- Department of Anthropology,
University of the Witwatersrand
Private Bag x3
Wits 2050 - +27 (0)11 717 4410
Robert J Thornton
University of the Witwatersrand, Anthropology, Faculty Member
- Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, Ethnography, Cultural Theory, Social Anthropology, Archaelogy, and 29 moreSocial Theory, Ethnography (Research Methodology), HIV/AIDS, Sexuality, Network Analysis, African Studies, South Africa (History), South Africa (Archaeology), Political Anthropology, Social Networks, African History, African Literature, History, STS (Anthropology), History of Anthropology, Ethnographic Methods, HIV and AIDS education, Tanzanian Studies, African Indigenous Cultures, Social and Cultural Anthropology, South Africa, Southern Africa, South African history, South African Politics and Society, Anthropology and Sexuality, Archaeology, Iron Age, Anthropology of Death, and Ethicsedit
- Professor Robert Thornton Brief biographical information June 2017 Professor Robert Thornton studied at Makerere Univ... moreProfessor Robert Thornton
Brief biographical information
June 2017
Professor Robert Thornton studied at Makerere University, Uganda, before going on to complete a BA at Stanford University, and his MA & PhD at The University of Chicago. Now retired from teaching, he continues to supervise advanced students at the MA and PhD level and runs and active research programme as Associate Research Professor at theUniversity of the Witwatersrand. He has published in several different fields including history, intellectual history, East African ethnography, and theory in anthropology. He has been employed at The University of Chicago, the University of Cape Town, Rutgers University, The Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and has been visiting lecturer at American, European, and African universities. He has worked at the University of the Witwatersrand since 1992.
He is an ethnographer and cultural and medical anthropologist. Recent and current research concentrates on African indigenous knowledge and practices of ‘traditional healing’ (bungoma) in responses to HIV and other medical and health issues, using ethnographic and medical anthropological approaches.
His book on HIV/AIDS, Unimagined Community: Sex, Networks and AIDS in Uganda and South Africa (University of California Press 2008) explores comparatively the role of sexual networks and local, cultural knowledge in the variations in HIV prevalence that both countries have experienced.
Major publications include:
Books:
1993 The Early Writings of Bronislaw Malinowski (With Peter Skalnik, Co-editor). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. See: http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521026468
and
1980 Space, Time and Culture among the Iraqw of Tanzania. New York: Academic Press. xv + 266 pp., maps, illust., bibliography.
The most recent book, Healing the Exposed Being (Wits University Press, 2017) presents a new vocabulary and ontology for understanding fundamental concepts of a regional version of the ‘Ngoma’ cult, found throughout the Bantu-language speaking areas of Africa. He is thus able to provide a more integrated anthropological account of beliefs and practices that have survived from pre-colonial times, describing them in their own terms rather than presenting them as a reflex of modernity or a reaction to colonialism, or as a consequence of neoliberal or other social, political, economic or historical factors. Bungoma, the knowledge and practices of ‘traditional healers’ in eastern Mpumalanga, is built on the fundamental premise that all persons are exposed to each other and to other person-like agents, including ancestors and witches, among others. This mutual and inescapable exposure is the condition for the possibility of healing, but also ultimately the cause of all illness, misfortune and death. Against this, the sangoma as healer attempts to augment the self of the exposed being through protective magical and by exposing relations between tangible (living human) and intangible (spiritual) agents for persons. Bungoma comprises multiple modalities including trance, music, rhythm, divination, herbal lore, teaching and learning, craftsmanship, and healing. the aim of bungoma is to enable patients to heal themselves by transforming their personal narratives of self. The book brings this local anthropology and its therapeutic applications into relation with global academic anthropology by exploring it through political, economic, interpretive, and ecological-environmentalist lenses.
He is currently developing a new research focus, “Metals, Magic, and Medicine” around the history of ‘traditional healing’ (shamanism, sangomas, rainmakers, ...) in the South African archaeological and ethnographic context. This involves the study of early mining and high-temperature technologies (glass, metals, ceramics, ...) in relation to ritual sites and healing practices, and ethnography of contemporary ‘illegal’ or artisanal and small-scale mining.
Details and current work, published and unpublished, can be found at
Blog:
robertthrontonza.blogspot.com ;
Academia.edu:
https://wits.academia.edu/RobertThornton ; and a
GoogleScholar:
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=o4flRnwAAAAJ&hl=en
Degrees
Ph.D. The University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology. June 1978.
MA The University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology. March 1974.
BA (Cum Laude, Honors in Anthropology by thesis), Stanford University, June 1972.
Identifiers
ORCID : 0000-0002-6748-0913
SCOPUS Author ID: 17344240400edit
Research Interests: History, Geography, Politics, Colonialism, Parliament, and 3 moreZulu, ethnicity South Africa, and CAPE
Reasoning incorrectly from empirical evidence, the magical logic of the traditional healer (TH) arrives at conclusions that cannot be scientifically demonstrated because it generalises too broadly from discrete (‘accidental’) instances of... more
Reasoning incorrectly from empirical evidence, the magical logic of the traditional healer (TH) arrives at conclusions that cannot be scientifically demonstrated because it generalises too broadly from discrete (‘accidental’) instances of success. But, this is not only a logical error; it is also a strategy to recruit clientele or patients by claiming that some specific empirical success can be generalised to any patient. Public health practitioners must also recruit both patients and experimental subjects. The ostensible object of public health, however, is not its ‘public’ (patients and experimental subjects) but rather the abstract biological notion of the ‘population’. In order to reason from population to patient, public health must invert the magical logic of the healer: it must reason from the general to the specific. The randomised controlled trial (RCT), for instance, seems to specify effectiveness for the single instance from the statistically general case, and creates the impression for its audience, the public, that its findings are proportionally valid for any and all instances. Thus magic and RCTs present invalid chains of reasoning based on sound empirical observations. This is what I call ‘magical empiricism’, and claim that it is a property of both the ‘evidence-based’ medical systems and interventions deriving from the RCT, and the ‘magical’ medical systems of traditional healing and CAM. In a medically pluralistic society such as South Africa, this account helps to explain the enduring appeal of many different medical practices and beliefs in this complex social environment (‘medical rainbowism’). Finally, I argue that the subject/patient of the traditional healer is never stripped of their social being like the subject of the modern medical and public health regime who can be characterised as having only ‘bare life’ (Agamben) relative to the bio-political discourse (Foucault), merely an element of the ‘population’. Instead, the subject of traditional healer possesses not ‘bare life’ but what I call ‘exposed being’. This, in turn, allows us to understand the appeal of the healer’s magic, her flawed logic, and her surprising efficacy.
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Standard models of political thought derived from Liberal, Democratic and Classical models of political theory do not appear to fully comprehend the structure and processes of political action and culture at the local-level in South... more
Standard models of political thought derived from Liberal, Democratic and Classical models of political theory do not appear to fully comprehend the structure and processes of political action and culture at the local-level in South Africa. I present a concise model that is based on set of four inter-linked'principles' or concepts that structure political action and sentiment:(I) the equivalence of persons,(2) respect,(3) jealousy, and (4) suffering. These principles form a resilient and powerful structure that govern political action, and are ...
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The demand for healing appears to produce a kind of 'market for healing'. It is often not possible, however, to evaluate healing's effectiveness, utility or economic efficiency (value for money). The market for healing is... more
The demand for healing appears to produce a kind of 'market for healing'. It is often not possible, however, to evaluate healing's effectiveness, utility or economic efficiency (value for money). The market for healing is governed less by price than by a parallel market for belief. In the Umjindi (Barberton) Municipality in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, medical choices are made on the basis of belief systems since the effectiveness of therapies is itself contingent on belief (the placebo effect). As beliefs change to accommodate the ...
Research Interests: Medical Sociology, Geography, African Studies, Medical Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology, and 7 moreSouth African Politics and Society, Critical Medical Anthropology, African traditional healing practices, Traditional Healing Practices (anthropology), South Africa, Medical Pluralism, and Hiv Aids
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Most national myths of origin begin with some transcendent or sacrificial story of violent revolution, warfare or liberation. This is also true of many origin myths of ethnic, tribal or other forms of social identity. This makes it appear... more
Most national myths of origin begin with some transcendent or sacrificial story of violent revolution, warfare or liberation. This is also true of many origin myths of ethnic, tribal or other forms of social identity. This makes it appear that some act of violence is the cause of their coming into being. This paper argues that this is an artefact of the temporal 'peculiarity' of violence. Violent events, it is argued, are essentially unpredictable even when statistically probable. This means that violence is only 'visible' after the fact, and rarely before and that plausible causal models can rarely be constructed in advance. Violence is always seen in retrospect, then, and where it has caused significant death and destruction, it requires that we begin to make sense of what caused it. Unlike other planned or and emotionally charged social interactions (such as eating, sexuality, ritual) acts of violence interrupt (disrupt, breach, rupture, break, etc.) and terminate...
Research Interests: Sociology and Philosophy
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Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), born and educated in Poland, helped to establish British social anthropology. His classic monographs on the Trobriand Islanders were published between 1922 and 1935, when he was a professor of... more
Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), born and educated in Poland,
helped to establish British social anthropology. His classic
monographs on the Trobriand Islanders were published between
1922 and 1935, when he was a professor of anthropology at the
London School of Economics. The present collection of
Malinowski's early writings establishes the intellectual background
to this achievement. Written between 1904 and 1914, before
he went to Melanesia, all but two of the essays are published here
in English for the first time. They show how Malinowski's considerable
impact on twentieth-century thought is rooted in the late
nineteenth-century philosophy of Central Europe, especially the
work of Ernst Mach and Friedrich Nietzsche, and in the critical
appraisal of the ethnological theories of Sir James Frazer.
