Steven Van Wolputte- PhD in Social & Cultural Anthropology
- Professor at KU Leuven
Steven Van Wolputte
- PhD in Social & Cultural Anthropology
- Professor at KU Leuven
About
112
Publications
57,817
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Introduction
Steven Van Wolputte is affiliated to the dept. of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences of the KU Leuven, Belgium. Based on his fieldwork in Namibia, his current research interests are in emerging forms of life - new social forms as a response to ecological, political and social changes.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
September 2004 - present
Position
- Professor
Description
- Research coordinator Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa (IARA); vice dean internationalization Faculty of Social Sciences, KU Leuven
September 2010 - April 2012
September 2004 - August 2011
Position
- Professor (Assistant)
Description
- Course holder of several graduate and postgraduate courses on contemporary anthropological theories, political anthropology, anthropology of the body, world ethnography, fieldwork, and others
Publications
Publications (112)
In Namibia, early missionaries among the Herero were intrigued by the important role of the matriclan, as it did not fit their ideals of a pastoral society. Despite their obsession with female sexuality, metonymically expressed in concerns over political organisation and kinship, female agency did not feature in their considerations. At first sight...
This case study probes the close link between locality and musical production. The setting is Opuwo, a small city in northern Namibia, notorious for its many bars. Here the music of a local band, Bullet ya Kaoko, provides the soundtrack to the quest for belonging and identity that takes place in the marginal space constituted by these bars and pubs...
In the mid-1930s the amateur French ethnographer and filmmaker Bernard de Colmont ventured into the mountainous state of Chiapas to study the Lacandón people and broadcast their way of life to a curious European public. Considered a “lost tribe,” the Lacandón were thought to be the closest living relatives of the ancient Maya.
De Colmont became a...
In the spring of 2023, the ninth European Conference on African Studies (ECAS) took place in Cologne. Though not unexpected (or unusual) this event sparked critical comments and questions. As the organisers, we understand and appreciate this criticism. We, therefore, felt the need to respond to at least some of them, partly because we also asked ou...
Graphic anthropology
This article explores the life histories of two Namibians who grew up in SWAPO's exile camps in Angola and their ‘futuring’ trajectories once they returned home to Namibia after independence. Presenting these actors’ life histories of navigating Namibian society helps challenge a one‐sided economic interpretation of precariousness. More critical th...
This chapter is part of an ongoing research ('CityLabs') focusing on the role that so-called makerspaces and hackerspaces (may) play in developing new forms of bottom-up urbanity.
This essay is about how people “mask” whenever they portray someone or something: masking is indeed a crucial feature of every effort at portraying someone, however realist or naturalist that effort may be. A mask, then, is not just a set of lines on a sheet of paper, not just layers of colourful paint on canvas, or not just the shapes the sculptor...
Uncertainty is a central theme in the illness experiences of older cancer patients throughout their illness trajectory. Mishel’s popular theory on uncertainty during illness approaches uncertainty as an outcome and is characterized by the patient’s inability to find meaning in illness events. This study used the concepts of liminality and subjuncti...
This story is about desire paths, about how people only rarely follow the designs imposed on them. You know, when a landscape architect or urban planner develops a park or something, within a few days you see that people take shortcuts, that they create their own bypasses and inroads. They simply don’t always walk where they are planned or supposed...
This little piece is part of a special section on "the fieldwork playlist", and offers a brief reflection on musicking, fieldwork and phenomenology.
Mattia Fumanti , The Politics of Distinction: African elites from colonialism to liberation in a Namibian frontier town. Canon Pyon, UK: Sean Kingston Publishing (hb £65 – 978 1 907774 46 1). 2016, ix + 311 pp. - Volume 87 Issue 4 - Steven Van Wolputte
Twenty-five years after the inauguration of the first President of an independent Namibia, we at the Journal of Namibian Studies thought it was time to pause, take stock and look ahead. Of course, we were not the only ones. Throughout the year, celebrations and impassioned speeches have marked the anniversary. Indeed, praise is merited. Namibia has...
GREGOR DOBLER , Traders and Trade in Colonial Ovamboland, 1925–1990: elite formation and the politics of consumption under indirect rule and apartheid. Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien (pb £22.95 – 978 3 905758 40 5). 2014, 248 pp. - Volume 85 Issue 4 - STEVEN VAN WOLPUTTE
In Kaoko, north-west Namibia, contagious bovine pleuropneumonia was the background to the local experience of colonialism and South African rule, a period that is locally remembered for the smell of putrefaction spread by animals bearing the disease. This article investigates what this smell tells us about the particular modalities of colonial rule...
