Franschhoek). - She gave a sense of the village as a whole, instead of a fragmented, unchanging view of the people in the valley. - Valley is divided into groups that seemingly only share geography. - Not just separated by animosity. - Apartheid was not just understood in a legal sense. - It was understood in a wider social and epistemological (relating to the nature of knowledge) sense. - Not just divided into White, Coloured and Black races. - Ethnically, class and age too. - Race and ethnicity were strict, essentialised categories. - They believed these groupings prescribed a certain essence to people that could never be escaped. - Prescribed behaviour. - Justify social distance from others. - To many white people, black people would always be “barbarians”. - SA apartheid was an extreme case of the Western predisposition to categorise everything into monolithic categories. 19 Page  - Any perceived changes of these essences threaten the classification system itself. - Any change was twisted to be compatible with classification system. - Racism, an essentialist form of thought, justifies social and psychological tyranny. - Racism masks other essentialist classification. - Isolating racism can perpetuate the status quo, as other essentialist classifications can just take its place. - “Culture”, “ethnicity”, “class”, or “character” can just take its place. - Although racist and other essentialist social categories enter the rhetoric of domination and subordination in hierarchical societies, they are not as freely manipulated by the dominant. - The dominators are subject to social/psychological constraints. - To be dominant in a system is not to dominate the system. - Both the dominant and the dominated are equally caught in it. - One has the advantage; the other does not. Fear: - Fear is pervasive. - Not the fear of government agents or fear of change (the loss of power, status, and wealth) for whites. - Whites have a more primordial fear that comes from the absence of any possibility of a real relationship with most of the people around you. - It is an unspoken, pervasive fear that has its source in the apartheid and that maintains apartheid. - There was no real contact between whites and other races. Why the study was done: - Anthro did not study the effects of domination on the dominant at the time. - Dominant were not seen as having a conscious, only motivated by personal gain. - To understand the dominant, Anthro has to understand: - The pity, terror, guilt and joy of power and acquisition. - The feeling of responsibility and resentment of that responsibility. 20 - Feelings of solitude and misunderstanding. Page  - The author did not come as a neutral observer and was banned from studying non- whites. - Still tried to be as objective as possible. English vs Afrikaners: - Wyndal was a good place to study because the presents of both dominant white groups. - Studies tended to ignore the English, focussing on Afrikaners. - Both treated the researcher differently. - Afrikaners would recount their history, the way they had been wronged by the English, and how they were misunderstood today. - The English cast themselves as informal colleagues and began to describe the Afrikaners. When the conversation turned to the English themselves, they would begin to talk about the Coloureds, the Zulu or the Xhosa so that they could spare themselves the embarrassment of scrutiny and of being the “objects” of research. - Both talked about larger social forces and history. - Language itself is central to the South African experience. - Language itself was differentiated between oppressors and oppressed. - Language itself ingrained ideas about race. - To Afrikaners, their language is their culture. - “Taal” gave them identity. - Language is not an instrument to them, put the product of historical struggle. - Afrikaans has no real connection to any European culture. - Afrikaans developed alongside Afrikaner Nationalism. - Lead by the Paarl Group, linguistic nationalism was born out of the Anglo-Boer War and anglicisation (making English) policies. - Afrikaans literature was produced to create a national identity. - This identity was built on the victimisation of the war. - Linguistic purity was seen as racial purity. - Taal monument was built to honour the “wonder” of Afrikaner cultural and political growth. 21 Page - The English defined themselves against the Afrikaners: - They made fun of the phallic shape of the taal monument. - But the English were also offended by it, it represented their loss of political power, victimisation from Afrikaner Nationalists and their feelings of exclusion. - It also represents inarticulate feelings of disunity, fragmentation and the lack if a cemented SA English national identity. - English were not a cohesive group. - The “vague communion” of SA English identity, cannot measure up to the Afrikaners’ monolithic nationalism. - They have no language monuments, no museums to commemorate their past. - They have no interpretation of history. - They do not share the Afrikaners’ self-conscious mythology or the communal fear and outrage of the Blacks, Coloureds, and Asians. - It is the language of commentary and judgment, an imperial vision trying to engage itself, of worldly, liberal values trapped in domestic irrelevance. - English migration to SA started in the early 1800s. - Immigration was less than other British colonies. - More came when diamonds and gold was discovered. - Afrikaners