Steven Robins

Whose Modernity? Indigenous Modernities and Land Claims after Apartheid

This article questions some of the key assumptions of post-development and anti-development critics such as Arturo Escobar and Wolfgang Sachs, who tend to prescribe a puritanical and principled rejection of ‘exogenous development’ that does not necessarily reflect the needs and desires of the beneficiaries of development. Drawing on fieldwork research on land claims in Northern Cape and Northern Provinces (South Africa), the author argues that these beneficiaries tend to deploy hybrid and highly selective and situational responses to development interventions. These hybrid responses can be regarded as indigenous modernities. Development packages are resisted, embraced, reshaped or accommodated depending on the specific content and context. The author also questions James Fergusons conclusion that depoliticizing development discourses inevitably buttresses bureaucratic state power. Rather, the fieldwork findings suggest that state-led development is often an extremely risky business that can undermine the legitimacy and authority of governments. In addition, in many parts of the developing world, it is the retreat of the neo-liberal state, rather than ‘the tyranny of development’, that poses the most serious threat to household livelihood strategies and economic survival. The case studies discussed here suggest that responses to development are usually neither wholesale endorsements nor radical rejections of modernity. Even when resisting and subverting development ideas and practices, people do not generally do so on the basis of either radical populist politics or in defence of pristine and authentic local cultural traditions.

Breaking out of the straitjacket of tradition: The politics and rhetoric of ‘development’ in Zimbabwe

Abstract To account for the failure of state-driven development projects, policy makers and planners have tended to blame communal farmers for adhering to outmoded traditional values and practices. Ethnographic data from fieldwork in Matabeleland during 1990–1992 shows that far from being trapped within the straightjacket of tradition, villagers opposing the project were intimately enmeshed within modern discourses and practices. They were by no means trapped within a pristine traditional worldview, even though at times they drew on such discourse to challenge disruptive and unpopular state interventions. The findings challenge the ways in which an imaginary “great divide” between tradition and modernity has functioned in development discourses to account for local opposition to top-down, centralized bureaucratic state planning and development.

‘Can't forget, can't remember’: reflections on the cultural afterlife of the TRC1

Abstract This paper focuses on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as an ongoing process of collective memory and public culture. Rather than concentrating on the actual TRC hearings themselves, it focuses on artistic and cultural mediations of this process. It explores the ways in which the South African artist Sue Williamson has engaged with the contradictions, ambiguities and silences of the TRC process. Williamsons work on the TRC, which was exhibited in the South African National Gallery in 2004 as part of the Decade of Democracy Exhibition, reflects upon the ‘grey zones’ and limits of the TRCs nation building efforts. The paper is divided into three sections. The first section locates the TRC, as a state ritual of nation building, within the broader anthropological literature on ritual. The second section situates Sue Williamsons work within academic debates on the TRC. The final section focuses on Williamsons work in the context of the role of museums and art galleries as spaces of nation building.