Thomas Cousins and Lindsey Reynolds
Let’s admit it: if any country knows about social engineering, it’s South Africa (although these days, there are plenty of others clamouring for that honour). And when it comes to the science of the social, anthropology has a pretty mixed reputation at best, and a whole lot to answer for at worst.
While some anthropologies have cultivated a tradition of self-criticism, the other human sciences are not guilt free for not having examined their histories. Whether you’re an anthropologist, an economist, a sociologist, a psychologist, or a political scientist, the descriptive and the normative lock horns at every level, top to bottom. When scientists make normative claims, they wade into dangerous moral and political territory. Whatever higher moral ground one claims on the grand moments in recent history, we’re all in the same boat now, in this moment we like to call “post-apartheid”.
For many people concerned about the well-being of those who live in South Africa, much of the appalling skew in the distribution of life chances can only be made sensible in terms of the long history of racialised exclusion. To the extent that constitutional democracy since 1994 has been able to change the grounds on which citizens can make claims on the state, and thus improve their lives, we can say that the new South Africa is radically different from the old.
However, to the extent that wealth, health, education, housing, and so on remain powerfully shaped by the social realities of race, one could argue that South Africa has not been able to break free from the logic of race. But how does one measure how much has actually changed?
And if we could agree on which measures were vital, what would they tell us about the meaning of the lives of those shaped by gender, age, mother tongue, nationality, and of course, race, among others categories? And if we could agree on what those lives meant, would we then agree on what we should do – to pose the question of policy? How would we move to redistribute the means of living well – the classical economic question? How would we tolerate our differences in values, aspirations, and hurts – the political question?
As social anthropologists at Stellenbosch University, we feel driven to ask these questions because of the ways in which knowledge produced by scholars at our institution has informed governmental practices in South Africa and more broadly. The ethical imperative to understand the history of anthropology at Stellenbosch, and the ideas it promulgated are clear: given its problematic complicity with colonial violence and the government of non-European Others, on what basis is the practice of anthropology to continue in 21st century South Africa? Does it have anything to contribute to understanding what it means to be human? How are concepts of “population” and “individual”, among a cacophony of others (such as “community”, “culture”, “ethnicity”, etc) used and reimagined in post-apartheid South Africa and in wider circuits of inclusion and exclusion under late liberalism?
How we understand the ways in which life chances are curtailed or increased in 21st century South Africa depends entirely on the categories we inherit or receive, and the methodologies we rely on to observe, analyse, and intervene in the world. However we want to enquire into our modes of existence, be it in a philosophical, political, economic, or sociological register, we must rely on an idea of what it means to be human in relation to Others – other humans, other nationalities, other families, other species even.
And indeed, we have developed many techniques over time for thinking of ourselves in relation to others, and for making ourselves and others count in various ways, whether as citizens, employees, patrons, or dependants (and of excluding or bonding the rest). We have found ways of measuring our qualities and quantities to serve diverse purposes, and we have always relied on such ideas and practices for deciding on how we should treat each other.
For our small group of anthropologists at Stellenbosch University, we have found it useful to consider such questions in terms of an “index”: a table, list, registry, compendium, or system for pointing, referring, or keeping track of a moving object. Hence, “the index” becomes a tool for reflecting on how we think about, measure, and act upon, those we call human. The index is a powerful tool as it allows us to track the ways in which concepts, methods, and actions are co-ordinated and aligned in the complexity of life as it is lived.
By using “the index”, we seek to understand how words, objects, and practices point to, or reference, shifting notions of inclusion and exclusion, humanity and animality, and representation and difference.The concept of the index is particularly important for us here in South Africa as scientific knowledge production has long been central to public life in South Africa, although in varying capacities at different times. Science has often been the driver of the development of new technologies designed to enumerate, track, control, and manage unruly populations for both conservative and progressive social agendas (although what exactly constitutes “progressive” has meant very different things!).
The social sciences have made particular contributions to the history of colonial and apartheid South Africa, and continue to play vital roles in shaping public policy. What a “population” is, its correct distribution, and its well-being are classical questions of state and society that anthropology has long been involved in helping to shape. Appeals to “natural” categories of race, tribe, volk, and nation, as made by the architects of apartheid during the middle of the 20th century, relied explicitly on an assemblage of concepts of race, blood, ethnos, and biology.
These concepts and categories live on despite many attempts to “de-nature” the apparent truth of such ideas. The many concepts and techniques that remain in vogue in anthropology and in the human sciences more broadly depend in part or whole on old, often unexamined, ideas about what it means to be a person ,or a member of a group, or a subject in a regime of government, or a patient, or an activist. Not only are those ideas insufficiently interrogated, and thus weak or inadequate to the task of understanding our contemporary condition, but they also form the ground for our public and private lives – transformation in our public institutions, justice in our economic policies, ethics in our communities – and are the means by which we understand our own lives and inner purpose.
Whether rights to land should be adjudicated on the basis of membership of a tribe, for example, or marriage endorsed by a religious or state authority, or access to life-saving drugs restricted to South African citizens or perhaps to those responsible enough to adhere to treatment): all these depend on some form of agreement on the terms by which we conduct our interactions and define ourselves and others. Cultural nationalisms appear to be thriving in these difficult times, raising the question of how and why they prove so resilient.
As esteemed historian Saul Dubow has shown, racial thinking is so deeply embedded in a southern African habitus that it can borrow concepts of biology, organic communities, and tribes in canny ways so as to appear enduring and natural. We maintain that unless we understand the history of these concepts and their articulations in South African politics and public life, we cannot contribute usefully to a civic or public project without ourselves reproducing essentialist ideas of culture and society.
To this end, we are launching a research programme and seminar series in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Stellenbosch University called Indexing the Human: From Classification to a Critical Politics of Transformation. The programme, supported by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, includes a series of seminars, workshops and collaborative learning opportunities, that brings together local, regional, and international scholars to provoke a rethinking of the past and future of social anthropology and of the human sciences more broadly at Stellenbosch University and in the region.
By taking Stellenbosch and its surrounds as a specific locality from which to think through a range of problematics concerning the production of knowledge, the techniques of governance and their limits, and the distribution of hope and harm, we seek to draw in scholars from around the world who might crack open some of our deepest held assumptions about what it means to be human in the particular historical conditions of contemporary South Africa and in the global South.
l Indexing the Human will be officially launched on Tuesday with a lecture by Professor Jonathan Jansen, rector of the University of the Free State, and remarks by Professor Saul Dubow, professor of history at Queen Mary, University of London. The event will take place at the Stellenbosch University Museum from 3.30pm to 5pm, with a small reception to follow. Professor Dubow will also be presenting a seminar on Thursday titled “The stubborn persistence of ‘race’ in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa.” Please see www.indexingthehuman.org for more details.
l Dr Cousins is lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Stellenbosch University. Dr Reynolds is NRF Postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Stellenbosch University.