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 Anthropology Southern
Africa
há ± 2 meses
We're excited to share the call for
papers for this year's ASnA
conference, to be held at the
University of Botswana,
Sociology Department from 26th
– 29th September 2018.
https://www.asnahome.org/
…/ASnA_Annual_Conference_201
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ABOUT ANTHROPOLOGY SOUTHERN AFRICA

An overview of the history of Social Anthropology in Southern Africa
People in the History of Anthropology

Henri-Alexandre Junod
Winifred Hoernlé
Werner Eiselen
Monica Wilson
Archie Mafeje

More

Association for Anthropology in Southern Africa (AASA)

Historical studies of southern African anthropology

As a university subject anthropology in South Africa dates to the 1920s when departments of social
anthropology and volkekunde (ethnology at Afrikaans-speaking universities) were established at newly
established universities in South Africa. Interest in ethnography predates this development by many decades
and was led by colonial missionaries and government officials. Three substantial bodies of ethnographic
knowledge warrant particular mention in this regard: the home-based San folklore researches of the German
philologist-turned-ethnographer Wilhelm Bleek (1827-1875) and his linguistically gifted sister-in-law Lucy
Lloyd (1836-1914) conducted in Cape Town between 1870 and 1884; the sustained collection of information
on Zulu history and customs by the Natal colonial official James Stuart (1868-1942) in the period 1897 to
1922; and the production of ethnographic knowledge about the Tsonga and Ronga peoples of south-eastern
Africa by the Swiss missionary entomologist-turned ethnographer Henri-Alexandre Junod (1863-1934),
culminating in his two-volume work The Life of a South African Tribe, published in 1912-3 and reissued in
1927. Although a separate association for anthropology was only to emerge many decades later, the South
African Association for the Advancement of Science (that held annual  conferences from 1903) had an
Anthropological Section where archaeologists and anthropologists read papers, and they often published
articles in the association’s journal, the South African Journal of Science.

Henri-Alexandre Junod (1863-1934) 

In 1921 the first chair in social anthropology in the British colonial world was established at the University of
Cape Town with the appointment of Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955) who in later years became
the leading theorist of structural functionalism in the British anthropological tradition. Ethnology was
established as a teaching subject at Witwatersrand University in 1923, with the appointment of Winifred
Hoernlé (1885-1960), a highly influential teacher and pioneering early ethnographer. Radcliffe-Brown and
Hoernlé collaborated in establishing social anthropology as a university discipline in South Africa, building
departments with extensive ethnographic libraries and ethnological museums, but primarily in developing a
much more rigorous sociological approach towards their newly established discipline. Building on a
friendship that dated back to their graduate years at Cambridge in the early 1900s, they applied the new
theoretical system ‘Brown’ had developed in his recently published foundational text,  The Andaman Islanders
(1922) to southern African societies based on the general concepts of ‘kinship’ and ‘social system’, and more
particular concepts including ‘social value’, ‘the mother’s brother’ and ‘social function’.

Winifred Hoernlé (1885-1960) 

A fundamentally different Afrikaner ethnological tradition was founded at Stellenbosch University by the later
architect of apartheid Werner Eiselen (1899-1977) in the decade between 1926 and 1936. Eiselen based his
analysis of African culture on essentialist principles derived from his Berlin mission roots, his post-War
political activism in the service of Afrikaner nationalism, but above all from his three-year induction into the
conservative and racially structured African linguistics of his then much-esteemed Hamburg mentor Carl
Meinhof (1857-1944). He not only established volkekunde as a discipline based on classification rather than
participant observation, developed by an exclusive male cohort of disciples, but trained the men who would
serve as the leaders of his Afrikaner-inflected ethnological tradition in the mid-late twentieth century,
including P.J. Schoeman, Frank Language and Pieter Coertze. Despite the radically contrasting political
orientations of the anti-segregationist social anthropologists and the Hertzog-aligned volkekundiges, there
was a brief period of co-operation between individuals within these two traditions in the Inter-University
Committee for African Studies during the early-mid 1930s and in their joint work on Bantu Studies, the first
journal dedicated to anthropology and African languages, founded in 1921 and renamed as  African Studies
in 1942.