The table of contents is as follows:
Introduction: Malinowski's reading, writing, 1904-1914. 1
On Malinowski's writings from 1904 to 1914 1
Nietzsche, Mach and Frazer, and their relationship in Malinowski's work. 3
Malinowski's personal and intellectual development 9
The Nietzsche essay: a charter for a theory of myth 16
The dissertation 'On the economy of thought' 26
'Religion and magic': observations on Frazer’s The Golden Bough 38
The methodological critique of Frazer's Totemism and Exogamy,
the review in Lud 42
Gender and power in Australian society: ‘Tribal male associations in Australia' 49
'The economic aspects of the intichiuma ceremonies' 51
Durkheim's dichotomy disputed 57
The essay on 'The relation of primitive beliefs to the forms of social organization' 58
The essay on 'The sociology of the family', a review of the literature 61
Malinowski's writings, 1904-1914
1. Observations on Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1904/5) 67
2. On the principle of the economy of thought (1906) 89
3. Religion and magic: The Golden Bough (1910) 117.
4. Totemism and exogamy (1911-1913) 123
5. Tribal male associations in Australia (1912). 201
6. The economic aspects of the intichiuma ceremonies (1912). 209
7. The relationship of primitive beliefs to the forms of
social organization (1913) 229
8. A fundamental problem of religious sociology (1914) 243
9. Sociology of the family (1913-14) 247
helped to establish British social anthropology. His classic
monographs on the Trobriand Islanders were published between
1922 and 1935, when he was a professor of anthropology at the
London School of Economics. The present collection of
Malinowski's early writings establishes the intellectual background
to this achievement. Written between 1904 and 1914, before
he went to Melanesia, all but two of the essays are published here
in English for the first time. They show how Malinowski's considerable
impact on twentieth-century thought is rooted in the late
nineteenth-century philosophy of Central Europe, especially the
work of Ernst Mach and Friedrich Nietzsche, and in the critical
appraisal of the ethnological theories of Sir James Frazer.
The table of contents is as follows:
Introduction: Malinowski's reading, writing, 1904-1914. 1
On Malinowski's writings from 1904 to 1914 1
Nietzsche, Mach and Frazer, and their relationship in Malinowski's work. 3
Malinowski's personal and intellectual development 9
The Nietzsche essay: a charter for a theory of myth 16
The dissertation 'On the economy of thought' 26
'Religion and magic': observations on Frazer’s The Golden Bough 38
The methodological critique of Frazer's Totemism and Exogamy,
the review in Lud 42
Gender and power in Australian society: ‘Tribal male associations in Australia' 49
'The economic aspects of the intichiuma ceremonies' 51
Durkheim's dichotomy disputed 57
The essay on 'The relation of primitive beliefs to the forms of social organization' 58
The essay on 'The sociology of the family', a review of the literature 61
Malinowski's writings, 1904-1914
1. Observations on Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1904/5) 67
2. On the principle of the economy of thought (1906) 89
3. Religion and magic: The Golden Bough (1910) 117.
4. Totemism and exogamy (1911-1913) 123
5. Tribal male associations in Australia (1912). 201
6. The economic aspects of the intichiuma ceremonies (1912). 209
7. The relationship of primitive beliefs to the forms of
social organization (1913) 229
8. A fundamental problem of religious sociology (1914) 243
9. Sociology of the family (1913-14) 247
Research Interests: Comparative Religion, Intellectual History, Anthropology, Social Anthropology, Kinship (Anthropology), and 10 moreHistory of Anthropology, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Mach, Totemism, James George Frazer, Bronislav Malinowski, Ernst Mach's epistemology, The Golden Bough, The Birth of Tragedy, and Bronisław Malinowski
84 To be fair, this chapter by Giliomee presents a valuable discussion of Afrikaner identity in pre-Union times which factually if not theoretically is good reading. Not quite the same can be said of the same author's chapter on... more
84 To be fair, this chapter by Giliomee presents a valuable discussion of Afrikaner identity in pre-Union times which factually if not theoretically is good reading. Not quite the same can be said of the same author's chapter on 'The Afrikaner Economic Advance'. This rather standard view of standard facts never really faces up to interesting questions. The regional groupings of Afrikaner capital are touched on only in a footnote. The complex Afrikanerisation of the trade unions, and the quiet death of Afrikaner socialism, are superficially treated. No clarity ...
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Skip to Main Content. Wiley Online Library will be disrupted 3 Dec from 10-12 GMT for monthly maintenance. ...
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'ETHNIC1TY'IS GENERALLY understood to be one'part'of a polity that contains, at least, other'ethnicities' and probably many other kinds of groupings or categories, including race, sex, colour, status groups... more
'ETHNIC1TY'IS GENERALLY understood to be one'part'of a polity that contains, at least, other'ethnicities' and probably many other kinds of groupings or categories, including race, sex, colour, status groups and classes (after Max Weber, 1978: 302-310,385-398; or Karl Marx, for instance 1970: 82; Eriksen 1993: 1-15). It is the thesis of this argument that categories such as ethnicity (as well as other similar types of social categories) are perceived, felt and talked about as' parts' of a larger whole, and that this image of a social ...
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If seeming is description without place, The spirit's universe, then a summer's day Even the seeming of a summer's day, Is description without place. It is a sense To which we refer... more
If seeming is description without place, The spirit's universe, then a summer's day Even the seeming of a summer's day, Is description without place. It is a sense To which we refer experience, a knowledge Incognito, the column in the desert, On which the dove alights. Description is Composed of a sight indifferent to the eye. It is an expectation, a desire, A palm that rises up beyond the sea, A little different from reality: The difference that we make in what we see
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Wilhelm Hendrick Immanuel Bleek was the first scholar to intensively study southern African languages and literatures. This paper examines his motivationfor doing so. Important influences included the German “Higher Criticism “of Biblical... more
Wilhelm Hendrick Immanuel Bleek was the first scholar to intensively study southern African languages and literatures. This paper examines his motivationfor doing so. Important influences included the German “Higher Criticism “of Biblical texts, and conflict between “High “and “Broad” church tradition in the English church. Bleek's attention to field study of actual oral literature is presented as his most important achievement, and his single‐minded effort to salvage the literature of the Cape Bushmen,“this dying out race” as he called them ...
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Southern African traditional healers often generalize too broadly from discrete ('accidental') instances of success, partly to recruit a clientele, while biomedicine frequently reasons incorrectly from the general to the specific.... more
Southern African traditional healers often generalize too broadly from discrete ('accidental') instances of success, partly to recruit a clientele, while biomedicine frequently reasons incorrectly from the general to the specific. Both logics are based on empirical observations, but are inversions of each other; these I characterize as 'magical empiricism'. 'Magic' functions as a metapragmatic discourse to recruit a clientele from a sceptical public that doubts the efficacy of any therapeutic interventions, and it acts in parallel with other practical (and efficacious) healing acts. I introduce the concept of 'exposed beings' to describe locally specific constructions of the person as patient and healer. This helps to explain the existence and enduring appeal of many different medical practices and beliefs in South Africa, but I suggest that 'medical parallelism' rather than 'pluralism' might be more accurate.
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Research Interests: Art, Death, Cognition, Adaptation, Cannibalism, and 15 moreCulture, Body, Biology, Cultural Evolution, Conscience, Causality, Dance, Comparative, Belief, Biological, Attitude, Definition, Classes, C, and Clans
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Frazer's pleasure was text. He was a child of the century in which the realistic novel, the popular press and the ethnographic monograph were also born. In this century of text, Frazer represents the historian's and... more
Frazer's pleasure was text. He was a child of the century in which the realistic novel, the popular press and the ethnographic monograph were also born. In this century of text, Frazer represents the historian's and critic's ideal reader: a reader who wrote. Frazer published virtually everything he wrote, and wrote on or about virtually everything he read. Like Alice, who grew and shrunk as she sampled titbits ('Eat Me','Drink Me'), Frazer's texts grew from notes, to essays, to books, to multi-volume sets and back again to epitomes, ...
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The books reviewed here direct our attention to different scales of space. Contributors to Pellow's collection are largely concerned with personal or smallgroup spaces. They are guided by the insights of Durkheim, Mauss, and Edward... more
The books reviewed here direct our attention to different scales of space. Contributors to Pellow's collection are largely concerned with personal or smallgroup spaces. They are guided by the insights of Durkheim, Mauss, and Edward T. Hall. Few stray far from these progenitors, who understood space in quasilinguistic terms, with" grammars" or grammarlike rules. For these authors, spaces are" performed" as an expression of social categories. Focusing on boundaries, they explore the multifunctionality of (mainly) domestic or ...
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Southern African rock art is painted on exposed but sheltered rock faces and features involved collocations of images in generally ambiguous relation to one another. Therianthropes — mixtures of parts of humans and animals — condense in... more
Southern African rock art is painted on exposed but sheltered rock faces and features involved
collocations of images in generally ambiguous relation to one another. Therianthropes — mixtures
of parts of humans and animals — condense in one image a relationship between animals and
human persons. This analysis takes inspiration from the anthropology of iconography and value
creation in Melanesian and Australian indigenous cultures rather than from Siberian “shamanism.”
It argues that specialised artisans created value by marking nodal points in the landscape that
helped to focus and to locate human-animal relations. Ethnographic sources for the interpretation
of some images is not restricted to vanished “Bushmen” cultures but is present in contemporary
“traditional” healing practices. Southern African cultures have used and understood the
relationships between humans, non-humans and the landscape in region-wide healing and ritual
practice. This paper abandons anachronistic “ethnic” boundaries of essentialised “Bushman” or
“hunter-gatherer” cultures, together with the notion that this art is the primitive manifestation
of altered consciousness. In sum, rock art images express concepts concerning the practical and
ethical relations that necessarily exist between human health (well-being), social life, “nature”
(animals, plants, earth) and the landscape in which human life and nature are set.
A arte rupestre da África Austral é pintada na superfície de rochas expostas, mas protegidas,
e apresenta arranjos elaborados de imagens em relações geralmente ambíguas entre si. Os
teriantropos — misturas de partes de humanos e de animais — condensam em uma única imagem
uma relação entre animais e pessoas humanas. Essa análise busca inspiração na antropologia
da iconografia e da criação de valor em culturas indígenas melanésias e australianas, e não
no “xamanismo” siberiano. Argumenta que artesãos especializados criaram valor ao marcar
pontos nodais na paisagem que ajudaram a focalizar e a localizar as relações humano-animal.
As fontes etnográficas para a interpretação de algumas imagens não se restringem a culturas
“bosquímanas” desaparecidas, mas estão presentes em contemporâneas práticas “tradicionais”
de cura. As culturas da África Austral têm usado e compreendido as relações entre humanos,
não-humanos e a paisagem em práticas rituais e de cura de alcance regional. Este artigo
abandona as fronteiras “étnicas” anacrônicas de culturas essencializadas de “bosquímanos” ou
“caçadores-coletores,” juntamente com a noção de que essa arte é a manifestação primitiva de
estados de consciência alterados. Em suma, as imagens na arte rupestre expressam conceitos que
dizem respeito a relações práticas e éticas que necessariamente existem entre a saúde humana
(o bem-estar), a vida social, a “natureza” (animais, plantas, terra) e a paisagem em que a vida
humana e a natureza estão situadas.
collocations of images in generally ambiguous relation to one another. Therianthropes — mixtures
of parts of humans and animals — condense in one image a relationship between animals and
human persons. This analysis takes inspiration from the anthropology of iconography and value
creation in Melanesian and Australian indigenous cultures rather than from Siberian “shamanism.”
