The role of trust in long-distance trade has long been a topic of scholarly inquiry and debate amongst economists, sociologists and historians. Much of this literature hinges on the social, legal and economic structures that undergird – if not obviate – the concept of trust.
Governing Islam traces the colonial roots of contemporary struggles between Islam and secularism in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The book uncovers the paradoxical workings of colonial laws that promised to separate secular and religious spheres, but instead fostered their vexed entanglement.
This paper proposes the oceanic south to navigate various conceptions of southness, while registering a more turbulent alterity and materiality than they sometimes admit.
The idea of a specific configuration called an “African Political Theology” (henceforth APT) raises a number of interrelated questions centred on definition (nomenclature), tradition (relationships), and development (sustainability).
Suspicion. The term evokes so many moods, so much affect, used as ways of reading the world: uncertainty, fear, anxiety, doubt, and the unknown. But also their opposites: faith, trust, confidence, certainty, the known and knowable. Is suspicion the defining feature of our times?
[An extract in place of an abstract:] How then might one talk about the ‘reading’ that Customs official undertook from an OOO or speculative realist position? Most obviously, officials were object-oriented.
Over the last decade, the Wits School of Clinical Medicine has increased efforts to develop a new generation of doctors who produce research, or who are at least research-literate.
At the beginning of the 1930s, the ANC, the ICU and CPSA were in disarray, and a small group of activist-intellectuals looked to new sources of inspiration in their struggles to liberate South Africa’s oppressed masses.
In democratic situations, "activism" and "mobilization" tend to be almost synonymous with "challenging". The analysis of student militancy in authoritarian situation in Cameroon calls that into question.
What do we do with the relics of race science in South Africa? My research focuses on the Bushman lifecasts currently housed in Iziko Museum in Cape Town. Dozens of casts were made in the first half of the 20th Century with the aim of classifying different races, specifically Bushmen.
In this paper I want to examine the reasons for the impressively consistent disinterest in African economics that runs through the four styles of comparative political economy that the journal Economy & Society – the most important forum for comparative economic sociology – has pu
Nostalgia has become an apt concept to elicit the examination of traces of the past upon the present. In this presentation, I am concerned with a particular kind of nostalgia, or, what I call, here, urban nostalgia.
Cape Town boasts roughly two dozen sacred Muslim tombs, known as kramats, which mark the resting places of pious, 17th and 18th century exiles from around the Indian Ocean basin.
Nations, as Isabel Hofmeyr long ago observed, are forged, in part, from words. Many, perhaps most, of those words are in the nature of history, stories of the past that provide explanation, justification, a charter for present arrangements. What are the politics of this process?
Partial or complete absence of the melanin pigment in the skin, eyes, and hair shape varied cultural expressions and labels denoting albinos or persons with albinism (PWA).
It is well-established in the South African historiography that the apartheid government adopted a new “language of legitimation” (Posel, 1984) in the aftermath of the 1976 student uprisings.
This paper examines the various types of experimentation that are built into the practice of oncology within Rwanda’s developing national infrastructure, with a focus on historicizing malignancy there by examining trajectories of research and treatment from the early 20th century until the
In this paper, which draws from a book manuscript in progress on feminist/queer politics in India, I show how ‘activism’ is informed by multiple rationalities and techniques of governing the self and other.
This paper examines the recent history of population registration and credit surveillance in Kenya. It argues that the events taking place there are important because they mark out the development of new kinds of administratively created informational collateral which, for the first time, m
South Africa’s legal system forms part of the lifeline of its democratic dispensation and is the foundation upon which it depends. It is crucial for social demands for service delivery, ensuring protection and general relief from the state for civil society.
