Research/Projects

Research is a fundamental element of our work and teaching practice. The Department hosts a range of research projects in the areas of health, identity, gender, popular arts, technologies, violence, and environment. Students and staff participate in and organise conferences and workshops, collaborating with international scholars and partner institutions across Africa. The following are some of the on-going research engagements in the Department. 

Research on Men and Masculinities 

This research platform focuses on men and masculinities in African settings. We seek to understand men’s experiences in society, their constructions of masculinity, and the socio-economic circumstances they face. We are interested in understanding what it means to be a man in Africa today; how masculinities are lived, contested and transform through time; how particular circumstances and historical conjunctures shape men’s behaviour and choices. 

To answer these questions, we conduct in-depth ethnographic studies and attempt to develop grounded theories about men and masculinities from the African continent. Our research team explores matters related to gender, masculinities, sexuality, health, violence, sport, and fatherhood. The Department offers students intense training in gender, masculinity and sexuality through a semester-long module covering contemporary theories, concepts, and methodological approaches to the study of gender, as well as the decolonial feminist theories of gender. 

There is a dearth of black African scholars researching on masculinities, and this is an issue that needs to be addressed as an urgent matter. Not only that but most African scholars rely primarily on theories of gender developed in the Global North. In such regard, our research project encourages more African-centred decolonial approaches to gender studies to fight this perennial problem of ‘academic dependency’ on the Global North. The programme aims at generating theories and knowledge that are African-centred and will allow for relevant interventions in African settings. In so doing, we hope to form and nurture a future generation of African scholars and encourage the production of innovative, alternative understandings of masculinities in Africa.

Contact Person
Sakhumzi Mfecane
Email: mfecane@uwc.ac.za

Human-Plant Interfaces

Plants play a vital role in the survival and well-being of the planet. Plants are everywhere and are fundamental for human life, yet we do not often acknowledge their presence. Can anthropology study plants as ‘beings’? What does a plant do, know, and sense?

In this research group, we turn our attention more closely to plants, conceptually and methodologically. To do so, to ‘see’ plants as culturally informed, affects how we can make sense of, theorise and investigate plants and their worldings. We interrogate the interrelatedness of people and plants, and we consider plants’ sociality and the constant ‘becoming with’ humans, ecologies, and climate. Analysing the plants and their vegetal subjectivity and ontology necessitates a decentering from the human and adopting a focus on the multi-species, the ‘other-than-human’ or ‘more-than-human’ — plants, animals, landscapes, objects, and spirits.

Current trends in anthropology, geography, philosophy, and other disciplines have questioned human exceptionalism and emphasised the interrelatedness of humans with more-than-humans. Such studies draw attention to the differing agencies and lifeworlds of non-humans. Rethinking plants may thus offer alternative ethical and political engagements with our humanity and shared world.

Our research, funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF), develops around three main aspects:

1. The radical interconnectedness and agentivity of plants — composed of a myriad of active phenomena, including practices, plants, landscapes, beings, spirits, and people;
2. The nature of knowledge in human-plant interfaces — we have looked into the many practices in which plants are interwoven: healing, rituals, artefacts. Our work challenges the orthodox assumptions about knowledge transfers in plant knowledge and shows that plants are located in networks of practitioners, ecologies, sites, and philosophies; and
3. The development of new methodological approaches to study plants in all their relationality, and to write about them: planthropologies, ‘herb-I-graphy’, plantography.

In 2016, the research group organised the INSPIRE 2016 Green Medicine Symposium funded by the NRF in which the work of colleagues and postgraduate students was showcased. The outcome of the workshop was published in the special issue of Anthropology Southern Africa: Human and plant interfaces: relationality, knowledge, and practices.

Contact Person
William F. Ellis
Email: wellis@uwc.ac.za
 

Popular Culture: Aesthetics and Politics

Pop culture? Students often seem surprised when we introduce them to the focus of popular culture and global society in the third-year course on contemporary cultural issues. They are not alone in this. Until recently, scholars have been ambivalent about popular culture as a serious topic in the social sciences. Some doubted that researching popular culture, performance, and media would come up with relevant research findings. Don’t we face serious problems in a society like South Africa’s? Recently, however, popular culture studies have become an increasingly significant interest of contemporary interdisciplinary research in the humanities in Africa, and particularly so in anthropology.

So, what are we interested in? Popular culture is key for what social scientists call the “politics of difference”. This has been the focus of projects in our Department over the past few years, sponsored by UWC research funds, the NRF and the South Africa-Netherlands Programme for Alternatives in Development (SANPAD). We, along with other local and international anthropologists, have employed popular cultural expressions as a lens into the revival of cultural and religious identities in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent. 

Research by staff and postgraduate students in the Department has investigated various religious and cultural repertoires and new technologies, which have been observed to mediate identities and categories of social, cultural, gender, and generational difference. One of our earlier case studies focused on Nollywood movies and their audiences in South Africa and Namibia. Some of us have been researching rap and hip-hop and other genres of music. Others have focused on theatre and performance. Some of our postgraduate students even completed fascinating studies on Muslim fashion and the Cape Town Carnival.

More recently, our research has begun to investigate the aesthetics and politics of popular culture in movements of popular protest. Popular cultural expressions have played an important role in recent social movements and protests by students and youth, especially, such as the #FeesMustFall movement in South Africa. Current research considers the aesthetics, evocative signs, and participatory embodied performance of the 21st-century protest movements. The articulation of images, songs, poetry, humour, satire, and dramatic performances is characteristic for recent movements. 

Together with digital social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the popular cultural forms and aesthetics through which the movements express their views are critical for understanding transformative political processes of mobilisation. An application for a broader project on popular culture, digital social media and popular protest movements is currently being prepared.

Contact Person
Heike Becker
Email: hbecker@uwc.ac.za
 

Research in Anthropology of Health

This is an interdisciplinary programme focusing on the social factors and cultural context of health in its teaching and on the intersecting fields of knowledge and experience in its research to improve the health of South Africans. The programme is premised on the idea that opportunities for interdisciplinary research collaboration in the health field are both a macro-level concerning the sociocultural foundations of health and a micro-level concerning identifying ‘proximal’ risk factors such as individual lifestyles in terms of food consumption and medicinal herbs in the management of diseases. 

The following research fields are included under the Anthropology of Health programme: 

1. Men’s health and masculinities: This research niche aims to explore men’s engagements with their health. Its adoptive, decolonial, African-centred approach seeks to go beyond western feminist framings of men’s health. The aim is not only to study men’s health but also contribute to the government and NGO initiatives aimed at improving men’s engagements with their health. 
2. Plant medicines. 
3. Food studies: A growing area of research specialisation and our Department seeks to develop this research niche through collaborative research with postgraduate studies and other departments within UWC and beyond. 

Contact Person
Sakhumzi Mfecane
Email: smfecane@uwc.ac.za

Hameedah Parker
Email: hpartker@uwc.ac.za