mostly traced their families back to seventeenth-century Dutch, German, and Huguenot settlers. - The continuous English immigration and the colonial status of SA created ties between the English South Africans and England that the Afrikaners did not have with Europe, from which they had been more or less cut off since the end of the seventeenth century. - English in Wyndal were still more internationally oriented. - Seldom demonstrate strength through unity. - Complain about political impotence, but don’t organise and unite. - English existence is opposition to Afrikaans. - Afrikaners and English identity are formed by rejecting the other. - This opposition to the other reaffirms the significance of the other. - SA English are more conscious of the purity of their language than Australians or Canadians and have their own dictionary. 22 - Fissure between their English and Great Britain English. Page  - Switch between identities of English purism and one disconnected from the UK, leading to them not having their own identity. - Idea that all UK English should unite = Apartheid thinking. - Afrikaner notion of ‘personhood’: - The “person” is encrusted in national, racial, and ethnic affiliation, with party membership, religious belief, and cultural tradition. - It is historically, and not simply biographically, determined. - The “person” and the group are bounded, evaluated in terms of purity and defined against a potentially dangerous other. - Too intimate contact with this other can destroy its boundaries, pollute it, and render it fluid and out of control. - Personhood must be preserved, as must the group. - When Afrikaans participants spoke bad about America, they apologised to the author for causing any offence. They see nationality and personhood as one and the same. - English notion of identity: - Wyndal English, despite marked class differences, were united by common sentiment and group loyalty. - They’d shop at inferior English shops. - Saw Afrikaners as somewhat tactless. - In both constructions of white identities, non-whites were insignificant. - While they “threatened the white way of life” (not their personhood), they did not enter the identity self-constituting of the whites. - The Blacks, Coloureds, and Asians were not “significant others” from whose standpoint the white could look reflectively at himself and discover his identity. They were too different and too distant. - Apartheid is the product of an essentialist racism in which people of colour are considered to be fundamentally different from whites and cannot meaningfully play a role in the formation of white identity. - Attempts were made to keep races apart so because it can undermine the view of fundamental racial difference. 23 Page  - In white identity play, Blacks, Coloureds, and Asians are little more than pawns. - The failure to give conceptual and emotional as well as legal and political recognition to South Africa’s majority population morally cripples the white South African. - It accounts for the static picture most of the whites in Wyndal have of the valley. There is no vibrancy in their relationship to non-whites. Waiting: - South Africans were generally waiting for something to happen. - They were not crippled by anxiety, but the future remained uncertain. - The past gives us security when we are waiting. We know “from past experience” that what we are waiting for probably will or will not come. - Our expectations become “realistic.” We are able devote ourselves to other things. Still, despite experience, we know that past experience offers no guarantee of the future. - Fear and anxiety in waiting: - Fear – You are afraid of something. - Anxiety – General uneasiness. - In English we do not distinguish between waiting for something concrete and waiting for something, anything, to happen. - The two forms of waiting are related to fear and anxiety. - Waiting for something specific (like fear) vs waiting for anything to happen (like anxiety). 24 Page Lecture 15 Witchcraft and politics Who is this about? - Witchcraft allegations in Bushbuckridge and Bantustans What is this about? - Witchcraft’s elective affinity with Bantustans. Key themes: Author: Isak Niehaus - History of witchcraft. Text: Witchcraft and the South - Witchcraft linked to social pressure. African Bantustans: Evidence - Witchcraft adapting over time. from Bushbuckridge (2012) Introduction: - News reports about witch-hunts were common. - In the everyday context of village life suspicions of witchcraft are commonplace and contribute towards a profound sense of insecurity. - Contemporary anthropological studies suggest that discourses of witchcraft cannot simply be viewed in terms of the persistence of “spiritual beliefs”. - They are embedded in contemporary political and economic processes and are associated with the pursuit of ‘modernity’ and ‘neoliberal’ policies. - Discourses of witchcraft enable people to think about how new technologies have ‘opened up’ local communities, and they express concerns about the unequal benefits derived from these processes. - Like conspiracy theories, discourses of witchcraft help people process the sudden acquisition or loss of power. - Witchcraft is established and entrenched through networks of social relations beyond the immediate context of blame and accusation. - The author looks at the institutional contexts of witchcraft in northeast SA. - Witchcraft-related violence of Sekhukhuneland, Bushbuckridge and Venda occurred in areas that were Bantustans. 