It argues that specialised artisans created value by marking nodal points in the landscape that
helped to focus and to locate human-animal relations. Ethnographic sources for the interpretation
of some images is not restricted to vanished “Bushmen” cultures but is present in contemporary
“traditional” healing practices. Southern African cultures have used and understood the
relationships between humans, non-humans and the landscape in region-wide healing and ritual
practice. This paper abandons anachronistic “ethnic” boundaries of essentialised “Bushman” or
“hunter-gatherer” cultures, together with the notion that this art is the primitive manifestation
of altered consciousness. In sum, rock art images express concepts concerning the practical and
ethical relations that necessarily exist between human health (well-being), social life, “nature”
(animals, plants, earth) and the landscape in which human life and nature are set.
A arte rupestre da África Austral é pintada na superfície de rochas expostas, mas protegidas,
e apresenta arranjos elaborados de imagens em relações geralmente ambíguas entre si. Os
teriantropos — misturas de partes de humanos e de animais — condensam em uma única imagem
uma relação entre animais e pessoas humanas. Essa análise busca inspiração na antropologia
da iconografia e da criação de valor em culturas indígenas melanésias e australianas, e não
no “xamanismo” siberiano. Argumenta que artesãos especializados criaram valor ao marcar
pontos nodais na paisagem que ajudaram a focalizar e a localizar as relações humano-animal.
As fontes etnográficas para a interpretação de algumas imagens não se restringem a culturas
“bosquímanas” desaparecidas, mas estão presentes em contemporâneas práticas “tradicionais”
de cura. As culturas da África Austral têm usado e compreendido as relações entre humanos,
não-humanos e a paisagem em práticas rituais e de cura de alcance regional. Este artigo
abandona as fronteiras “étnicas” anacrônicas de culturas essencializadas de “bosquímanos” ou
“caçadores-coletores,” juntamente com a noção de que essa arte é a manifestação primitiva de
estados de consciência alterados. Em suma, as imagens na arte rupestre expressam conceitos que
dizem respeito a relações práticas e éticas que necessariamente existem entre a saúde humana
(o bem-estar), a vida social, a “natureza” (animais, plantas, terra) e a paisagem em que a vida
humana e a natureza estão situadas.
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Pre-colonial people in southern Africa produced large quantities of gold, iron, & copper, made beads and indelible paint for rock art, ceramics, herbal medicines, and may also have produced glass in small quantities. I argue that the... more
Pre-colonial people in southern Africa produced large quantities of gold, iron, & copper, made beads and indelible paint for rock art, ceramics, herbal medicines, and may also have produced glass in small quantities. I argue that the technicians were organised as guilds, and operated in ‘protected precincts’ in order to produce goods for a regional ritual economy. I advocate for a focus on the artisan, on technical knowledge and skill. This implies a dispersed, networked economy of artisanal manufacture rather than hierarchical redistributive economies of nascent states, as most current historical and archaeological accounts maintain. The neglect of individual, artisanal, technical, artistic, and professional activities in pre-colonial societies leads us to image material culture merely as instantiations of categories (blacksmiths, doctors), determined by ‘culture’. By applying some of the insights from current Science and Technology Studies (STS) to the creation of these products—gold, iron, beads, healing, images, …— I explore here ways in which we might think of these technologies as the context for a different kind of science: not as ‘pre-science’, or as primitive craft, but as connected modes of thinking about the nature of material and its possibilities in response to other social and cultural realities. By considering multiple technologies that are usually kept widely separate—rock art images painted with ochres, metals produced through mining and metallurgy, medicines derived from plant, animal and mineral substances—it may indeed be possible to recover some elements of the artisanal processes and the knowledge-practices involved.
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This is the published version of the draft that also appears in this list. Cite as: Thornton, Robert J. 2014. Zamazama 'illegal' artisanal miners misrepresentedc by South African Press and Government. Extractive Industries and Society... more
This is the published version of the draft that also appears in this list.
Cite as:
Thornton, Robert J. 2014. Zamazama 'illegal' artisanal miners misrepresentedc by South African Press and Government. Extractive Industries and Society 1:127-129.
Abstract:--
Contrary to views of South African government officials and the media, illegal miners (zamazama) in South Africa are better described as ‘artisanal’ miners and entrepreneurs who create significant numbers of jobs and economic value for many local communities. For the most part, they are not ignorant desperados, nor especially violent. They have unusual non-standard mining skills and knowledge that is distinctly different from industrial miners. They exploit gold resources that major mines cannot access and interact directly with global markets. With better legislation and, possibly, training, they could be economic assets and elements of the national heritage.
Cite as:
Thornton, Robert J. 2014. Zamazama 'illegal' artisanal miners misrepresentedc by South African Press and Government. Extractive Industries and Society 1:127-129.
Abstract:--
Contrary to views of South African government officials and the media, illegal miners (zamazama) in South Africa are better described as ‘artisanal’ miners and entrepreneurs who create significant numbers of jobs and economic value for many local communities. For the most part, they are not ignorant desperados, nor especially violent. They have unusual non-standard mining skills and knowledge that is distinctly different from industrial miners. They exploit gold resources that major mines cannot access and interact directly with global markets. With better legislation and, possibly, training, they could be economic assets and elements of the national heritage.
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This short 'research highlights' article in the University of the Witwatersrand's research magazine discusses the critical link between artisanal mining ("the mud") and the digital technologies that require the metals such as gold that... more
This short 'research highlights' article in the University of the Witwatersrand's research magazine discusses the critical link between artisanal mining ("the mud") and the digital technologies that require the metals such as gold that artisanal mining produces, especially in Africa.
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One of the most remarkable features of the Southern African archaeological record is the presence of thousands of mining sites, and tens of thousands of dry-stone structures. Numerous forges and smelting sites were used to make large... more
One of the most remarkable features of the Southern African archaeological record is the presence of thousands of mining sites, and tens of thousands of dry-stone structures. Numerous forges and smelting sites were used to make large amounts of metal and metal objects of iron, gold and copper. I argue here that together these constitute an industry that produced a profusion of beads, amulets, and other small metal objects. These circulated as ritual and trade goods within a wide regional network of exchange. (While it has been argued that gold was exported, there a very few goods that could plausibly have been received in exchange.) Throughout the period that is called the “Iron Age”—based on analogies with European history—southern African societies were small and mobile. They practised a range of economies that included hunting, gathering, scavenging, sheep and goat herding, cattle pastoralism, and agriculture. But other economic activities must have also included trading, provision of ritual and healing services, dispute resolution and management of courts, some organised raiding, defence and attack, together with craft production of ceramics, clothing, decorative items, hairdressing, leather tanning, and other activities. Among these was also mining, ore processing, smelting, and metalsmithing. Historians and archaeologists of southern Africa, however, have mostly neglected the full range of economic activities in favour of activities related to “food production”, with metal working presented as a part-time avocation. This has had the effect of leaving healing, ritual activities, and the constitution of the moral basis of society out of the historical picture. I argue, instead, that the many objects produced by highly skilled craft specialists were crucial elements in an exchange of valued, protective, and sacred objects that provided the moral basis for disparate small mobile ethnic and family groups to interact with each other. The specialists that made these objects were surrounded by taboos and avoidance that universally characterise such artisans. For their own part, these technicians organised themselves into what we might call secret guilds. The proposed model constructs a morally imagined landscape in which ritual and technical specialists knit together a diverse population of autochthons and incomers who spoke Bantu, Khoe and Bush languages, and practised different but complementary economies. These practices and beliefs show a genuine historical continuity, albeit often existing today outside of the institutions of modernity. Networks in which healers, prophets, and pastors exchange medicines, magical practices, knowledge, and sacred objects continue to exist. Worship at sacred sites is still prevalent in southern Africa. So too is the use of ‘muti’, amulets and regalia by traditional healers and their clients, among others. This historical vision allows us to re-conceptualise southern African cultures and practices and to integrate an account of the moral basis of society over the longue durée.
Research Interests: Landscape Archaeology, Rock Art (Archaeology), South Africa (History), Archaeology of Mining, Archaeology of Ritual and Magic, and 7 moreSouthern African archaeology, Southern African Iron Age, Artisanal Mining, Anthropology of Mining, Artisanal and Small-scale Mining, Anthropology of Religion, and Anthroploglogy
This is an article by journalist David Oliveira, in the South African industry periodical "Mining Weekly" vol 22, no. 15 ( 22 April 2016), pp. 10-11. It is mostly based on Oliveira's attendance at a seminay I gave at the Department of... more
This is an article by journalist David Oliveira, in the South African industry periodical "Mining Weekly" vol 22, no. 15 ( 22 April 2016), pp. 10-11. It is mostly based on Oliveira's attendance at a seminay I gave at the Department of Anthropology, U of the Witwatersrand, 10 March 2016. It highlights several points that I made: "Artisanal and small-scale miners have no legal recourse". "Artisanal miners can recover more gold for every tone mined becasue they select and remove only the best gold-bearing ore". "The significant number of mining and metallurgical tools found in Zimbabwe is evidence of societies with a sophisticated knowledge and technology base that was not solely focused on cattle herding and agriculture". "Thornton says new models of settlement, migration, trade and economics for the precolonial period, as well as for investigating how metals were used and integrated into South African societies and cultures, must be developed to determine the scale and sophistication of these ancient societies."
