Isak Niehaus

Death before dying: Understanding AIDS stigma in the South African Lowveld.

This article explores some of the social and cultural factors that have undermined effective treatment and care for persons living with AIDS in South Africa. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bushbuckridge, I observe that AIDS stigma has been both pervasive and intense. However, contrary to conventional wisdom, I argue that the association of AIDS with sexual promiscuity has not been the major source of its stigma. Instead, I suggest that denial, silence, fear and fatalism have stemmed from the construction of persons living with AIDS as being ‘dead before dying’, and from their symbolic location in the anomalous domain betwixt-and-between life and death. This article also challenges the notion that older cultural practices in the folk domain impede an effective biomedical response to AIDS. I see the construction of persons with AIDS as ‘dead before dying’ as an outcome of the manner in which biomedical discourses have articulated with religious and popular ones. In this process the notion that AIDS is a fatal terminal illness carries as much symbolic weight as the popular association of persons suffering from AIDS with lepers and zombies. * I wish to thank my informants, as well as my research assistants, Eliazaar Mohlala and Eric Thobela, for their help. I also acknowledge valuable comments by Cecil Helman, Adam Kuper, Jean La Fontaine, Conny Mathebula, Erik Seathre, Enos Sikauli, Jacqueline Solway and Jonathan Stadler.

Dr. Wouter Basson, Americans, and wild beasts: men's conspiracy theories of HIV/AIDS in the South African Lowveld.

ABSTRACT This article investigates HIV/AIDS as a cosmological problem among Northern Sotho and Tsonga-speakers in the South African lowveld. Based on in-depth interviews with 70 informants (35 men and 35 women) I show how the attribution of blame for HIV/AIDS articulates gendered concerns. I suggest that women blamed men and envious nurses for spreading the virus and that these discourses expressed womens ideological association with the domestic domain. By contrast, men invoked conspiracy theories, blaming translocal agents—such as Dr. Wouter Basson, Americans, soldiers, and governments—for the pandemic. I suggest that these theories are informed by mens humiliating experiences of job losses and deindustrialization in the global labour market. My discussion highlights the need for HIV/AIDS interventions in order to address not only womens oppression but also mens gendered concerns.

Maternal Incest as Moral Panic: Envisioning Futures without Fathers in the South African Lowveld

During 2008, rumours about revolting incestuous encounters between sons and their mothers circulated in the Bushbuckridge municipality of the South African lowveld. This article views these rumours as expressing moral panic, paying particular attention to the historical contexts of their emergence and circulation, and to their temporal orientation. I locate these rumours in the periphery of South Africas de-industrialising economy, marked by increased unemployment and criminality among men and by a growing prominence of women-headed households. They express a regressive temporalisation and pessimistic vision, not of development, progress and civilisation, but rather of deterioration and de-civilisation. Through the alleged act of incest, sons who engage in crime usurp the authority of fathers who once produced value in strategic industries and mines. As such the rumours envision a dystopia marked by the ‘death of the father’ and chaotic disorder without morality and law.

Gendered Endings: Narratives of Male and Female Suicides in the South African Lowveld

Durkheim’s classical theory of suicide rates being a negative index of social solidarity downplays the salience of gendered concerns in suicide. But gendered inequalities have had a negative impact: worldwide significantly more men than women perpetrate fatal suicides. Drawing on narratives of 52 fatal suicides in Bushbuckridge, South Africa, this article suggests that Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘symbolic violence’ and ‘masculine domination’ provide a more appropriate framework for understanding this paradox. I show that the thwarting of investments in dominant masculine positions have been the major precursor to suicides by men. Men tended to take their own lives as a means of escape. By contrast, women perpetrated suicide to protest against the miserable consequences of being dominated by men. However, contra the assumption of Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’, the narrators of suicide stories did reflect critically upon gender constructs.

Treatment literacy, therapeutic efficacy, and antiretroviral drugs: Notes from Bushbuckridge, South Africa

Health activists often see the uptake of antiretroviral drugs and adherence to antiretroviral treatment as the outcome of ‘treatment literacy.’ Organizations have invested considerable resources into educating the public in conventional scientific understandings of HIV and AIDS. Drawing on the results of fieldwork in South Africa and the life history of a man living with AIDS, I highlight the complex and unstable relationship that exists between therapeutic literacy and treatment efficacy. Factors that have little to do with treatment literacy have impacted upon uptake and adherence. These include a lack of political support, stigma generated by labelling, access to social welfare, and gender constructs. Moreover, in situations of medical pluralism, marked by multiple, constantly shifting understandings of sickness, it is very difficult to ascertain treatment literacy, and treatment literacy neither implies therapeutic efficacy, nor vice versa.