25 - Bantustans were a social institution that shaped patterns of social interaction. Page  - Bantustans: - Were a product of colonial dispossession. - Establishment disrupted older modes of subsistence. - Brought greater impoverishment. - Encapsulated communities, limiting interaction with the outside. - Power lies outside the community, so members could not change things. - Blame is deflected from external institutions and processes, onto kin and neighbours. - ‘Elective affinity’ between the South African Bantustan system and witchcraft. - Elective affinity -> a natural relationship between different social elements that seem to complement and reinforce each other, even though there is no direct causal link between them. - Conditions of life in the Bantustans gave fears of witchcraft an aura of factuality, and that the ideologies of cultural difference facilitated their prominence. Witchcraft, Reserves, and Agricultural Decline, 1913-1957: - The belief in witchcraft has long been present in the SA lowveld since before the era of colonialism. - Beliefs in witchcraft were widespread among Northern Sotho speaking people. - But missionary records contain very few references to incidents of individuals being openly accused/punished for witchcraft or lethal witch- hunts. - Context changed when whites started to alter land holdings. - New landlords compelled Africans residents on their land to pay rent in labour or cash. - The price of land rose. - A transition from stock to arable farming, creating labour shortage. - The 1913 Native Land Act addressed this by imposing a system of labour tenancy on the white-owned farms. - The African household head, or his sons, now worked for the white landlord for a period of three months each year, without remuneration. - The Land Act allotted farms for exclusive African occupation, which became the 26 Bushbuckridge Native Reserve. Page  - The Act left intact a system of labour tenancy, where residents paid taxes to landholding companies for residential, cultivation and farming rights. - Many households displaced by the creation of the Kruger National, into the reserves. Placed strain on rural resources. - Large amount of land was cleared. Plagues and drought hurt agriculture. - WW2 -> Severe food crisis. - Faced with crisis, many men signed contracts to work in Witwatersrand. - 1948 saw the birth of Apartheid. - More were pushed into reserve. - Amount of land for agriculture was cut. - These processes of agricultural decline formed the social context of witchcraft. - More witchcraft accusations, mostly against neighbours and family by marriage. - Motivated by feelings of envy, greed and resentment. - Accusations showed tensions resulting from unequal harvests, troubled relations between mothers and daughters-in-law over domestic labour, and disputes between kin over the inheritance of cattle. - In Bushbuckridge, ‘witch’ denoted both those who inherited power from their mothers, and those who acquired harmful substances and skills. - Witchcraft encompassed poisoning, the malevolent use of potions and also the deployment of familiars. - The Suppression of Witchcraft Act, dated from British rule, criminalised both the practice of witchcraft and accusing others of witchcraft. - Indirect rule obstructed the implementation of this legislation. - The SA Native Affairs Department granted chiefs judicial autonomy and allowed them to deal with matters of Native law and custom within the Reserves. - Chiefs actively intervened in the field of witchcraft. - Chiefs encouraged commoners to report suspected witches to their court. - Trials would be held by a diviner. - Imposed a penalty paid in cattle and hair was shaved if guilty. - Apartheid authorities ignored these trials because of the limited violence. 27 Page Resettlement, Wage Labour and Witchcraft, 1959-1986: - Since the late 1950s the South African government divided the former Bushbuckridge Native Reserve into two ethnic zones. - Government also created rural villages and enforced a strictly monitored system of labour migration. - These changes had a big impact on witchcraft beliefs and accusations, and on the political management of witchcraft. - Bureaucratisation of chieftaincy -> chiefs lost most autonomy and now had several unpopular tasks on behalf of government: collected taxes, issued arable plots, and controlled dipping and grazing operations. - New Bantu Affairs Commissions actively pushed immigration by Shangaan households into zones. - Men found more viable work in SA’s mining and industry, migrating between their rural homes and urban workplaces. - Before, area collectively engaged in agriculture. - The new village sections were diverse collections of unrelated households, living from the remittances of male migrant labourers. - Communities fragmented into smaller households. - Sons achieved greater independence from their fathers. - Neighbours were often complete strangers. - Confinement in concentrated village settlements brought distrust and tension between neighbours, and also escalating fears of witchcraft. - Even more witchcraft accusations. - Mostly against neighbours. Second most were people related by blood. - Competition over scarce resources and sexual jealousies were often the pretext to these accusations. - Some village residents believed that greater material success could trigger witchcraft attacks. - The system of labour migration generated new tensions and inequalities that were fertile breeding grounds for envy and resentment. - According to informants, migrants brought ever-more dangerous technologies of 28 malevolence, purchased on urban marketplaces. Page - New familiars and their exaggerated features drew attention to new desires and fears.  - Mamlambo depicts the selfish pursuit of money. - Tokolotsi depicts unwanted sexual intercourse. - The experience of working on distant mines and industries became a new pretext for narratives about zombies. - Bantu Affairs Commissioners implemented the Suppression of Witchcraft Act (1957), and prohibited chiefs from intervening in witchcraft accusations. - A perception arose among villagers that Commissioners and chiefs were more inclined to shield the perpetrators of witchcraft than support their victims. - In isolated instances, villagers took justice into their own hands and violently took revenge against alleged witches. - Zionist and Apostolic churches came to provide a new space for managing witchcraft. - Attraction of these churches stemmed from their emphasis on ‘this worldly’ concerns. - Unlike the leaders of mission churches who discouraged the belief in witchcraft, Zionist prophets actively confronted the malevolent power of witches. Comrades and Witches, 1986-1993: - Like most South Africans, residents of Bushbuckridge experienced the 1980s and early 1990s as an era of struggle, driven by the desire for political transformation. - Political activists launched a Crisis Committee and Youth Organisation in Impalahoek. - The Youth Organisation proved most resilient and attracted a large following among young men, called Comrades. - The Comrades acted in concert with the national struggle against apartheid and directly confronted broader structures of political domination and oppression. - Through political action, the Comrades effectively brought the activities of Tribal Authorities to a halt. - Local political activism was orientated towards restructuring social relations within the Bantustan. - The Comrades displayed a strong sense of generational consciousness and dedicated themselves to the complete eradication of evil. - At meetings they asked adult men to name witches residing within their neighbourhoods and formed disciplinary squads to confront and punish the 29 suspects. Lead to multiple attacks. Page  - Comrades challenged the authority of the state which was unwilling to punish witches and usurped the authority that chiefs and adults previously commanded. - The lifting of the ban on the ANC (1990), tempered the involvement by youth in the domain of witchcraft. - Adults were elected to lead local branches of the liberation movement. - Women joined the ANC Women’s League in large numbers. - Youth activism was increasingly confined to activities of the ANC Youth League. - The ANC national executive strictly forbade ANC members from engaging in witch-hunts. - Yet it is precisely at this historical juncture that the largest public witch-hunt occurred in Impalahoek. - It was succeeded by successive bouts of extreme misfortune. - ANC leaders tried to protect the accused. - The witch-hunt articulated social tensions associated with daily living in the Bantustan area. - The accused were generally elderly and of insecure occupational status: most were jobless, received pensions or worked in the informal sector. - The accused people generally seen as people who transgressed moral precepts, like drunkards or adulterers. - Even during the latter years of the Bantustan system, judges of the apartheid state were very lenient in sentencing those who attacked witches. - Only 52% of those accused of being accomplices in witch-killings were prosecuted. - Judges often treated the belief in witchcraft as an extenuating circumstance. - These judgements show how ideologies of racial and cultural difference, that were a hallmark of apartheid, legitimised witchcraft beliefs within the Bantustans. - Judges saw witch-killing as a “cultural feature” of sorts and not a severe crime. 30 Page Witchcraft in Neo-Bantustan Era, 1994-2010: - The ANC won a dramatic victory during South Africa’s first democratic elections of 1994. - This granted residents of Bushbuckridge direct representation in national centres of power. - Bantustans were disestablished and a single Bushbuckridge municipality was established. - Fifteen years of democratic rule brought new opportunities and definite improvements in certain domains of life. A new, small elite emerged. - Ordinary people also benefitted from political change. - Despite these changes, Bushbuckridge still exhibited many stereotypical features of a Native Reserve or Bantustan. - Land ownership had not been privatised and remained in the hands of the state. - Households were legally entitled to freedom of movement, but the enormous expense of housing curtailed large scale urbanisation. - Few could afford to leave, so overcrowded conditions still prevailed in villages such as Impalahoek. - Rates of unemployment, morbidity and mortality had actually increased. - At the same time the AIDS epidemic had taken a devastating toll. - Life expectancies declined. - Although less encapsulated than during the apartheid era, Bushbuckridge was still disadvantaged and dependant on the government. - The paradoxical co-existence of new opportunities, alongside new forms of misfortune, contributed to continuing fears of witchcraft. - South Africa’s new modernist state did not entertain the ideologies