Werner Eiselen (1899-1977) 

In the decade from 1929 there was a revolution in social anthropology in southern Africa led by the women
students of Winifred Hoernlé. By the mid-1940s they had produced internationally acclaimed ethnographies
of many African societies, combining the analysis of tradition with the analysis of social change. Informally
supervised by Hoernlé during her two years of fieldwork in Pondoland, East London and on Eastern Cape
farms, Monica Hunter (later Wilson) (1908-1982) is probably the best known of this talented cohort of women
scholars, given her later seniority in South African anthropology from the 1940s to the 1970s. The other
Hoernlé-trained women scholars - Ellen Hellmann (1908-1982), Hilda Kuper (1911-1995) and Eileen Jensen
Krige (1904-1995) – pioneered the field of African urban anthropology in the 1930s and in the latter two cases
published ethnographies on the Swazi and the Lovedu that have stood the test of time. Isaac Schapera (1905-
2003) and Max Gluckman (1911-1975) also  launched their fieldwork careers with their work on the Tswana
and Zulu respectively, shaped deeply by an approach towards African societies that included the migrant, the
missionary and the magician in the same frame of reference. Can one speak of a South African school of
social anthropology in these years, distinct from the British tradition given the depth of its analysis of social
change and urban African experience?

Monica Wilson (1908-1982) 

 ↑

Apartheid brought a dramatic change of context for social anthropology in the English-speaking tradition.
Many English-speaking social anthropologists chose to live and work in exile, most notably Schapera who
moved to London University in 1949 and Max Gluckman who moved to Manchester University in the same
year, following his influential directorship of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Northern Rhodesia that had
been established by the late Godfrey Wilson (1908-1944). African ethnographers like Archie Mafeje and
Livingstone Mqotsi were forced into exile, effectively squashing what might be retrospectively identified as a
rich insider ethnographic tradition in South Africa which included the work of Z.K. Matthews, Bernard
Magubane, Joseph Manyoni and Absolom Vilakazi, the latter becoming early radical critics of liberal social
science in southern Africa and elsewhere.

The other major development in South African social anthropology during these decades was the production
of a second wave of studies in urban anthropology. The most internationally famous of these was Philip and
Iona Mayer’s Townsmen or Tribesman: Urbanization in a Divided Society (1961) which celebrated the cultural
resilience of the traditional or ‘Red’ Xhosa migrants of East London’s townships. Monica Wilson and Archie
Mafeje’s Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township (1963) was  another influential co-authored
study examining, amongst other things, new urban African social identities and (here again) the resilience of
Xhosa tradition and ‘home-boy groups’ in a South African township under apartheid.

Archie Mafeje (1936-2007) 

Meanwhile the volkekundiges drew inspiration from German and, later, American cultural anthropology and
had their focus on racial and cultural difference, anchored in the pre-colonial past. Volkekunde became
associated with the policy of separate development and apartheid, and contributed to the training of
government officials and the armed forces. The most orthodox volkekundige school of thought developed at
the University of Pretoria under Pieter Coertze (1907-1998), while the Stellenbosch volkekundige, J. P. Bruwer,
was associated with a more liberal interpretation of separate development. A dissident volkekundige, Brian du
Toit, emigrated and made a contribution to cultural anthropology in the United States. Some of the students
he taught at Stellenbosch University would move away from volkekunde in the 1980s.