Research Interests: Social and Cultural Anthropology, South Africa (History), Mining, South African history, Zimbabwe, and 8 moreSouth Africa, African Archaeology, Artisanal Mining, Anthropology of Mining, Artisanal and Small-scale Mining, Great Zimbabwe, National Archives of Zimbabwe, and History of Zimbabwe and South Africa
High-temperature technologies (pyrotechnology) for smelting, melting and forging metals (iron, gold, copper) and for ceramic firing are reasonably well attested in the southern African archaeological landscape, especially in eastern... more
High-temperature technologies (pyrotechnology) for smelting, melting and forging metals (iron, gold, copper) and for ceramic firing are reasonably well attested in the southern African archaeological landscape, especially in eastern Highveld and lowveld regions. It is likely too, that glass and glass beads were also produced by similar high-temperature technologies at sites such as Mapungubwe, since pyrotechnologies of are usually grouped together. Although almost entirely neglected by archaeology and history, it is likely too that small scale or artisanal mining of ores formed part of this economy and knowledge base. The products of these technologies (metal objects, glass, glass beads, pots and other ceramic items such as the ‘Lydenburg Heads’) were all part of an economy of ritual and sacred objects. The masters of these technologies were powerful ‘healers’ (or ‘shamans’, ‘witchdoctors’, ‘rainmakers’), both revered and avoided, as elsewhere in African and world societies, past and present. The knowledge—or sciences—that made these technologies possible was the property of secret guilds, whose cultural descendants are contemporary sangomas or ‘shamans’. The places where ritual objects were produced —‘amulets,’ beads, muti, often mistakenly called ‘personal decoration’—were also ‘sacred’ or ritually significant sites. Networks of secret guilds produced healing and protective objects for small, loosely-organised, largely-mobile populations that hunted, gathered, herded cattle and caprids, and practiced transhumant and shifting agriculture. These populations were ‘anchored’ to the landscape by sacred sites, often on mountaintops, such as Mapungubwe and many other hilltops demarcated by stone ‘walls’. Pyrotechnical knowledge, practices, and the objects they produced thus formed social framework for interaction and social exchange between neighbours, incomers and autochthons, living and dead, the sick and the healer/healed, and chiefs and their followings. While metals, glass and other objects of European and Asian manufacture swamped and eventually replaced the products of earlier indigenous pytotechnologies from 1500-1850 CE, the social organisation of knowledge and practice is still seen today amongst indigenous nominally-‘Christian’ groups and among sangomas.
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Is it possible to see the ethnography as the document of human freedom, rather than as the constraint, limit and consequence of power, custom, society, and environment? In the traditions of social science we see culture as acquired (‘by... more
Is it possible to see the ethnography as the document of human freedom, rather than as the constraint, limit and consequence of power, custom, society, and environment? In the traditions of social science we see culture as acquired (‘by man as a member of society’), as imposed (as ‘social fact’, the person as ‘subject’ to discourse, knowledge or power), as ‘always already there’ in tradition and custom, as habit/habitus, as discipline, as the ‘prison house’ of language, and so forth. Culture, as described by ethnography, is too often represented as the sediment, complement, or supplement of other processes, or as the impediment to progress. While we now recognise that all culture is dynamic, constructed, and processual, too little attention is paid to the fact of human freedom as progressive and regressive, destructive and productive, good and evil, with sources in consciousness and cognition, conflict and pain, altered consciousness, and complexity. Seeing ethnography as documentation of human freedom entails a different vision of its project. [keywords: Ethnographic methodology; freedom; theory of culture; South Africa ]
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Extreme morphological and behavioural variation among hominins and humans has not led to speciation, nor has this diversity tended towards equilibrium of adaptation and homogeneity, as Darwinian theory predicts. Instead, all members and... more
Extreme morphological and behavioural variation among hominins and humans has not led to speciation, nor has this diversity tended towards equilibrium of adaptation and homogeneity, as Darwinian theory predicts. Instead, all members and groupings of hominin globalizing populations remained interfertile, and diversity has been maintained or increased. This presents a challenge to the Darwinian and neo-Darwinian paradigm as applied to human evolution. Instead, I propose that the diversity of observed social regulation of sexual practices existed throughout hominin evolution and contributed to the emergence and maintenance of human diversity. The uniquely human external sexual anatomy must also have had sufficient social and cultural value to offset their high physiological cost and the limits they impose on locomotion. This entailed also a decoupling of sexual action from reproduction for emerging humans, thus giving sexual relations their foundational value in social and cultural formations. These developments in turn enabled the further elaboration of diversity of the external sexual anatomy in conjunction with human sexual, social-structural, and cultural diversity while also preventing speciation during the global expansion of the species.
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To have a social identity implies the existence of person who possesses such an identity within a social context that is the condition for the existence of any identity. Any such person has a concept (‘identity’) of their own being with... more
To have a social identity implies the existence of person who possesses such an identity within a social context that is the condition for the existence of any identity. Any such person has a concept (‘identity’) of their own being with reference to his or her social ontology. The social identity implies a social ontology, that is, a mode of being that we call ‘the social’. But there are different forms of the social, or different social ontologies. Social identities can be—and are—understood and constituted within different social ontologies such as markets, populations, networks and institutions. Although the social sciences generally assume that identities are fundamental elements of social being, and are therefore positive, empirical entities, identity must be defined differently within different social ontologies. For instance, the identity of participants in randomised controlled trials (medical population-based experimental method) is necessarily—that is ethically—without personal identity. There are also 'failed identities' and frustrated identities, and identities that are not always possible to define with respect to four fundamental social ontologies. These include criminal identities, secret actors in corrupt, nepotistic, kleptocratic or criminal networks. It is often not possible to assign specific identities to economic actors in markets since it is the prices and commodities rather than the human transactors that are important, and that are recorded. This paper offers a critique of the notion that identities are always possible, and positive, and/or necessarily successful; and argues that some identities to which some people might aspire, or that they imagine for themselves, are impossible in practice. These are ‘failed identities’ or frustrated identities. Negative identities, and negation of identity is also possible. Identity, then, depends on assumptions about social ontologies, and is sometimes ‘undefined’, impossible, negated, or frustrated. Finally, can we write sociologies without ‘identity'?
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From a PowerPoint presentation prepared originally in 2006. See Chapter 9 of Unimagined Community (2008, University of California Press). Because there is ‘a cultural understanding of sex and sexuality—widely current in southern... more
From a PowerPoint presentation prepared originally in 2006.
See Chapter 9 of Unimagined Community (2008, University of California Press).
Because there is ‘a cultural understanding of sex and sexuality—widely current in southern Africa—in which some sexually transmitted substance flows between both sexual partners we wish to expand our conceptualisation of sexuality as culture in a way that goes beyond the more simplistic notions of ‘cultural influence’. This leads towards a model of ‘flows of sexual substance’ in southern African representations of the body. The central concept of the model is that ‘flows’ of bodily substance and gifts that go both ways in the sexual encounters. This implies a concept of the person that is permeable to both physical and ‘spiritual’ substances of other persons, rather than—or perhaps in addition to—a (‘Western’) concept of ‘the individual’ This points toward a set of distinctive beliefs about sex that must be understood in terms of representations of the body, of sex and sexuality, and of the notion of the nature of the person in southern African society. It also implies that the sexual fluids are derived from blood, and are in principle no different. Blood is ‘heated’ or ‘pressurised’ by arousal and is ‘shared’ during sexual relations. The flows of sexual substance occur in social time and space. This implicit model of ‘social fluids’ implies that blood and semen flows through time (‘vertical’ generations through procreation) but also across (‘horizontally’ ) among the set of one’s lover(s)/wive(s) and the social networks through ‘recreational’ sexual contact.
Sexuality occurs at a crucial cosmologic nexus. These social fluids and sexual substances have different qualities. For instance, blood is transmissible but non-transitory (it lasts over generations) and creates a currency/current of exchange values deriving from sex. Sexual substance and blood, then, are part of a transactional system involving these ‘flows’ but also flows of other valuable things: money, support, emotional involvement, services, and, of course, love and passion. In healing rites, and pollution concepts related to death, we see this functioning as a negative flow, and must be kept separate.
Sexuality, then, is creative of persons in three ways: (1) as procreation, it creates new human beings; (2) as recreation, it permits an ‘escape’ from the normal and moral into the space of the sexual relationship, and renews—or recreates—the person; (3) as role-creation, it creates sexual or gendered identities (masculine/fem.; child/adult; boy/man; girl/woman; woman/old woman) The three acts of ‘creation’–(pro)creation, (re)creation, and (role)-creation –exist as a single bodily performance—sexual intercourse—that lies at the juncture of two ‘perpendicular’ dimensions in the work of making persons and connecting them to the flows of gifts an blood between persons now, in the past and in future.
These ideas resonate with the ‘traditional’ model of the body among traditional healers, especially the four co-ordinated ‘substances’ that characterise flesh (nyama): spirit, body, blood, ‘shadow’/presence. Blood is enduring and fluid substance—it flows across people in generational and social time. Spirit is enduring and fluid but non-substantial—it also flows with blood across generations and across social networks of relations, but is not a substance. The body is transient substance that has ‘presence’—it has a place in networks of personal relations and a genealogy, but dies. The ‘shadow’ is a concept of ‘presence’ or ‘influence’ in the immediate space of the body; like the body it is transient (it dies with the body), but is not substantial (and is not spirit).
These concepts form a model of the body on which a healing system of ritual, herbs, and talk acts to generate balances and flows that lead to health/wholeness or to disease/illness. The sexual system is similarly understood as a system of balances and flows that lead to health or illness.
Sex, then, has its own cultural dimensions that shape its practice and the values associated with it. While many aspects of sexual practices are universal, the meaning of sexuality differs with context and over time. Sexual meanings are central to concepts of self and of the person, and to the values we associate with others. While we cannot make a clear, principled or even fully empirical distinction between ‘traditional’ or ‘African’ notions of sexuality and ‘European’ ones: both are active and present in SA.
This has implications for HIV transmission because the discourse of healing cannot be separated from the discourse of flows. They constitute the condition for the possibility of the other. Since sex is both harmful and healing in the traditional sense, the danger of HIV simply adds another burden of danger to the act but does not, however, cancel the healing effect it is also believed to have. The centrality of sex in relationships of all kinds, however, means that it links people in complex networks of sexual relations. These ideas also shape the social terrain through which HIV can spread so efficiently. Understanding these concepts is not going to stop the spread of HIV, of course, but it can help us to formulate more effective and culturally sensitive means of dealing with the epidemic.
See Chapter 9 of Unimagined Community (2008, University of California Press).
Because there is ‘a cultural understanding of sex and sexuality—widely current in southern Africa—in which some sexually transmitted substance flows between both sexual partners we wish to expand our conceptualisation of sexuality as culture in a way that goes beyond the more simplistic notions of ‘cultural influence’. This leads towards a model of ‘flows of sexual substance’ in southern African representations of the body. The central concept of the model is that ‘flows’ of bodily substance and gifts that go both ways in the sexual encounters. This implies a concept of the person that is permeable to both physical and ‘spiritual’ substances of other persons, rather than—or perhaps in addition to—a (‘Western’) concept of ‘the individual’ This points toward a set of distinctive beliefs about sex that must be understood in terms of representations of the body, of sex and sexuality, and of the notion of the nature of the person in southern African society. It also implies that the sexual fluids are derived from blood, and are in principle no different. Blood is ‘heated’ or ‘pressurised’ by arousal and is ‘shared’ during sexual relations. The flows of sexual substance occur in social time and space. This implicit model of ‘social fluids’ implies that blood and semen flows through time (‘vertical’ generations through procreation) but also across (‘horizontally’ ) among the set of one’s lover(s)/wive(s) and the social networks through ‘recreational’ sexual contact.