From Witch-hunts to Thief-hunts: On the Temporality of Evil in the South African Lowveld

Abstract This article explores continuities and changes between two forms of political mobilisation in the Bushbuckridge region of South Africa: violent attacks on alleged witches by young men during the late 1980s, and the punishment of thieves and rapists by anti-crime squads since 2009. I suggest that within local knowledge witches, thieves and rapists have important affinities. As ‘absented persons’ they perpetrate negative reciprocity and feed upon ordinary hardworking villagers. But significant differences become apparent when one considers the broader ‘tempo-politics’ of these kinds of political mobilisation. Activism occurred against witches towards the end of apartheid and was informed by ideologies of liberation and lineal progress. Witches were perceived as elders who were rooted in the past, and spread misfortune that obstructed the realisation of a brighter future. Fifteen years into democratic rule, the new ANC governments promises of prosperity lacked conviction. In this context, the crimes perpetrated by young thieves and rapists, provoked disquiet about succeeding generations and about the future. Anti-crime squads did not seek to inaugurate an age of bliss, but rather aimed to avert catastrophe.

Averting danger: taboos and bodily substances in the South African lowveld

In this article, I provide a new interpretation of taboos in the Southern African lowveld – particularly those pertaining to sex, pregnancy, abortion, death and widowhood. I argue that an appropriate starting point for understanding such taboos is to focus analytical attention on emic understandings of the body. Residents of Bushbuckridge in South Africa saw bodies as permeable, partible and constantly engaged in the transfer and exchange of aura, breath, blood and other fluids such as breast milk and semen. However, they believed the disorderly coalescence of substances from different bodies could, potentially, give rise to dangerous conditions of heat. For example, by engaging in multiple sexual liaisons with different partners, a man might place a vulnerable baby at risk of sickness. From this perspective, taboos provide a standardized technique of avoiding contaminative exposure and averting danger. In conclusion, I contemplate duality and multiplicity as a source of power, and how it might also explain the unease surrounding twins and the transgression of seniority rules. I suggest that the latter situations represent a multiplicity of social statuses.

Witchcraft as subtext: deep knowledge and the South African public sphere

Anthropologists have documented pervasive discourses about witchcraft in South Africa. The issue of witchcraft gained prominence during the latter years of apartheid when youths called ‘Comrades’ sought to cleanse rural villages in the north‐eastern provinces of witches. However, after apartheid witchcraft has only made a few brief incursions into the South African public sphere. I suggest that the absence of witchcraft in formal political discussions is not only due to censorship by a modernist government. It is also a product of the popular status of witchcraft as ‘deep knowledge’ or as a ‘subtext’ to social interaction in village and township settings. Accusations of witchcraft occur largely in private domestic spaces. Moreover, the ontological status of witchcraft as a mystical reality that transcends ordinary perception implies that it cannot meet standards of proof demanded by courts of law.

Marriage, Kinship and Childcare in the Aftermath AIDS: Rethinking Orphanhood in the South African Lowveld

In this article I consider the significance of marriage from the vantage point of children’s affiliation to domestic units during the era of South Africa’s AIDS pandemic. Drawing on multi-temporal fieldwork in Impalahoek, a village in the Bushbuckridge municipality of the South African lowveld, I suggest that AIDS-related diseases and deaths have led to the further erosion of marriage and to the greater absence of fathers in the lives of children. However, these changes have not precipitated a crisis in childcare. A survey of 22 households shows that orphaned children are generally cared for by related adults, such as matrikin and older female siblings. These arrangements are a product of a long history of improvisations, necessitated by experiences of oscillating labour migration. Moreover, they are facilitated by a diffusion of parental obligations, which is a central tenet of Northern Sotho and Shangaan models of kinship. I argue that in an economy of high unemployment and dependence upon state-instituted social security systems, marriage does not appear to be decisive to children’s welfare.

Warriors of the rainbow nation? South African rugby after apartheid

In this article I seek to account for the special appeal of rugby to white, particularly Afrikaner, men in South Africa, by treating rugby as a social phenomenon. I suggest that at a metaphorical level formulaic elements of the sport resonate with those of modern military and bureaucratic institutions that were so prominent in the history of Afrikaners. However, whilst rugby embodies historical memories, Afrikaner mens participation in the sport is also geared towards the present. With reference to the autobiographies of three Springbok rugby captains, I argue that participation in the sport has become an important arena for dramatizing their contribution to nation building. In the micro-world of rugby, players perceive themselves as warriors who lay their bodies on the line for a new democratic nation.