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Research Interests

Anthropology of Landscapes, Objects, Things and Materiality.

The affective presence and emotive materiality of bones, bodies and bodily substances

Politics of memory, history, heritage and the past/place

Nationalism and the postcolonial state

Belonging, sovereignty and the materiality of place

Water and land reform

Spirit mediums, sacred places, war veterans and political subjectivity

Zimbabwe

 

 

Biographical statement

I am an Africanist  and social anthropologist interested in the political imbrications of landscapes, things and materialities. I did my doctoral fieldwork in southern Zimbabwe, exploring the politics of heritage landscape around the internationally renowned  site of Great Zimbabwe. This thesis won the ASA UK Audrey Richards Prize in 2004, and a monograph entitled The Silence of Great Zimbabwe: Contested Landscapes & the Power of Heritage was published by UCL Press in 2006. I am currently writing a book entitled Graves & Water: Belonging, Sovereignty and the Political Materiality of Landscape around Lake Mutirikwi in Southern Zimbabwe. It focuses on the complex reciprocity of material and imaginative aspects of landscape, environment and water in ongoing contests over belonging and sovereignty, emergent in the ongoing reconfiguration of the postcolonial state, in the highly politicized context of recent land reform around Lake Mutirikwi in southern Zimbabwe. As a founding member of the Bones Collective research group, based in anthropology at Edinburgh, I am also involved in a longer term, collaborative research project exploring the affective presence and emotive materiality of human remains. We recently published a special issue of the Journal of Material Culture focusing on this theme (December 2010), and i am developing a new research project exploring the Materialities of Death in Southern Africa (MODISA).  I  am an editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies, and co-founder & editor of a new online Africanist journal called Critical African Studies. In 2009 i was elected to the prestigious Curl lectureship by the Royal Anthropological Institute, and deliver a paper entitled "Graves, Ruins & Belonging: Towards an Anthropology of Proximity", which will be published in JRAI in December 2011. It can be listened to here:

http://www.socanth.cam.ac.uk/2011/02/graves-ruins-and-belonging-towards-an-anthropology-of-proximity/

I have presented at seminars and conferences in South Africa, Zimbabwe, France, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, USA, and Zambia as well as in the UK, in Glasgow, Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, SOAS and London, and i have published a wide variety of different academic journals, edited collections and books. I teach various undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Anthropology and African studies at Edinburgh and supervise PhD students focusing on a wide range of subjects, countries and themes, ranging from land reform and belonging in Zimbabwe, to children's engagement with objects at National Museum of Scotland, to the complexities of life amongst the detritus and mines of post war Cambodia, to the ecotourism in Kenya, corpses and commemoration in post genocide Rwanda, and Afrikaner identity in South African enclaves.  I have also done consultancy work for asylum and occasionally criminal cases involving Zimbabweans, and for BBC documentaries, such as the Lost Kingdoms of Africa series broadcast in 2010.

 

Selected Publications

Monographs

2006 The Silence of Great Zimbabwe: Contested Landscapes and the Power of Heritage London: UCL Press & Harare: Weaver Press. Reprinted 2008. 

Edited Collections/Special Issues of Journals/General Journal Issues 

 

 

Dec. 2010 with C.Krmpotich & J.Harries (eds) The Substance of Bones: the emotive materiality and affective presence of human remains Special issue of Journal of Material Culture 15(4). 

Dec. 2008 with R.Marsland & J. McGregor (eds) The Power of Water: Landscape, Water and the State in Southern & Eastern Africa. Special Issue of Journal of Southern African Studies (JSAS) 34.4.

March 2011 General Issue of Journal of Southern African Studies, 37.1, Lead editor & author of Editorial

March 2010 General issue of Journal of Southern African Studies, 36.1, Lead editor & author of Editorial

June 2009 Critical African Studies Issue No 1 (June 2009). Lead editor.

Journal articles

In press:

Dec 2011 “Graves, Ruins & Belonging: Towards and anthropology of proximity” JRAI – RAI Curl Lecture 2009, British Museum, September 2009.

Published

Dec. 2010 “Between Tortured Bodies and Resurfacing Bones: the Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe” in Special issue on “The Substance of Bones” in Journal of Material Culture. 15(4).

Dec. 2010 with C.Krmpotich & J.Harries “Introduction: The Substance of Bones: the emotive materiality and affective presence of human remains Special issue of Journal of Material Culture 15(4) (eds.) J.Fontein, C.Krmpotich & J.Harries 

2009 “Anticipating the Tsunami: Rumours, planning and the arbitrary state in Zimbabwe”, in AFRICA (August 2009)

2009 “ ‘We want to belong to our roots and we want to be modern people': New farmers, old claims around Lake Mutirikwi, southern Zimbabwe” African Studies Quarterly, (June 2009).

2009 “The Politics of the Dead: Living Heritage, Bones and Commemoration in Zimbabwe”, ASAonline .

2008 “The Power of Water: Landscape, Water and the State in Southern & Eastern Africa. An Introduction” in Special Issue of JSAS, 34.4

2006 “Languages of land, water and ‘tradition’ around Lake Mutirikwi in southern Zimbabwe” Journal of Modern African Studies, 44, 2, pp.1-27.

2006 “Shared legacies of the War: spirit mediums and war veterans in southern Zimbabwe” Journal of Religion in Africa, 36, 2, pp.167-199.

2006 “Silence, destruction and closure at Great Zimbabwe: local narratives of desecration and alienation” Journal of Southern African Studies, 32, 4, pp. 771-794

2006 “Reclaiming Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business: Review Article of Hammer, A. Raftopoulos B. & Jensen S. 2003 Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business: Rethinking Land, state and Nation in the Context of Crisis, and Campbell, H. 2003 Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation” in Africa 75,4.

Book Chapters

Jan 2011 “The Politics of the Dead: Living Heritage, Bones and Commemoration in Zimbabwe” in Polite K. & Brosius, C. (eds) Media Rituals and Ritual Media Weisbaden: Harrasowitz 

October 2010 “The efficacy of emic and etic in archaeology and heritage” in U.Rizvi & J.Lydon (eds) World Archaeological Congress (WAC) Research Handbook on Postcolonialism and Archaeology, Left Coast Press.

2005 “An ethnographic study of the politics of water and land around Lake Mutirikwi, southern Zimbabwe” in edited conference proceedings, African Water Histories: Trans-disciplinary discourses Vanderbijl Park: Northwest University. 

Occasional papers

2004 “‘Traditional Connoisseurs’ of the Past: The Ambiguity of Spirit Mediums and the Performance of the Past in southern Zimbabwe” Occasional Paper No 99. Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh.

2000 “UNESCO, Heritage and Africa: An anthropological critique of World Heritage” Occasional Paper No 80, Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh. 2nd edition published by LAP publishing 2010.