In 1967 what was called an ‘interuniversity continuation committee of anthropologists’ (advocated by John
Blacking, J. P. Bruwer, Aubrey Myburgh and Berthold Pauw) managed to draw many South African
anthropologists, though with some important exceptions on both sides, into an informal network that met
annually at Unisa for academic conferences. Monica Wilson (University of Cape Town) and David Hammond-
Tooke (Witwatersrand University) were reluctant social anthropologists in that network, while Pieter Coertze
(the leading volkekundige at the University of Pretoria) was opposed to cooperation with social
anthropologists. In the context of escalating political polarization and the radicalization of ideological
differences, a formal unitary organization was unthinkable at that time. When black anthropologists began
attending the conferences, many of the volkekundiges withdrew and formed a separate, formal organization,
the Vereniging van Afrikaanse Volkekundiges (VAV) (Association of Afrikaans Anthropologists) in 1977. VAV
organized its own annual conferences and published a journal: Suid-Afrikaanse Tydskrif vir Etnologie / South
African Journal for Ethnology (in post-apartheid times continued as Anthropology Southern Africa). As
Afrikaner nationalists, the volkekundiges invested strongly in publishing in Afrikaans in their journal and
insisted on using Afrikaans exclusively in their theses and conferences.

The ideological differences between the two traditions of anthropology in the country became increasinly
apparent in the way that South African society was seen as either, following Radcliffe-Brown and Gluckman,
one social system or, from the perspective of volkekunde, as a collection of incompatible racial and cultural
entities (described through what was known as ethnos theory). Furthermore, while participant observation
and a need for social closeness was a normal part of social anthropological methodology in the field, this
was politically problematic in volkekunde and personalized social relationships were therefore kept to a
minimum during fieldwork.

The informal, mainly English-medium conferences continued with very little participation by volkekundiges.
However, in 1987 the Association for Anthropology in Southern Africa (AASA) was established in order to
unite and professionalize anthropology by means of an open and democratic association, with the support of
some of the younger members of VAV who had broken ties with that organization. AASA expressly rejected
apartheid ideology and all discrimination, including sexism, in the preamble to its constitution. It also
accepted a set of ethical guidelines that emphasized the unacceptability of undercover work. By that stage
South Africa had entered what turned out to be the final phase of the liberation struggle and the political
polarization between the two professional associations was high. By then an academic boycott of all
academic institutions in South Africa had been instituted, and it isolated the discipline from its international
network. This was also the time, in 1989, that Witwatersrand University social anthropologist, David Webster,
was assassinated by the state’s security forces for his human rights activism. Much of the work in social
anthropology in the decades before the democratization of the country was part of the exposé tradition in
which the damaging effects of apartheid, especially in rural areas, were studied through a neo-Marxist
theoretical lens.

With the transition to democracy in 1994, a new phase in organized anthropology began, with the impact of
the dramatic political changes clearly showing in the demise of volkekunde. This was triggered by the need
for transformation in curricula, university administration and power relations in higher education. Volkekunde
departments, once superior in their numbers of staff and students, were increasingly under threat and a
paradigm shift occurred, away from ethnos theory, especially amongst younger academics. This shift was, for
instance, expressed in the 1990s name change of VAV to the South African Association of Cultural
Anthropologists (SAACA). At a 1996 conference of AASA at Unisa, in combination with the Pan African
Association of Anthropologists (PAAA), several SAACA members participated, although an important part of
the academic leadership of the organization kept its distance. Finally, in 2001, the two associations merged to
become the current Anthropology Southern Africa (ASnA). The journal of SAACA was inherited by the new
association and renamed Anthropology Southern Africa. After many decades of disengaged competition and
often bitter dissent, anthropologists in South Africa united into one disciplinary association and a further
phase of growth could begin.

Historical studies of southern African anthropology

Bank, A., 2015. Pioneers of the Field: South Africa’s Women Anthropologists. New York: Cambridge University
Press in association with the International African Institute.

Hammond-Tooke, W. D. 1997. Imperfect Interpreters: South Africa’s Anthropologists 1920-1990.

Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

Studies on individual southern African anthropologists

On Hunter Wilson:
Bank, A. and Bank, L. J. (eds.) 2013. Inside African Anthropology: Monica Wilson and her Interpreters.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

On Junod:
Harries, P., 2007. Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of knowledge in South-East
 Africa. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.

On Schapera:
Comaroff, J. L.; Comaroff, J.; and James, D. (eds.) 2007. Picturing a Colonial Past: The African Photographs
of Isaac Schapera. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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