Sexuality occurs at a crucial cosmologic nexus. These social fluids and sexual substances have different qualities. For instance, blood is transmissible but non-transitory (it lasts over generations) and creates a currency/current of exchange values deriving from sex. Sexual substance and blood, then, are part of a transactional system involving these ‘flows’ but also flows of other valuable things: money, support, emotional involvement, services, and, of course, love and passion. In healing rites, and pollution concepts related to death, we see this functioning as a negative flow, and must be kept separate.
Sexuality, then, is creative of persons in three ways: (1) as procreation, it creates new human beings; (2) as recreation, it permits an ‘escape’ from the normal and moral into the space of the sexual relationship, and renews—or recreates—the person; (3) as role-creation, it creates sexual or gendered identities (masculine/fem.; child/adult; boy/man; girl/woman; woman/old woman) The three acts of ‘creation’–(pro)creation, (re)creation, and (role)-creation –exist as a single bodily performance—sexual intercourse—that lies at the juncture of two ‘perpendicular’ dimensions in the work of making persons and connecting them to the flows of gifts an blood between persons now, in the past and in future.
These ideas resonate with the ‘traditional’ model of the body among traditional healers, especially the four co-ordinated ‘substances’ that characterise flesh (nyama): spirit, body, blood, ‘shadow’/presence. Blood is enduring and fluid substance—it flows across people in generational and social time. Spirit is enduring and fluid but non-substantial—it also flows with blood across generations and across social networks of relations, but is not a substance. The body is transient substance that has ‘presence’—it has a place in networks of personal relations and a genealogy, but dies. The ‘shadow’ is a concept of ‘presence’ or ‘influence’ in the immediate space of the body; like the body it is transient (it dies with the body), but is not substantial (and is not spirit).
These concepts form a model of the body on which a healing system of ritual, herbs, and talk acts to generate balances and flows that lead to health/wholeness or to disease/illness. The sexual system is similarly understood as a system of balances and flows that lead to health or illness.
Sex, then, has its own cultural dimensions that shape its practice and the values associated with it. While many aspects of sexual practices are universal, the meaning of sexuality differs with context and over time. Sexual meanings are central to concepts of self and of the person, and to the values we associate with others. While we cannot make a clear, principled or even fully empirical distinction between ‘traditional’ or ‘African’ notions of sexuality and ‘European’ ones: both are active and present in SA.
This has implications for HIV transmission because the discourse of healing cannot be separated from the discourse of flows. They constitute the condition for the possibility of the other. Since sex is both harmful and healing in the traditional sense, the danger of HIV simply adds another burden of danger to the act but does not, however, cancel the healing effect it is also believed to have. The centrality of sex in relationships of all kinds, however, means that it links people in complex networks of sexual relations. These ideas also shape the social terrain through which HIV can spread so efficiently. Understanding these concepts is not going to stop the spread of HIV, of course, but it can help us to formulate more effective and culturally sensitive means of dealing with the epidemic.
Research Interests:
Mining has long been a core element of southern African economies, but histories of mining and popular knowledge of mining is almost entirely restricted to the large-scale, capital intensive, formal, industrial mines of the twentieth... more
Mining has long been a core element of southern African economies, but histories of mining and popular knowledge of mining is almost entirely restricted to the large-scale, capital intensive, formal, industrial mines of the twentieth century. There is scant knowledge of the African contribution to mining in the pre-colonial period and even less knowledge of the artisanal skills involved in mining, processing of ores, metallurgy, metal fabrication, and use of metals.
Early mining—both African and European—relied on highly developed skills of artisanal miners, but industrial mining effectively eliminated the artisanal skill set as miners became mere labourers in mines managed as capital intensive businesses. We ask here: What was the nature of early African mining? Did it interact at all with European artisanal miners who entered southern Africa in the late nineteenth century? Why did African mining and metallurgical traditions fail to survive, even as oral histories? Contemporary ethnographic evidence of the ‘artisanal process’ in which ore is mined and processed without capital or large-scale industrial plant shows that it leaves little environmental ‘footprint’ or archaeological trace, although there are characteristic residues that can help us trace gold mining in the southern African past,
and its possible environmental impact.
In this presentation we show how ethnographic and archaeological methods used together can identify sites, and yield insight into practices and processes of both contemporary and ancient (“pre-colonial”) mining and metallurgical technologies. We explore the cultural and historical significance of these technologies in southern Africa, and explore a link between high-temperature technologies & other specialised knowledge systems such as ‘traditional healing’.
The central hypotheses are that practice of these technologies is specialized as restricted expertise, and not generalized as ‘cultural knowledge’ of a linguistic (e.g. ‘Bantu’) or ethnic group and that it is the property of specialised “guilds” (groups of practitioners). Many sites previously identified as agricultural can be better understood as mining and metallurgical sites. We argue that the products of high temperature technologies were circulated mainly within the region and not necessarily exported as ‘long distance trade’ as many historians have argued. Finally, we conclude that there are deep continuities between early (“Pre-colonial”) miners and metallurgists in the past and the present.
Early mining—both African and European—relied on highly developed skills of artisanal miners, but industrial mining effectively eliminated the artisanal skill set as miners became mere labourers in mines managed as capital intensive businesses. We ask here: What was the nature of early African mining? Did it interact at all with European artisanal miners who entered southern Africa in the late nineteenth century? Why did African mining and metallurgical traditions fail to survive, even as oral histories? Contemporary ethnographic evidence of the ‘artisanal process’ in which ore is mined and processed without capital or large-scale industrial plant shows that it leaves little environmental ‘footprint’ or archaeological trace, although there are characteristic residues that can help us trace gold mining in the southern African past,
and its possible environmental impact.
In this presentation we show how ethnographic and archaeological methods used together can identify sites, and yield insight into practices and processes of both contemporary and ancient (“pre-colonial”) mining and metallurgical technologies. We explore the cultural and historical significance of these technologies in southern Africa, and explore a link between high-temperature technologies & other specialised knowledge systems such as ‘traditional healing’.
The central hypotheses are that practice of these technologies is specialized as restricted expertise, and not generalized as ‘cultural knowledge’ of a linguistic (e.g. ‘Bantu’) or ethnic group and that it is the property of specialised “guilds” (groups of practitioners). Many sites previously identified as agricultural can be better understood as mining and metallurgical sites. We argue that the products of high temperature technologies were circulated mainly within the region and not necessarily exported as ‘long distance trade’ as many historians have argued. Finally, we conclude that there are deep continuities between early (“Pre-colonial”) miners and metallurgists in the past and the present.
Research Interests:
This PowerPoint file shows the discovery of unusual striations in a delta formation draining a section of land adjacent to the Ziwa national monument in the eastern highlands of Zimbabwe. Using remote sensing (GoogleEarth) data and XRF... more
This PowerPoint file shows the discovery of unusual striations in a delta formation draining a section of land adjacent to the Ziwa national monument in the eastern highlands of Zimbabwe. Using remote sensing (GoogleEarth) data and XRF analysis of elemental compositions of soils from the ground, this presentation suggests that the thousands of hectares of stone structures (mostly linear loose stone 'walls' in parallel formations together with other more substantial circles, 'pits', and workshop areas) were most probably the result of surface mining and metallurgical processing. The site examined here appears to be a drainage field from crushed ore after extraction of metals. Although this terrain and archaeolgoical record has previously been interpreted as evidence of large-scale agriculture that included underground penning of miniature cattle
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The paper examines possible links between the southern African practices of ‘traditional healing’, especially the material culture associated with this, and trance and healing in southern India. Evidence for an early link is developed by... more
The paper examines possible links between the southern African practices of ‘traditional healing’, especially the material culture associated with this, and trance and healing in southern India. Evidence for an early link is developed by examining the ‘mace’, ‘axe’, ‘spear’ (umkhonto, imkhali) of the sangoma (southern African traditional healer) and the iconography of Ganesha and Hanuman in particular. The role of beads, espeically colours, the Indian Ocean trade in beads, and possible manufacturing methods are included in the analysis. The material culture, espeically the ‘weapons’ of the sangoma, and the beads, show strong similarities with southern Indian ritual and religious material culture that suggest more than trade was involved in early links between the southern Indian region and the southern African region.
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Magic, as James George Frazer showed in The Golden Bough and other works, reasons incorrectly from empirical evidence, arriving at conclusions that cannot be scientifically demonstrated. Specifically, it generalises too broadly from... more
Magic, as James George Frazer showed in The Golden Bough and other works, reasons incorrectly from empirical evidence, arriving at conclusions that cannot be scientifically demonstrated. Specifically, it generalises too broadly from discrete instances by means of several lines of logical process that are called ‘sympathetic’ or ‘contagious’ magic. The methods of empirical public health research, specifically the randomised controlled trial (RCT), works its magic from the other side. Statistical results that are only ‘valid’ within margins of error, and only over the population, not for specific individuals or acts, are nevertheless taken by medical clients to have efficacy in their own discrete case. It creates the impression that its findings are proportionally valid for all instances. Thus, if some intervention, drug, or act is found to provide x% ‘protection’, or ‘efficacy’, most people act as if they believe, or do believe, that this means that its efficacy is distributed over each instance in the entire population. That is, that each individual will receive x% protection or efficacy in all instances. This is, of course, not the case, and yet this magical generalization is repeated in virtually every press release of medical results obtained through randomised controlled trials. This represents an invalid chain of reasoning from the general, statistical, results that apply over populations to the claims of specific efficacy for discrete individuals, acts or treatments. Thus magic and RCTs, relative to each other, and in practice, present invalid chains of reasoning based on sound empirical observations. Moreover, the errors of logic are inverses of each other. While the RCTs (more accurately the audience reception of the findings of RCTs) make invalid logical leaps from the general to the specific, magic makes invalid logical leaps from the specific to the general.
People we call ‘scientists’ are perfectly aware that the logic that appears in popular accounts of their results are not applicable in the vast majority of cases to all individuals, or even to any. Many results are only applicable in fact to very small numbers of persons, and the identity or circumstances of these persons cannot usually be predicted in advance, except as probabilities. People we call ‘magicians’, or traditional, complementary, or alternative healers, are also generally aware that the results that they may obtain in specific therapeutic instances are often ‘lucky’—that is, that they are unpredictable in advance, and are said to be controlled by non-empirical intangible entities called ‘gods’, ‘God’, ‘spirits’, ‘wind’, qi, ‘energy’, ‘forces’, and so on. Nevertheless based on individual successes, they do predict to their audiences (or clients) that their therapies will work in general, that is, on any and all unspecified future patients (including the client at hand). Magicians, traditional and CAM practitioners, and public health scientists are acutely aware that they depend for their livelihoods on this magical logic. Clients, too, are generally aware that any therapy or intervention may not work, and are willing to ‘take their chances’. Despite claims to the contrary, then, ‘evidence based medicine’, RCTs, traditional healers and CAM practitioners all rely on different kinds of specious logic.
