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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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´If we had money, we would not have spirits´: Socio-political context of illness and healing in the aftermath of South African apartheid
| Panel |
57. Post-apartheid's social imaginaries
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| Paper ID | 159 |
| Author(s) |
Rezacova, Vendula
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | Decades of colonization and apartheid rule, as well as contemporary neo-liberal economic policies, have tied the former homeland of Venda in South Africa ever more tightly and irreversibly into commodity and labour relations of global capitalism, and power structures of the nation-state. Drawing closely on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper aims to illustrate that ´signs and practices of the commodity form´ have not been internalized without contestation and substantial alterations. In fact, aspects of the regime of migrant labour and wage work have been designated by the term ´tshikuani´ - ´ways/things/places of the whites´ - signifying alien and inherently dangerous modes of livelihood. Moreover, encompassing structures, as experienced by people in their everyday lives, have often in and by themselves posed barriers to such internalization by virtue of the conflicting conditions and demands they have engendered.
In this view, myth and ritual will be understood as counter-hegemonic practices through which experiences of subordination have been subsumed under idioms of illness and affliction, and addressed within symbolic categories and ritual practices of a healing cult closely linked with ancestor worship. Far from being restricted to a purely ´symbolic´ domain, the goals and consequences of such praxis have effected a reconstitution of the private sphere - centered in the extended household - as a viable economic base. It serves to mediate monetary exchange and resist splintering and subordination of its members under relations of wage labour. The efficacy of the healing cult depends to a large extent on the constitution of social networks, concomitantly with an ethos of mutual assistance, pulling of resources, and obligations for solidarity and support. Furthermore, through an invocation of the imagined community of ancestors, the extended household has become a locus of identity politics and a ground for the establishment of new hierarchies, whose efforts have been further supported by cultural policies recently adopted by the South African government.
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