Department of social anthropology seminar with Isak Niehaus

The Department of Social Anthropology has the pleasure to invite you to a seminar with Isak Niehaus from Brunel University, London. He will present the following paper:

Anthropology and Zones of the Extraordinary


Abstract
Anthropological theory has privileged a consideration of the regularities of everyday life and has paid considerably less attention to irregular events. This paper contributes towards attempts to redress this imbalance. Despite acknowledging the potential historical importance of such events, I do not see them as entirely free-floating. Sahlins has shown how people order events through mythopraxis and how social structure facilitate individual agency. Drawing on my own fieldwork in Bushbuckridge, South Africa, I show how villagers framed uncanny and destructive incidents in zones of the extraordinary. A focus on such framing provides insight into classical topics of witchcraft accusations and homicide that transcend the conventional emphasis on systemic agency. I suggest that anthropologists can best deal with such events by combining investigation and analysis with witnessing and story-telling. [events, Sahlins, framing, witchcraft, misfortune, homicide, rage, South Africa]

Bionote
Isak Niehaus is a lecturer in Anthropology at Brunel University in London. He has done extensive fieldwork in South African rural areas, and is the author of Witchcraft, Power and Politics: Exploring the Occult in the South African Lowveld (Pluto, 2001) and of Witchcraft and a Life in the New South Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

All interested are welcome!