This is what I call ‘magical empiricism’, and claim that it is a property of both the ‘evidence-based’ medical systems and interventions deriving from the RCT, and the ‘faith based’ medical systems of traditional healing and CAM. In fact, real efficacy of any treatment depends on complex social and cultural structures of belief, trust, social relationships, and other structural factors that are often lumped as ‘political economic’.
By examining some of the consequences of these logics in actual medical practice in medically pluralistic societies such as South Africa, we can begin to account for the relative gains and losses of each, and the enduring appeal of all medical practices in the complex social environments in which we live.
People we call ‘scientists’ are perfectly aware that the logic that appears in popular accounts of their results are not applicable in the vast majority of cases to all individuals, or even to any. Many results are only applicable in fact to very small numbers of persons, and the identity or circumstances of these persons cannot usually be predicted in advance, except as probabilities. People we call ‘magicians’, or traditional, complementary, or alternative healers, are also generally aware that the results that they may obtain in specific therapeutic instances are often ‘lucky’—that is, that they are unpredictable in advance, and are said to be controlled by non-empirical intangible entities called ‘gods’, ‘God’, ‘spirits’, ‘wind’, qi, ‘energy’, ‘forces’, and so on. Nevertheless based on individual successes, they do predict to their audiences (or clients) that their therapies will work in general, that is, on any and all unspecified future patients (including the client at hand). Magicians, traditional and CAM practitioners, and public health scientists are acutely aware that they depend for their livelihoods on this magical logic. Clients, too, are generally aware that any therapy or intervention may not work, and are willing to ‘take their chances’. Despite claims to the contrary, then, ‘evidence based medicine’, RCTs, traditional healers and CAM practitioners all rely on different kinds of specious logic.
This is what I call ‘magical empiricism’, and claim that it is a property of both the ‘evidence-based’ medical systems and interventions deriving from the RCT, and the ‘faith based’ medical systems of traditional healing and CAM. In fact, real efficacy of any treatment depends on complex social and cultural structures of belief, trust, social relationships, and other structural factors that are often lumped as ‘political economic’.
By examining some of the consequences of these logics in actual medical practice in medically pluralistic societies such as South Africa, we can begin to account for the relative gains and losses of each, and the enduring appeal of all medical practices in the complex social environments in which we live.
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This poster presents the initial results of analysis of slag samples and samples from a smelting furnace wall in a region of South Africa where mining and metal processing has so far not been documented. This is a region of some 10... more
This poster presents the initial results of analysis of slag samples and samples from a smelting furnace wall in a region of South Africa where mining and metal processing has so far not been documented. This is a region of some 10 thousand or so archaeological structures consisting of hundreds of thousands of dry-stacked stone. It is argued that these were created through metal extraction and processing technologies involving iron, and possibly gold. This poster shows that well contronlled furnaces were capable of producing steel.
Slag samples were found by Matthew Dawson during a field trip that included Aaron Thornton and George Xafis.
Slag samples were found by Matthew Dawson during a field trip that included Aaron Thornton and George Xafis.
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Author: Robert Thornton, Anthropology, Wits University, Johannesburg (Robert.thornton@wits.ac.za) TITLE: Pre-colonial mining in Mpumalanga and Limpopo, South Africa: The evidence Considerable evidence exists of pre-colonial gold mining... more
Author: Robert Thornton, Anthropology, Wits University, Johannesburg (Robert.thornton@wits.ac.za)
TITLE: Pre-colonial mining in Mpumalanga and Limpopo, South Africa: The evidence
Considerable evidence exists of pre-colonial gold mining in Zimbabwe, and of gold and iron processing and export from circa 600 CE to ca. 1600 CE, yet there is apparently little evidence for early mining in South Africa. This paper argues, to the contrary, that there is ample evidence of mining in eastern Mpumalanga and Limpopo Provinces, but that the evidence for this has so far been misinterpreted as cattle kraals, agricultural terraces, and enclosures for chiefly elites. The thousands of dry stone structures, stone walling and cairns, from <10 m to >100 m in size, were created through shallow surface mining for iron ore, ochre, and alluvial gold. I report on my unique discovery and exploration of contemporary artisanal gold mines still being worked with hammer and chisel, and present archaeological evidence of early smelting and metal working. While the dating of these structures and the ethnic/linguistic identity of the miners is still unknown, I show that the early miners were probably a specialist guild who also provided ritual and magical services, much like metalsmiths and blacksmiths have done elsewhere in Africa, Europe and Asia. Moreover, since today’s traditional healers or sangomas still carry on traditions involving metals, magical protection from witches, and ritual or healing services, they are likely to be the cultural descendants of these early miners. This gives us an ethnographic model for understanding how pre-colonial mining was done, and how its products were used. Multiple lines of evidence show that mining was widespread with distinctive regional, cultural, and technical characteristics.
TITLE: Pre-colonial mining in Mpumalanga and Limpopo, South Africa: The evidence
Considerable evidence exists of pre-colonial gold mining in Zimbabwe, and of gold and iron processing and export from circa 600 CE to ca. 1600 CE, yet there is apparently little evidence for early mining in South Africa. This paper argues, to the contrary, that there is ample evidence of mining in eastern Mpumalanga and Limpopo Provinces, but that the evidence for this has so far been misinterpreted as cattle kraals, agricultural terraces, and enclosures for chiefly elites. The thousands of dry stone structures, stone walling and cairns, from <10 m to >100 m in size, were created through shallow surface mining for iron ore, ochre, and alluvial gold. I report on my unique discovery and exploration of contemporary artisanal gold mines still being worked with hammer and chisel, and present archaeological evidence of early smelting and metal working. While the dating of these structures and the ethnic/linguistic identity of the miners is still unknown, I show that the early miners were probably a specialist guild who also provided ritual and magical services, much like metalsmiths and blacksmiths have done elsewhere in Africa, Europe and Asia. Moreover, since today’s traditional healers or sangomas still carry on traditions involving metals, magical protection from witches, and ritual or healing services, they are likely to be the cultural descendants of these early miners. This gives us an ethnographic model for understanding how pre-colonial mining was done, and how its products were used. Multiple lines of evidence show that mining was widespread with distinctive regional, cultural, and technical characteristics.
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Author: Robert Thornton, Anthropology, Wits University, Johannesburg (Robert.thornton@wits.ac.za) TITLE: Pre-colonial mining in Mpumalanga and Limpopo, South Africa: The evidence Considerable evidence exists of pre-colonial gold mining... more
Author: Robert Thornton, Anthropology, Wits University, Johannesburg (Robert.thornton@wits.ac.za)
TITLE: Pre-colonial mining in Mpumalanga and Limpopo, South Africa: The evidence
Considerable evidence exists of pre-colonial gold mining in Zimbabwe, and of gold and iron processing and export from circa 600 CE to ca. 1600 CE, yet there is apparently little evidence for early mining in South Africa. This paper argues, to the contrary, that there is ample evidence of mining in eastern Mpumalanga and Limpopo Provinces, but that the evidence for this has so far been misinterpreted as cattle kraals, agricultural terraces, and enclosures for chiefly elites. The thousands of dry stone structures, stone walling and cairns, from <10 m to >100 m in size, were created through shallow surface mining for iron ore, ochre, and alluvial gold. I report on my unique discovery and exploration of contemporary artisanal gold mines still being worked with hammer and chisel, and present archaeological evidence of early smelting and metal working. While the dating of these structures and the ethnic/linguistic identity of the miners is still unknown, I show that the early miners were probably a specialist guild who also provided ritual and magical services, much like metalsmiths and blacksmiths have done elsewhere in Africa, Europe and Asia. Moreover, since today’s traditional healers or sangomas still carry on traditions involving metals, magical protection from witches, and ritual or healing services, they are likely to be the cultural descendants of these early miners. This gives us an ethnographic model for understanding how pre-colonial mining was done, and how its products were used. Multiple lines of evidence show that mining was widespread with distinctive regional, cultural, and technical characteristics.
TITLE: Pre-colonial mining in Mpumalanga and Limpopo, South Africa: The evidence
Considerable evidence exists of pre-colonial gold mining in Zimbabwe, and of gold and iron processing and export from circa 600 CE to ca. 1600 CE, yet there is apparently little evidence for early mining in South Africa. This paper argues, to the contrary, that there is ample evidence of mining in eastern Mpumalanga and Limpopo Provinces, but that the evidence for this has so far been misinterpreted as cattle kraals, agricultural terraces, and enclosures for chiefly elites. The thousands of dry stone structures, stone walling and cairns, from <10 m to >100 m in size, were created through shallow surface mining for iron ore, ochre, and alluvial gold. I report on my unique discovery and exploration of contemporary artisanal gold mines still being worked with hammer and chisel, and present archaeological evidence of early smelting and metal working. While the dating of these structures and the ethnic/linguistic identity of the miners is still unknown, I show that the early miners were probably a specialist guild who also provided ritual and magical services, much like metalsmiths and blacksmiths have done elsewhere in Africa, Europe and Asia. Moreover, since today’s traditional healers or sangomas still carry on traditions involving metals, magical protection from witches, and ritual or healing services, they are likely to be the cultural descendants of these early miners. This gives us an ethnographic model for understanding how pre-colonial mining was done, and how its products were used. Multiple lines of evidence show that mining was widespread with distinctive regional, cultural, and technical characteristics.
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synopsis Tens of thousands of ‘ancient ruins’, or extensive stone structures, lie in eastern Mpumalanga, southern Limpopo and northeastern Free State. These have been at the heart of controversy for over a century. Professor Thornton... more
synopsis
Tens of thousands of ‘ancient ruins’, or extensive stone structures, lie in eastern Mpumalanga, southern Limpopo and northeastern Free State. These have been at the heart of controversy for over a century. Professor Thornton takes an anthropological look at the distinctive structures in eastern Mpumalanga with some surprising results. Professional archaeologists have explained these as Sotho-Tswana or ‘Bakoni’ cattle kraals and residential sites, although there have also been other more far-fetched explanations from New Age magicians, African traditional healers, UFO enthusiasts, and others.