of cultural difference that previously legitimated witchcraft beliefs. - Police have successfully brought an end to large scale witch-hunts. - Witchcraft retreated from public political domains and now exists largely as ‘deep knowledge’, concealed in intimate, hidden, spaces. - Witchcraft accusations have also become ‘internalised’. - Most new accusations were made against kin. 31 - Most of the new accusations were made against men. Page - There has also been a resurgence of the old practice of vengeance magic. Conclusion: - In the analysis of witchcraft, a balance of considering the contents of these beliefs and the contexts occur in is important. - Witchcraft has been reconfigured through time, outliving the institutions supporting it, and surviving to confront new situations of life. - Discourses about witchcraft are never free floating: they exist within definite social and institutional contexts. - These discourses are not insular: they allow for the incorporation of new themes and link local realities to broader forces. - Witchcraft is essentially a language about things like misfortune and interpersonal tensions. - This text explored the ‘elective affinity’ between witchcraft beliefs and Bantustans. - Experiences of social encapsulation, relative deprivation, and of limited control over one’s destiny, are frequent in these institutions. - These frequently give rise to high rates of interpersonal violence, which might include witchcraft. - At different times, systems of chieftaincy and Bantu Authorities, and ideologies of ethnic and cultural difference, have facilitated accusations of witchcraft. 32 Page Lecture 16 Sex and Gender Who is this about? - Small town gays in Wesselton, Ermelo. What is this about? - Ladies and Gents as sexual identities. Key themes: Author: Graeme Reid - Conflicting representations of queer identity. Text: How to Be a Real Gay: Gay Identities in Small-town South - How to be a real gay? Africa (2013) - Local vs global vision of gay identities. Introduction: - How gender was manifested: - Role in expressing individual identities as masculine or feminine and in the ways that this dichotomy manifested itself. - Interpersonal relationships structured along gender lines. - The primacy of gender roles in same-sex interactions. - In the small towns, urban peripheries and rural areas that were visited: - Masculine gays were an oxymoron: to be gay was to be effeminate. - It was the boyfriends of gays who were masculine. - They rarely saw themselves as gay and social and sexual norms conspired to keep them ‘straight’. - Rural South Africa’s local models of being gay different global vision. - New “egalitarian” gay identities came from new activism and the new constitution. - Men who had sex with men were divided into ladies and gents. - Social interactions between ladies and gents were the same as between men and women. - The ladies: 33 - Considered gay. Page - Did feminine gender roles.  - Were the sexual receivers (bottoms). - A sharp distinction between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. - Ladies and gents were fundamental to the sexual and social organisation of relationships. - Dichotomy between ladies and gents: - Ideal types and categories of the imagination, rather than real (in the sense of rigid, unyielding and impermeable) divisions between masculine and feminine in personal relationships. - Within the framework of this dichotomy, the terrain of gender was as infinitely varied and complex as the people involved. - While the categories themselves were quite clear-cut and unambiguous, within those parameters, there was a wide range of possibilities in terms of self-styling and relationships. - Studying ladies and gents on their own terms offered a route to follow in exploring the particularity of gender dynamics in a local context. - There is an implicit assumption in gay studies of a universal trend towards a modern gay identity. - Construction of discrete categories of sexual identity, namely heterosexual and homosexual. - In this scenario, sexual object choice is pivotal to sexual identity. Both partners are considered gay. - In Ermelo, modern gay identities are pushed aside in favour of a model in which a strong emphasis is placed on gender classification. The engagement party: - The engagement ceremony was a performance in which gender ideals were centre stage. - There was a neat division of labour between ladies and gents. - The activities that surrounded the event constituted ‘repetitive daily tasks’ that constituted ‘gender identities and sexual differences’. - The ceremony was both innovative and derivative: - Innovative - Involved a same-sex couple. 