This chapter presents an anthropological case-study that focuses on the artisanal and small-scale gold mines in Makongolosi, a small mining town in Mbeya Region, south-west Tanzania. Starting from the observation that most studies on mining are male-centred, this chapter argues that evolutions at the international level, together with institutional...
In October 2013, the editors of this special issue conducted an interview with Rosalind Hackett, one of the pioneering scholars in the field of media and religion. The interview took place via email and consisted of five questions that address the discussion in this special issue of Social Compass and attempt to look into the future of religion and...
From the introduction:
This volume is on borders, and concentrates on the marked influence borders and boundaries, whether “real” or “imaginary,” have on the lives of those who happen to live near them or are involved in making them.
This perspective is the point of departure for the seven contributions collected here, whether they look at how p...
This volume is on borders, and concentrates on the marked
influence borders and boundaries, whether “real” or “imaginary,”
have on the lives of those who happen to live near them
or are involved in making them. This is the point of departure for the seven
contributions collected here, whether they look at how political
and symbolic borders took con...
The colonial encounter in the northern Kunene Region (or Kaoko) in north-west
Namibia was epitomized in the events associated with the coming of Contagious
Bovine Pleuropneumonia (CBPP) to the region. This contribution is mainly based on
archival sources. It probes into the genealogy of a disease that made animals
‘putrefy from the inside out’ and...
The introduction to the special issue draws together theoretical and analytical strands that run through the four papers. As the four papers illustrate, devotion and mobility, belief and trajectory, go hand in hand. The main argument is that the religious movements discussed in this special issue are not local phenomena attempting to transcend fixe...
The research explored the link between type II Female Genital Cutting (FGC) and sexual functioning. This thesis summary thus draws from an exploratory ethnographic field study carried out among the Maasai people of Kenya where type II FGC is still being practiced. A purposely sample consisting of 28 women and 19 men, within the ages of 15-80 years...
Female Genital Cutting (FGC), also known as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and Female Circumcision (FC), continues to be a prevalent practice in many parts of the world and especially in Africa. This is somewhat perplexing given the concerted efforts aimed at eradicating this practice. This article argues that the perpetuation of FGC is due to the...
Female Genital Cutting (FGC), also known as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and Female Circumcision (FC), continues to be a prevalent practice in many parts of the world and especially in Africa. This is somewhat perplexing given the concerted efforts aimed at eradicating this practice. This article argues that the perperuation of FGC is due to the...
This article revisits the open debate regarding the link between Female Genital Cutting (FGC) and Female Sexual Function (FSF). In particular, it considers how the practice, both as an operative procedure involving the alteration of external female genitalia, and culturally sanctioned maturation ritual, affects subjects' sexual function and capacit...
http://books.google.be/books/about/Beer_in_Africa.html?id=-jqRkS-3fRQC&redir_esc=y
Jesuit Books in the Low Countries, 1540-1773. A Selection from the Maurits Sabbe Library, (Documenta Libraria, XXXVIII) , Paul Begheyn, Bernard Deprez, Rob Faesen, Leo Kenis (eds.) Leuven: Maurits Sabbe Library; Leuven-Paris-Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2009
De paginanummers van uw artikel zouden moeten correct zijn. Daar komen inleidende pp. bij en index...
This article takes a political ecological stance to investigate the close relationship between local politics and water in the northern Kunene Region, Namibia. Combining archival and ethnographic evidence, it illustrates that even under apartheid colonial rule and ‘material development’ were subject to negotiation between different parties involved...
In many ways, nomadic and pastoral communities live at the fringes of the contemporary nation-state: literally, since for historical and political reasons they often inhabit its border regions; and metaphorically, as they often find themselves at a considerable distance from the seats of power and decision-making. These communities also occupy a ra...
During the past twenty years the human body evolved from a rather marginal social fact into a notion of central concern to current social and cultural anthropology. But recent studies question the idea of the body as a given physical entity. They focus on the experience or threat of finiteness, limitation, and vulnerability and also raise doubts re...
This article concentrates on the ambiguities and contradictions in the colonial archive on North West Namibia (a region also known as Kaokoland), and on the way these were exploited by the "stubborn traditionalists" inhabiting it. Its aim is to place the emergence of postcolonial identities and subjectivities in the region in an historical perspect...
Van Wolputte, Steven (2004). Power to da cattle. Cows and counterworks in Himbaland, North-West Namibia. In Steven Van Wolputte and Gustaaf Verswijver (eds) Tervuren: Royal Museum for Central Africa, pp 201-231
Herding communities in Africa take up a ‘special’ place in modernist imagery. Once confined to the outskirts of the colonial land- and mindscape, nowadays they are found at the fringes of the contemporary nation-state: modernist discourse, quite literally, ‘has no place’ for herders and nomads.
This collection of five essays focuses on cultural t...