Professor Thornton examines these accounts. He then presents a radically new explanation that is more fully consistent with what we can actually see in this region today using GoogleEarth imagery and on-the-ground research. He links these structures to the long-term history, geology, botany, geography and ethnography of the region. The results will be both surprising and satisfying to the many who have contemplated these structures.
Tens of thousands of ‘ancient ruins’, or extensive stone structures, lie in eastern Mpumalanga, southern Limpopo and northeastern Free State. These have been at the heart of controversy for over a century. Professor Thornton takes an anthropological look at the distinctive structures in eastern Mpumalanga with some surprising results. Professional archaeologists have explained these as Sotho-Tswana or ‘Bakoni’ cattle kraals and residential sites, although there have also been other more far-fetched explanations from New Age magicians, African traditional healers, UFO enthusiasts, and others.
Professor Thornton examines these accounts. He then presents a radically new explanation that is more fully consistent with what we can actually see in this region today using GoogleEarth imagery and on-the-ground research. He links these structures to the long-term history, geology, botany, geography and ethnography of the region. The results will be both surprising and satisfying to the many who have contemplated these structures.
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ABSTRACT: This presentation is based on ethnographic work conducted between 2003-2007 in Mpumalanga and Johannesburg, but primarily around the town of Barberton in Umjindi Municipality in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. I examine the... more
ABSTRACT: This presentation is based on ethnographic work conducted between 2003-2007 in Mpumalanga and Johannesburg, but primarily around the town of Barberton in Umjindi Municipality in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. I examine the diversity and nature of traditional healer’s engagement with HIV/AIDS. I explain that there is a large diversity of healing epistemologies, therapeutic strategies and diagnostic methods used by traditional healers, and that there is no clearly defined hierarchy of resort amongst patients. This is largely due to the fact that there is no clear hierarchy of legitimacy or value attached to any of the diagnostic or therapeutic strategies, including the biomedical. Knowledge can be characterised as a kind of network, rather than a hierarchy of categories (more to less inclusive, for instance, or more to less effecatious, valued, risky, etc.) as would be expected for a more scientific or formal knowledge system. Pathways taken in the search for healing, then, vary according to many contin1gent factors.
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‘Sexual anatomy’ lecture for 'Sex, Cuture and Society’ course, 2nd year, Department of Anthropology, University of the Witwaterand.
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Syllabus 2014 of Sex, Culture and Society, a course taught at the second year undergraduate level, Department of Anthropology, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. By Robert Thornton
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Introductory lecture material, from ‘Sex, Culture and Society’, Department of Anthropology, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. By Prof. Robert Thornton.
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This is the first lecture (extending over several periods) of the course that I have taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in the Department of Anthropology. It explores some of the background to sexuality studies,... more
This is the first lecture (extending over several periods) of the course that I have taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in the Department of Anthropology. It explores some of the background to sexuality studies, and begins to advance some of the reasons why sex among humans is uniquely human (and not ‘animal’, driven by ‘selfish genes’, or even biology), and how and why sex is an aspect of social action in standard theoretical terms.
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In southern Africa, artisanal mining shows different patterns of exclusion and inclusion in a complex regional economy that involves skill and expertise, knowledge, movement of personnel, different legal regimes and the manner in which... more
In southern Africa, artisanal mining shows different patterns of exclusion and inclusion in a complex regional economy that involves skill and expertise, knowledge, movement of personnel, different legal regimes and the manner in which they are enforced, different types of mining and processing, and different underlying geologies. There is also a history. Of course, the principle economic and social exclusion in southern African mining is the exploitation of black African men in the large industrial gold and platinum mines, and diamond fields during the twentieth century, and the codification of this practice under Apartheid. This primary exclusion has been well documented in every history of southern Africa, and is not the concern here. The focus here is the archaeology, history and ethnography of indigenous, artisanal, small-scale mining, primarily in southern Africa. To begin the discussion, I outline a somewhat alternative history of mining in southern Africa and highlight what amounts to a distinctive ontology of the underground world and the processing of ore to metals.
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Ziwa is the name of a remarkable site of intensive and extensive stone structures near Nyanga, Zimbabwe, covering thousands of hectares. In this case, these structures lie on extensive deposits of metal ores, including iron and gold. Here... more
Ziwa is the name of a remarkable site of intensive and extensive stone structures near Nyanga, Zimbabwe, covering thousands of hectares. In this case, these structures lie on extensive deposits of metal ores, including iron and gold. Here we focus on a drainage ‘delta’ that drains large middens of what we show are waste material from ore processing. Our analysis suggests that this feature represents a ancient (1500-1700 CE [??]) metallurgical waste dumping site that has been modified by erosion.
Today alluvial gold is intensively panned in streams draining this area. We interpret the stone structures, often called “terraces” in the literature, as the remains of intensive surface mining in the past (no dates are yet available). The drainage ‘delta’ shows strongly marked striations visible on enhanced GoogleEarth images. On the ground, it was found that these lines are shallow furrows, scarcely visible at ground level. They converge on a drainage channel leading from large middens of crushed mineral material along the up-stream periphery of the delta. We collected soil samples from the different ‘lines’, and analysed these using a pXRF instrument. The darker, slightly depressed channels show concentrations of magnetite (Fe) and other metals, while higher values of K, Ti, Zr, and Ba are concentrated in the higher, lighter areas. Imagery from GoogleEarth allowed us to spot this feature once images had been enhanced with Adobe Lightroom to increase contrast, and to highlight colour. We used a Fisher-Thermo portable XRF instrument to estimate elemental concentrations in the soils (courtesy of EarthLab, School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Sciences, Wits U), and an Olympus BX41 microscope with an Olympus SC50 5 Pixel camera for the micrographs (School of Geophysical Sciences, Wits U).
Today alluvial gold is intensively panned in streams draining this area. We interpret the stone structures, often called “terraces” in the literature, as the remains of intensive surface mining in the past (no dates are yet available). The drainage ‘delta’ shows strongly marked striations visible on enhanced GoogleEarth images. On the ground, it was found that these lines are shallow furrows, scarcely visible at ground level. They converge on a drainage channel leading from large middens of crushed mineral material along the up-stream periphery of the delta. We collected soil samples from the different ‘lines’, and analysed these using a pXRF instrument. The darker, slightly depressed channels show concentrations of magnetite (Fe) and other metals, while higher values of K, Ti, Zr, and Ba are concentrated in the higher, lighter areas. Imagery from GoogleEarth allowed us to spot this feature once images had been enhanced with Adobe Lightroom to increase contrast, and to highlight colour. We used a Fisher-Thermo portable XRF instrument to estimate elemental concentrations in the soils (courtesy of EarthLab, School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Sciences, Wits U), and an Olympus BX41 microscope with an Olympus SC50 5 Pixel camera for the micrographs (School of Geophysical Sciences, Wits U).
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Despite huge recent advances in ethnography of sex/uality, anthropologists’ understandings of sex and sexuality (sex/uality) have so far been dominated by psychological, historical, political, evolutionary, and other essentially... more
Despite huge recent advances in ethnography of sex/uality, anthropologists’ understandings of sex and sexuality (sex/uality) have so far been dominated by psychological, historical, political, evolutionary, and other essentially non-anthropological disciplinary approaches. My work on HIV/AIDS ('Unimagined Community', U California Press, 2008), and on African traditional healing ('Healing the Exposed Being', Wits University Press, forthcoming) convinced me that a truly anthropological approach is still largely lacking. I explain why, and advance a theory
of 'twisted systems'. First sex is 'twisted' together with reproduction, on the one hand, and excretion, on the other. Second, at the socialcultural level, sex is 'twisted' together with religion and violence. This makes two sets of ‘twists' involving three systems at different scales. These inescapable and inevitable linkages of form, meaning and action result from human anatomy and evolution, the way in which humans do sex, and the way in which we give it meaning. In addition, since ovulation is ‘concealed’, the reproductive function is essentially probabilistic, another inescapable incoherence. Institutions of marriage and kinship help to create ‘coherent’ society, but with unpredictable
results. The unpredictable role of sex in the coherence of social structures similarly requires complex rules, taboos, rituals and regulations that frequently conflict with each other and with human’s internal and external experiences of sex/uality. I argue, finally, that the inescapable and essential incoherence of sex/uality is largely due to the divergence of (social) sex from (biological) reproduction over evolutionary time.
of 'twisted systems'. First sex is 'twisted' together with reproduction, on the one hand, and excretion, on the other. Second, at the socialcultural level, sex is 'twisted' together with religion and violence. This makes two sets of ‘twists' involving three systems at different scales. These inescapable and inevitable linkages of form, meaning and action result from human anatomy and evolution, the way in which humans do sex, and the way in which we give it meaning. In addition, since ovulation is ‘concealed’, the reproductive function is essentially probabilistic, another inescapable incoherence. Institutions of marriage and kinship help to create ‘coherent’ society, but with unpredictable
results. The unpredictable role of sex in the coherence of social structures similarly requires complex rules, taboos, rituals and regulations that frequently conflict with each other and with human’s internal and external experiences of sex/uality. I argue, finally, that the inescapable and essential incoherence of sex/uality is largely due to the divergence of (social) sex from (biological) reproduction over evolutionary time.
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Rock art in southern Africa acted, I argue here, is an art of dwelling (Heidegger, & Ingold) that permanently marked the environment with a human presence and established a “moral imaginary” that established relationships with other... more
Rock art in southern Africa acted, I argue here, is an art of dwelling (Heidegger, & Ingold) that
permanently marked the environment with a human presence and established a “moral imaginary”
that established relationships with other animate and inanimate beings in the landscape, taken here
to mean the lived-in space that is humanly perceived and created. Rock art is emplaced in the
landscape and embodied by its makers and audiences. Taking an approach based on contemporary
anthropological theory and pragmatic philosophy, the essay presents two nineteenth-century cases
that show how this art form acted to ensure its continuity, and that it had a practical and sensuous
impact on its audiences. The first case shows that new European inhabitants were motivated to
respond to it with their own “graffiti” that stated their own claims to the land by means of
defacement. The second case explores the reaction of “two old Bushmen” who responded with songs
and dance when shown copies of rock art images. The transcribed song and its possible meaning
suggests that it may have inspired the Zulu song Mbube, also known as Wimoweh and The Lion
Sleeps, and thus shows continuities with later musical traditions. (197 words)
Interpretations of this art form have turned in the previous four decades towards a broadly spiritualist
approach and a this-world/other-world binary that has tended to isolate rock art from all other
regional cultural forms, such as music and dance, and from other technologies such as metallurgy
(blacksmithing, gold working, etc.). Instead, my aim in this essay is to bring the corpus that
comprises southern African rock art fully within the scope of southern African lifeways and
historical experience.