34 - Derivative - Drew on a heterosexual wedding between a bride and a groom. Page The gender hierarchy: - A striking feature of the engagement was the extent of the sharp distinction between masculine and feminine, with a marked hierarchical aspect that resonates with a heterosexual model. - Different identities: - Gay synonymous with being effeminate -> a lady or sisButi. - ‘Somehow bended’ refers to ‘straight’ men known /suspected of being available as sexual partners to gays. - Those who are ‘somehow bended’ are also referred to as gents. - ‘Straight’ men remain the primary object of sexual desire for gays. - Injonga -> ‘gay butch’, someone who is attracted to and involved with gays, but who maintains a male social and sexual role in a same-sex relationship. - This term is almost the same as a gent, but the subtle distinction is that the term suggests a primary, albeit not exclusive, attraction with gays, whereas a gent is primarily heterosexual in orientation. - This gender binary is respected by both ladies and gents. - Orthodoxy that was constantly confirmed and reinforced in daily practice and through gossip, banter and rumour. - People were characterised and allocated a gender role according to this gender binary and usually the allocation seemed so self-evident that it was not worthy of comment: a lady was obviously a lady; a gent clearly a gent. - There was room for ambiguity. The term “Greek salad” was coined to describe anyone who remained confused or ambivalent about his or her sexual identity. - Gents treat their ladies in ways that mirror traditional male-female relationships. - Expected them to do cooking, etc. - Saw themselves as protectors. Protection tied up in masculine ideas of control. - Gents were sometimes abusive to ladies. - Ladies tended to have well-paying jobs, so many gents were attracted to them (gold- diggers). - Gents tended to have more than one sexual partner. - Erotic dynamics are critical to the creation and maintenance of gender classifications. 35 Page - - Sex can’t happen between two ladies or two gents. Town and country - A related opposition: - Current conceptions frame the city as a prerequisite for the emergence of gay identities and sociability. - Quintessential setting of the making of gay spaces. - In the smaller towns where this research was based, conservative values, particularly in relation to gender and sexuality, hold sway. - Gays tended to be visible and were forced to negotiate their identities under scrutiny from the broader community. - Gay spaces were nested inside the wider social world because they could not organise a discrete gay subculture. - Identities could be categorised into ‘city’ and ‘country’. - This was particularly evident in terms of gender and sexual identity. - This meant that these two dichotomies, between ladies/gents and town/country, were conceptually linked. - Competing and overlapping discourses of gay identity and their complex intersections with gender were presented in terms of different styles. - There were competing and coexisting understandings of what it meant to be gay. - Sexuality as determined by sexual object choice (gay meaning men who sleep with men) vs ladies and gents where gender and sexual roles 36 (penetrative/receptive) determined sexual identity. Page - Was closely linked to city/country divide.  - Boundaries between town and country are permeable, artificial and easily crossed, both literally and figuratively. - Country and city were not distinct entities, but subtle differences in gender norms and sexual practices. There are many ways to be a man: - Gents attempted to assert their masculinities in various ways. - If a man could not clearly fit into either ladies/gents category, this would have a massive influence on their sense of self. - Gender dichotomy frames interpersonal relationships. Sexual practices and HIV/AIDS: - Unique gendered view of same-sex relationships led to “men who have sex with men” spread of AIDS not being understood. - Some thought anal sex could not spread AIDS. - Condom not always used. - Alcohol or sexual urgencies. - Sexual assault. - Same-sex public health messaging was rare. Marriage and authenticity: - The Constitution raised hopes amongst informants that same-sex marriage would become a reality. - Marriage and engagement ceremonies reflected the interplay between older traditions of same-sex marriage and the options opened up by the Constitution. - Same-sex engagement and marriage ceremonies that took place were events where traditions were both evoked and reinvented. - Marriage could be seen as a path towards respectability. - Yet it was an aspiration undermined by rumours and gossip. - Same sex marriages happened before they were legal. - Sometimes marriages were kept secret from families. - The families did not always oppose the marriages, and the secrecy was sometimes unnecessary. 37 - Some marriages were conventional “white marriages and a honeymoon”. Page  - Others were traditional African marriages including lobola. - Many believed a pastor should officiate. 38 Page Lecture 17 Christianity, mission, prosperity and prophecy Who is this about? - The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG). What is this about? - How the UCKG grew so fast in SA. Key themes: - Growth of UCKG. Author: Ilana van Wyk (Your - Pentecostal Christianity. lecturer) - Flaws of macro-level explanations. - Local explanations based in a local understanding. Text: The Universal Church of - Ethics of dislike in anthropology. the Kingdom of God: A church of strangers (2014) Rumours from afar: - UCKG members apparently ordered fast cars and extravagant luxuries from catalogues pinned to church walls. - ‘But it’s not free. If you want it, you have to pay their price’ -> Refers to the massive donations members had to make to receive these blessings. - Several controversies, like a child dying because of abuse after they were “possessed”. - In the UK, the UCKG gained a reputation as a cult-like church. - This Brazilian church’s most successful mission field was in South Africa. - SA operation apparently covered the financial losses of all the UCKG’s other churches in Africa while its pastors supplied missionaries to the rest of the world. Durban: - Durban was still spatially segregated along racial lines. - Almost a third of its 3.2 million inhabitants lived in townships on the city’s outskirts. - High rates of crime and unemployment. 