Imagining the Post-Apartheid State
Imagining the Post-Apartheid State

Author: John T. Friedman

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2011-07-01

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 0857450913

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In northwest Namibia, people’s political imagination offers a powerful insight into the post-apartheid state. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork, this book focuses on the former South African apartheid regime and the present democratic government; it compares the perceptions and practices of state and customary forms of judicial administration, reflects upon the historical trajectory of a chieftaincy dispute in relation to the rooting of state power and examines everyday forms of belonging in the independent Namibian State. By elucidating the State through a focus on the social, historical and cultural processes that help constitute it, this study helps chart new territory for anthropology, and it contributes an ethnographic perspective to a wider set of interdisciplinary debates on the State and state processes.

Namibia's Red Line
Namibia's Red Line

Author: G. Miescher

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2012-06-18

Total Pages: 557

ISBN-13: 1137118318

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Based on archival sources and oral history, this book reconstructs a border-building process in Namibia that spanned more than sixty years. The process commenced with the establishment of a temporary veterinary defence line against rinderpest by the German colonial authorities in the late nineteenth century and ended with the construction of a continuous two-metre-high fence by the South African colonial government sixty years later. This 1250-kilometre fence divides northern from central Namibia even today. The book combines a macro and a micro-perspective and differentiates between cartographic and physical reality. The analysis explores both the colonial state's agency with regard to veterinary and settlement policies and the strategies of Africans and Europeans living close to the border. The analysis also includes the varying perceptions of individuals and populations who lived further north and south of the border and describes their experiences crossing the border as migrant workers, African traders, European settlers and colonial officials. The Red Line's history is understood as a gradual process of segregating livestock and people, and of constructing dichotomies of modern and traditional, healthy and sick, European and African.

Ethnography in Unstable Places
Ethnography in Unstable Places

Author: Carol J. Greenhouse

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2002-03-13

Total Pages: 447

ISBN-13: 0822383489

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Ethnography in Unstable Places is a collection of ethnographic accounts of everyday situations in places undergoing dramatic political transformation. Offering vivid case studies that range from the Middle East and Africa to Europe, Russia, and Southeast Asia, the contributing anthropologists narrate particular circumstances of social and political transformation—in contexts of colonialism, war and its aftermath, social movements, and post–Cold War climates—from the standpoints of ordinary people caught up in and having to cope with the collapse or reconfiguration of the states in which they live. Using grounded ethnographic detail to explore the challenges to the anthropological imagination that are posed by modern uncertainties, the contributors confront the ambiguities and paradoxes that exist across the spectrum of human cultures and geographies. The collection is framed by introductory and concluding chapters that highlight different dimensions of the book’s interrelated themes—agency and ethnographic reflexivity, identity and ethics, and the inseparability of political economy and interpretivism. Ethnography in Unstable Places will interest students and specialists in social anthropology, sociology, political science, international relations, and cultural studies. Contributors. Eve Darian-Smith, Howard J. De Nike, Elizabeth Faier, James M. Freeman, Robert T. Gordon, Carol J. Greenhouse, Nguyen Dinh Huu, Carroll McC. Lewin, Elizabeth Mertz, Philip C. Parnell, Nancy Ries, Judy Rosenthal, Kay B. Warren, Stacia E. Zabusky

The Kavango Peoples
The Kavango Peoples

Author: Gordon D. Gibson

Publisher:

Published: 1981

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13:

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This is a synthesis of anthropological studies of the people living along the Namibian section of the Okavango River, in which the authors have supplemented their own field research with other source material. After a general introduction, consecutive chapters discuss each of the five "tribes", using the same comparative framework of presentation. Although historical change is regularly noted in passing, the essays are largely written in a timeless present, sometimes even when early sources are cited. Coverage of the peasant economy is variable, but the scattered factual detail is useful given the almost total absence of modern field studies. (Eriksen/Moorsom 1989).