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Burying SM: The Politics of Knowledge and the Sociology of Power in Africa
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review
Abstract
Cohen. David William and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo. Burying SM: The Politics of Knowledge and the Sociology of Power in Africa, Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann; London: James Currey, 1992.
... In the case of Kenya in the 1950s Bates argues that the withdrawal by the successful was punished by the upsurge of violence we know as Mau Mau, as the unsuccessful fought to reclaim what they saw as their rights. A more recent instance of the same process of penalising those among the successful who wish to exit the group was the legal contest over the burial of a successful emigrant from Western Kenya (Cohen, 1992). The community claimed the right to bury the body locally, despite a will to the contrary, and the Kenyan High Court upheld community rights. ...
This article explores how moral perceptions of HIV/AIDS-related illness and death in rural Tanzania are related to social and cultural practices of disease interpretation, patient caring and burial in the context of rural-urban migration and HIV/AIDS. Drawing on anthropological discussions of the relationship between death, social reproduction, and HIV/AIDS I argue that moral discourses and practices surrounding the epidemic in Northwest Tanzania are intimately intertwined with local notions of order and disorder. Furthermore, they are tied to individual and collective concerns about the implications that the high numbers of premature deaths among young men and women are perceived to have on the continuity of whole families and communities. Focusing on the case studies of several young HIV-infected women and men who finally died from the consequences of AIDS I show that the infected persons themselves, as well as their relatives, draw on a wide range of—sometimes mutually contradictory—strategies in dealing with the disease in cultural, religious, or moral terms (including the reference to witchcraft or the violation of ritual prescriptions). In conclusion, I argue that the various strategies and practices surrounding HIV/AIDS-related illnesses and deaths have become an integral part of the negotiation of kinship relations in rural Tanzania, as well as of the moral state of "modern" society in general.
This article primarily concerns the intersection of the changing management of death with the problems and possibilities presented by the growing mobility of the African, and specifically Xhosa-speaking, population in South Africa from the latter half of the twentieth century to the present day. I am interested in how shifts in the practices and beliefs around death are mediated by individuals, households and businesses who have an historical affinity towards movement, particularly across what has been called the ‘rural–urban nexus’. In what ways has this more mobile orientation influenced the perception of rites and responsibilities surrounding death? And how have more mobile ‘ways of dying’ in turn created new subjectivities and new ways in which to imagine relations between the living and the dead? I argue that African funeral directors based in Cape Town and the rural areas of the Eastern Cape – a steadily more numerous and prominent group of entrepreneurs – are well-placed to shape these processes, through their role as cultural mediators and technological innovators, and their particular emphasis on maintaining a flow of bodies (both dead and alive) between rural and urban areas. I focus on two aspects of contemporary South African funerals – embalming and exhumations – that are suggestive of how the migration dynamic, and the continuing demands from mobile mourners for innovations via the funeral industry, have encouraged new perceptions of and relations to the dead body.
Why did a conflict between a majority of settlers (Konkomba), claiming equal citizenship, and a minority of autochtons (Nanumba) produce both Ghana's largest incidents of ethnic cleansing and a subsequent ominous calm? Analysing the post-1996 peace accord Konkomba/Nanumba coexistence against their violent past and in Ghana's political context as one of Africa's promising nations, this ethnography shows that the conflict has two forms. One is sovereign violence and another is a persistent silence in relation to legalistic speeches. Breaking out of these forms may not so much require a reconciliation, as peace brokers proposed, but a political compromise.
Martijn Wienia studied Cultural Anthropology, Development Sociology and African Studies at Leiden University. Currently, he works as policy officer with the WOTRO Science for Global Development division of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) in The Hague.