39 - Substandard healthcare for black people. AIDS pandemic. Page - Durban had a very religious population.  - Like its people, religion was largely segregated. - City’s spatial segregation ensured most congregations reflected the demographics of the areas in which they were situated. - Christianity formed an integral part of township life. An Elusive Quarry: - Fieldwork in the UCKG was not easy. - Bishops and pastors at the church refused to answer emails or to grant interviews. - While an open-door policy welcomed all, pastors asked assistants to question author discreetly when she first visited and to watch her every move in church. - Majority of UCKG members had little interaction with clergymen. - Lack of intimate social ties between church members. - UCKG did not have Bible study, prayer or women’s groups and did not offer any social, educational or health services. - There were no social gatherings apart from the six daily services, and even in these, people rarely talked to other churchgoers. - Membership was loosely defined around church attendance rather than through subscription or social participation. - Finding informants was hard. - One was found, but later she left and the social group around her said she was misled by Satan. This group disintegrated. - Believed that God did not help the meek. - People were friendly outside of church in interviews, but they were not friendly at church. - Other UCKG churches shared a similar unsocial characteristic. Durban, the Devil and the Universal Church: - The lack of sociability in the UCKG, the high turnover rate in membership and the fact that church pastors were constantly transferred between branches made it hard to trace the historical trajectory of the church’s growth in Durban. - People and pastors usually ‘come and go’ at the UCKG. 40 Page  - Many outsiders were surprised when the Brazilian pastors urged them to donate money in order to become prosperous or blessed. - Believers asserted that Satan, ‘jealous’ of the UCKG’s success, had ‘planted the complaints about money’. - The UCKG generally built churches near shebeens, railway stations and taxi ranks and the UCKG owned newspapers and radio stations across southern Africa. - They were able to fill stadiums with people. A Multinational Church in South Africa: - The UCKG was one of the fastest growing churches in South Africa. - New churches were opening weekly. - Between 400 000 and 1 million members. - Daily TV and radio broadcasts. - The UCKG also built large cathedrals in prime urban locations. - Large income came from SA church members. - Mostly churchgoers’ donations. - While the UCKG’s growth in SA seems to be driven organically by its local popularity, the opening of new churches is not random. - A small group of bishops in the Brazilian Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (IURD) decides on new mission fields abroad and on the location of specific churches in those fields. - Create commissions to investigate the viability of new branches, evaluating the most appropriate local discourses and relevant tax and property laws, as well as laws governing religious expression and non- profit organisations. - Once successful, the IURD rely on locally recruited staff who have been trained at regional church headquarters. - The IURD’s commercial enterprises are administered by a holding company and are highly profitable. 41 Page The IURD’s South African Story: - First in SA opened in Bez Valley, 1992. - By January 1993, the IURD’s scouting commission had strategically shifted its focus to areas where black South Africans lived or congregated. - From nodes in some of the largest cities, the church spread to all the major cities and towns in South Africa, directed by careful research and planning. - UCKG’s spectacular growth had gone unnoticed by the South African press. - In 2001, the two church organisations condemned the UCKG for its alleged occult practices. - Human Rights Commission disclosed that it was investigating the UCKG for financially exploiting the poor with ‘rituals that amount to forms of psychological conditioning’. - UCKG also accused of being a ‘sect’, of financially preying on poor congregants, of offering ‘neither spiritual enlightenment nor salvation’ and of being (suspiciously) ‘media-shy to the point of paranoia’. - A number of pastors also complained that the UCKG was racist because (black) South African pastors were paid considerably less than Brazilian clergy, enjoyed fewer benefits, were seldom promoted and were subjected to ‘severe humiliation and intimidation’. Events for all answers. - Their ‘all answers’ series of events filled stadiums across SA. - They asserted that God would not allow the church to be ‘defeated’ and vowed to fight Satan so that the event would be a success. - The All Answers event was well advertised. - For UCKG members, the All Answers event was the culmination of a period of concentrated financial sacrifice to the church, of ‘chains of prayer’ and of spiritual fighting. - Many hoped that their attendance would mark the start of a flow of God’s blessings into their lives. - After the event, many unbelievers insisted that the most impressive part of the event was the testimonies and exorcisms. 