KEY
permanently marked the environment with a human presence and established a “moral imaginary”
that established relationships with other animate and inanimate beings in the landscape, taken here
to mean the lived-in space that is humanly perceived and created. Rock art is emplaced in the
landscape and embodied by its makers and audiences. Taking an approach based on contemporary
anthropological theory and pragmatic philosophy, the essay presents two nineteenth-century cases
that show how this art form acted to ensure its continuity, and that it had a practical and sensuous
impact on its audiences. The first case shows that new European inhabitants were motivated to
respond to it with their own “graffiti” that stated their own claims to the land by means of
defacement. The second case explores the reaction of “two old Bushmen” who responded with songs
and dance when shown copies of rock art images. The transcribed song and its possible meaning
suggests that it may have inspired the Zulu song Mbube, also known as Wimoweh and The Lion
Sleeps, and thus shows continuities with later musical traditions. (197 words)
Interpretations of this art form have turned in the previous four decades towards a broadly spiritualist
approach and a this-world/other-world binary that has tended to isolate rock art from all other
regional cultural forms, such as music and dance, and from other technologies such as metallurgy
(blacksmithing, gold working, etc.). Instead, my aim in this essay is to bring the corpus that
comprises southern African rock art fully within the scope of southern African lifeways and
historical experience.
KEY
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In southern Africa, artisanal mining shows different patterns of exclusion and inclusion in a complex regional economy that involves skill and expertise, knowledge, movement of personnel, different legal regimes and the manner in which... more
In southern Africa, artisanal mining shows different patterns of exclusion and inclusion in a complex regional economy that involves skill and expertise, knowledge, movement of personnel, different legal regimes and the manner in which they are enforced, different types of mining and processing, and different underlying geologies. There is also a history. Of course, the principle economic and social exclusion in southern African mining is the exploitation of black African men in the large industrial gold and platinum mines, and diamond fields during the twentieth century, and the codification of this practice under Apartheid. This primary exclusion has been well documented in every history of southern Africa, and is not the concern here. The focus here is the archaeology, history and ethnography of indigenous, artisanal, small-scale mining, primarily in southern Africa. To begin the discussion, I outline a somewhat alternative history of mining in southern Africa and highlight what amounts to a distinctive ontology of the underground world and the processing of ore to metals.
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The failure of standard social science has been brought into focus by the unexpected election of Donald Trump, the vote for Brexit , but is also visible in a number of other areas such as the continued incidence of HIV and other socially... more
The failure of standard social science has been brought into focus by the unexpected election of Donald Trump, the vote for Brexit , but is also visible in a number of other areas such as the continued incidence of HIV and other socially transmitted diseases despite vast expenditure on prevention. Economists, business, and government regulation has failed to predict or control massive accumulations of wealth by individuals, globalised corporations, and sovereign wealth funds. What failed is the methodology: sampling strategies, polling, and statistical extrapolation according to standard sociological categories. Some of this failure can be ascribed to the methodological conservatism of the social sciences that cling to the theoretical visions and methodologies from the nineteenth century. Today, it would appear that a different form of social order is quietly emerging: a different form of the ‘social’ composed of complex sets of interpersonal relations that structure many forms of transactions but which remain essentially opaque to the social sciences. This presents us with a newly powerful social ontology: the network, the ‘social polymer’, or web. We face politicians and pundits, social scientists among them, who simply do not have the means to understand, or to even name this new ‘reality’. They have in common a destructive, revolutionary conservatism. They simply don’t understand “what is going on here”, and seek both solace and solutions from a vision of a world that no longer exists. But all of this may be less a political manoeuvre than a desperate grab at comprehension even as the meanings of borders and categories, markets, institutions, and identities slip from their—and our—grasp.
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This just the cover for my forthcoming book. I like it, so I'm posting it as a teaser for the whole book that will appear in April (?)
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One of the most remarkable features of the Southern African archaeological record is the presence of thousands of mining sites, and tens of thousands of dry-stone structures. Numerous forges and smelting sites were used to make large... more
One of the most remarkable features of the Southern African archaeological record is the presence of thousands of mining sites, and tens of thousands of dry-stone structures. Numerous forges and smelting sites were used to make large amounts of metal and metal objects of iron, gold and copper. I argue here that together these constitute an industry that produced a profusion of beads, amulets, and other small metal objects. These circulated as ritual and trade goods within a wide regional network of exchange. (While it has been argued that gold was exported, there a very few goods that could plausibly have been received in exchange.) Throughout the period that is called the " Iron Age " —based on analogies with European history—southern African societies were small and mobile. They practised a range of economies that included hunting, gathering, scavenging, sheep and goat herding, cattle pastoralism, and agriculture. But other economic activities must have also included trading, provision of ritual and healing services, dispute resolution and management of courts, some organised raiding, defence and attack, together with craft production of ceramics, clothing, decorative items, hair dressing, leather tanning, and other activities. Among these was also mining, ore processing, smelting, and metalsmithing. Historians and archaeologists of
Research Interests: Landscape Archaeology, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Traditional Medicine, Cultural Landscapes, Southern Africa, and 12 moreExtractive industries (Economic Anthropology), Mining, Archaeology of Mining, Cultural Anthropology, Southern African History, Glass Beads, Anthropology Southern Africa, Mapungubwe, Gold mining, Stone Circles, Extractive metallurgy of gold, and Sangomas
One of the most remarkable features of the Southern African archaeological record is the presence of thousands of mining sites, and tens of thousands of dry-stone structures. Numerous forges and smelting sites were used to make large... more
One of the most remarkable features of the Southern African archaeological record is the presence of thousands of mining sites, and tens of thousands of dry-stone structures. Numerous forges and smelting sites were used to make large amounts of metal and metal objects of iron, gold and copper. I argue here that together these constitute an industry that produced a profusion of beads, amulets, and other small metal objects. These circulated as ritual and trade goods within a wide regional network of exchange. (While it has been argued that gold was exported, there a very few goods that could plausibly have been received in exchange.) Throughout the period that is called the " Iron Age " —based on analogies with European history—southern African societies were small and mobile. They practised a range of economies that included hunting, gathering, scavenging, sheep and goat herding, cattle pastoralism, and agriculture. But other economic activities must have also included trading, provision of ritual and healing services, dispute resolution and management of courts, some organised raiding, defence and attack, together with craft production of ceramics, clothing, decorative items, hair dressing, leather tanning, and other activities. Among these was also mining, ore processing, smelting, and metalsmithing. Historians and archaeologists of
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This is simply the front matter from my 1980 book Space, Time and Culture among the Iraqw of Nothern Tanzania. Preface, Acknowledgements, Orthographic Note, & Introduction.
This book is about the Iraqw, or Wambulu, people of the Arusha region in North-Central Tanzania. It is not simply a description, however, for I am seeking to develop a clear approach to the nature and potentialities of space in social... more
This book is about the Iraqw, or Wambulu, people of the Arusha region in North-Central Tanzania. It is not simply a description, however, for I am seeking to develop a clear approach to the nature and potentialities of space in social organization. The thesis of this study is that under certain historical conditions, an ideology of spatial relations may serve to organize sociopolitical action and cultural forms in a technologically simple and egalitarian society. Considerable attention has already been given by anthropologists to the way in which ideologies of descent and kinship, patrimonial authority or chiefly hierarchy, fulfil the organizational function in other African societies such as the Nuer, Tallensi, Baganda, or Swazi. For the Iraqw, however, categories and relations of space, not kin or chiefship, underlie all social organization above that of the domestic group. It is the principles of spatial order-not principles of hierarchy, "shared substance," or economy-that integrate independent single-family homesteads, the smallest productive and reproductive units, into larger social and political units. These principles, which are given expression in ritual and oral performances, create social space and provide the parameters for political action. This amounts to a cosmology that defines political means and ends by placing both Iraqw people and others who surround them in a valued social universe. The cultural categories of space that emerge in this study of the Iraqw provide the framework for the organization and evaluation of social action. They, therefore, create polarities and tensions that generate social processes and that lead to historical changes.
Chapter 1 begins with a brief overview of the Iraqw (or WaMbulu in KiSwahili, not to be confused with the country Iraq with which it has no connection) people and present the central thesis that while the Iraqw have little in the way of explicit political order, the ritual organisation of space serves this function. I proceed to a discussion of concepts of space, sovereignty, and territory according to earlier scholars such as H S Maine, Morgan, Durkheim, van Gennep, Simmel, and others up to the 1970s. The key problem emerging from this overview is "the investigation of the historical conditions that produce particular relationships between a community and the way in which it chooses to define the space it occupies." (p.12) The key criterion was the way space was "differentiated and valued so that it represented the differentiation and evaluation of social groups. Introducing the book, show how a small set of basic postulates about the order of space are manifested in politics, the conduct of ritual, the "conditions of appropriateness" for certain types of discourse" (14). Territory, in this case, is the symbolic differentiation of space (topologization) and the appropriation of this topologized space into a structure of meaning by attributing shared and public values to places, directions, and boundaries such that it may be graphically, cognitively, or ritually represented as a coherent and enduring image." I argue that the organizing ideology is constituted on the basis of an elementary topology-a systematic set of ideas about spatial categories and relationships such that in this egalitarian society, social order is primarily ritual order, and that ritual, therefore, is politics for the Iraqw.
Chapter 1 begins with a brief overview of the Iraqw (or WaMbulu in KiSwahili, not to be confused with the country Iraq with which it has no connection) people and present the central thesis that while the Iraqw have little in the way of explicit political order, the ritual organisation of space serves this function. I proceed to a discussion of concepts of space, sovereignty, and territory according to earlier scholars such as H S Maine, Morgan, Durkheim, van Gennep, Simmel, and others up to the 1970s. The key problem emerging from this overview is "the investigation of the historical conditions that produce particular relationships between a community and the way in which it chooses to define the space it occupies." (p.12) The key criterion was the way space was "differentiated and valued so that it represented the differentiation and evaluation of social groups. Introducing the book, show how a small set of basic postulates about the order of space are manifested in politics, the conduct of ritual, the "conditions of appropriateness" for certain types of discourse" (14). Territory, in this case, is the symbolic differentiation of space (topologization) and the appropriation of this topologized space into a structure of meaning by attributing shared and public values to places, directions, and boundaries such that it may be graphically, cognitively, or ritually represented as a coherent and enduring image." I argue that the organizing ideology is constituted on the basis of an elementary topology-a systematic set of ideas about spatial categories and relationships such that in this egalitarian society, social order is primarily ritual order, and that ritual, therefore, is politics for the Iraqw.