42 Page Invisibility and the Pentecostalisation of Christianity: - In a country where almost 80 per cent of people were practising Christians, it was weird that the press ignored an event of this size and potential controversy - Especially after the cases where they allegedly cured AIDS. - Some of this invisibility was due to the UCKG’s attitude to the media. - UCKG pastors and bishops generally shunned the media limelight, were seldom available for public comment and often refused to issue statements on comments or articles about the church. - UCKG trained its assistants to be on the lookout for journalists and other investigators. - UCKG has so many lawyers. - Another explanation for the UCKG’s media invisibility was that South African Christianity had been ‘Pentecostalised’. - The claims of occult forces and miracles were so commonplace that they were not newsworthy. - Pentecostal churches (PCCs): - Salvation is through Jesus; healing is possible through Him. - Divine healing. - God wants believers to be richly blessed in this life. - In their services, they waged spiritual warfare against witchcraft and satanic forces. - Preachers created lucrative connection with international PCC networks. - Modelling their programmes on those of American televangelists, they streamed live sermons where charismatic preachers led large congregations in ecstatic worship and prayer-healing sessions. - While the UCKG, like African PCCs, predominantly catered to working-class black communities, but it had access to vast financial resources. - The UCKG built impressive cathedrals. - Unlike charismatic leaders of well-known PCCs, the UCKG’s local leaders changed often and without explanation. - UCKG pastors lived relatively modest lives and were secretive about their 43 families and personal lives, unlike those of PCCs. Page  - UCKG came from a country with no historical connections to South Africa (Brazil) and refused to join established church networks. - Given these factors, the South African media remained both suspicious and ignorant of the UCKG. A Perplexing Church: - Why has a Brazilian church found such popularity among South Africans in a post- apartheid era? - UCKG was not a nice church; it looked and acted like a multinational business, its pastors were brash and constantly demanded money, its congregations were unsociable, and its services were usually devoid of the spiritual comfort and euphoria of other PCCs. - Apart from spiritual healing, the church did not offer help to those in need and denounced Christian charity as ‘useless’. - UCKG paid little attention to the Bible as a source of meaning. - The church placed emphasis on a materially oriented faith, one that delivered ‘all answers’. - UCKG seemed ‘thin’ on theology and content. - In his sermon, one bishop declared that all suffering stemmed from demons and that sufferers could only overcome their problems through financial sacrifices. - UCKG members were not concerned with their relational or historical connection to the church, its leadership or other members, but shared a desperate commitment to attain their own blessings. - Churchgoers’ efforts to attain blessings were not dependent on the cooperation of others and were largely standardised and explicitly signposted within the church. - The church pastors insisted that all problems were caused by demons and that these demons often resided in other people. 44 Page Social and Economic Explanations: - Scholars have explained the popularity of PCCs in terms of their social and adaptive functions. - Individuals learned to be self-motivated, to develop micro-entrepreneurial initiative, and to have the flexibility to deal with the insecurity bred by neoliberalism. - The ideology of the social gospel has traces throughout South African church history and across a wide political spectrum. - During apartheid, township churches played an important role in supporting the struggle by hiding young activists and supplying vital resources. - As more people died, funerals became occasions to organise. - The SA Council of Churches offered legal, financial and institutional support to the resistance while theologians urged groups to resist the ‘absolute evil’ of apartheid. - Even overtly apolitical churches like the Zion Christian Church and some PCCs held versions of social gospel that extended their responsibility beyond individuals. - On the other side of the political divide, churches used their influence to rationalise and consolidate white support for: - The National Party. - Its political theology of race. - Christian National Education. - Across the political spectrum, SA churches provided their members with economic safety nets and served as centres of many communities. - Some scholars have attributed the UCKG’s growth to the receptivity of previously marginalised South Africans to the promises of the prosperity gospel. - Black people in particular were attracted to the UCKG because it articulated their post-apartheid utopian hopes. - There are two problems with this: - Firstly, the UCKG expanded at a time when the government’s macroeconomic growth plans resulted in spiralling unemployed and a 45 growing sense of disillusionment among those waiting for economic Page liberation.  - Secondly, this does not take account of the specificities of the UCKG’s ‘promises’. - The church depicted demonic forces in such a way that made it look like individuals could not win, quashing explanations that pivot on church followers’ supposed naive economic hopes. - A number of scholars have