UWC – Anthropology Department

Head of Department

Dr William Ellis

Email: wellis@uwc.ac.za

William is a lecturer in Anthropology at UWC. He teaches courses in Economic Anthropology, Anthropological Theory, and the Anthropology of Africa. His Economic Anthropology course focuses on the link between religion and economy and explores works by Georges Bataille, Marcel Mauss and Marshall Sahlins on the gift and questions the market through the work of Karl Polanyi.

His courses also explore the well-known debates in social sciences such as the dialectic of the master and the slave, Marx’s labour theory of value, Lewis’ culture of poverty and the economic value of human life. His postgraduate theory course teaches the history of anthropology, the ontological turn and the ethnography of the ‘more-than-human’. He maintains strong interests in Khoisan studies, indigeneity and is passionate about researching the human plant interface.

William has done extensive fieldwork among the San people in the southern Kalahari. The main thrust of his fieldwork there was land reform, natural resources management and the intersections with culture. Currently, he is working on several projects in the Northern Cape that aim to examine knowledge connections and plant ontologies. These projects have focused on various plant practitioners, and the current phase is a collaboration with the herders in Leliefontein. Additionally, he has a keen interest in the Afrofuturist movement and science fiction in Africa.

Publications

• Ellis, W. (2019). “Situational chiefs: notes on traditional leaders amidst calls for KhoiSan recognition after 1994” in Skosana, D., M. Buthelezi, Beth Vale Traditional Leaders in a Democracy: Resources, Respect and ResistanceMISTRA, Johannesburg
• Ellis, W., Clement Cupido and Mogamat Igshaan Samuels (2021) Walking with herders: following into the multispecies classroom Anthropology Southern Africa, 2021 Vol. 44, No. 1
• Ellis, W. (2019) A Tree Walks through the Forest: Milkwoods and Other Botanical Witnesses in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. Critical Perspectives: Plants, Race, and Colonialism, 5 (2)
• Diana Gibson & William Ellis (2018) Human and plant interfaces: relationality, knowledge and practices, Anthropology Southern Africa, 41:2, 75-79, DOI: 10.1080/23323256.2018.1483735
• William Ellis (2018) Plant knowledge: transfers, shaping and states in plant practices, Anthropology Southern Africa, 41:2, 80-91, DOI: 10.1080/23323256.2018.1476165

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Academic Staff

Dr Jung Ran Annachiara Forte

Email: jforte@uwc.ac.za

Jung Ran Annachiara is an anthropologist and joined the Department of Anthropology and Sociology in 2014. She completed her PhD in Social Anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris in 2007. Her research is located at the intersections of the study of ‘traditional’ African religions and subjectivity. In her doctoral dissertation, Chevauchés par les dieux. Initiations des Occidentaux aux cultes Vodun béninois: pratiques culturelles et trajectoires identitaires, grounded on extensive fieldwork in the Republic of Benin, West Africa, she explored the dynamics of change of a traditional religion.

Historically characterised by a striking extraversion and flexibility, Vodun cults have travelled, adapted, and transformed across time and space, creatively reinventing their traditions, generating new meanings and redefining regimes of practice, both locally and globally. Recently, in collaboration with Leslie Witz and Paolo Israel, Annachiara published an edited volume that charts new trends in South African historiography through a series of essays from the early 1990s to the present. In the Department, she teaches classes on rituals, beliefs, traditional practices, gender and kinship, and popular culture.

Publications

 

Associate Professor Kelly Gillespie

Email: kgillespie@uwc.ac.za

Kelly Gillespie is a political and legal anthropologist with a research focus on abolition in South Africa, particularly concerned with the ways in which criminal legal processes become vectors for the continuation of apartheid relations. She joined the department of Anthropology/Sociology at the University of the Western Cape in 2018, prior to which she worked for a decade at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). In 2008 she cofounded the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC), an experimental project tasked with recrafting the work of critical theory beyond the global north. She writes and teaches about urbanism, violence, sexualities, race and the praxis of social justice. Prof Gillespie has been involved in work on the decolonisation of the university in South Africa, supporting student movement activism and curriculum reconstruction, with a particular pedagogical interest in writing-intensive teaching. She also works beyond the university in popular education projects supporting a range of social justice formations.

Publications

• 2022. ‘Orders of Protection: Feminist lessons in anti-privatisation and authoritarianism from South Africa’. Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 37, Issue 4, pp. 599–624.
• 2021. (co-authored with Leigh-Ann Naidoo). ‘Abolition Pedagogy: Forcefields of Critique’ Critical Times 4 (2), pp.284-312.
• 2020. (co-authored with Gautam Bhan, Teresa Caldeira and AbdouMaliq Simone) ‘The pandemic, southern urbanisms and collective life’. Society + Space. https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/the-pandemic-southern-urbanisms-and-collective-life
• 2019. (co-authored with Leigh-Ann Naidoo). ‘Between the Cold War and the Fire: The Student Movement, Anti-assimilation, and the Question of the Future in South Africa’. The South Atlantic Quarterly 118(1), January, pp.226-239.
• 2014. ‘Murder and the Whole City’. Anthropology Southern Africa, Vol 37 (3/4), pp.203-212.
• 2011. ‘Containing the “wandering native”: Racial Jurisdiction and the Liberal Politics of Prison Reform in 1940s South Africa’ in Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol 37 (3).
• 2008. ‘Moralizing Security: “Corrections” and the Post-Apartheid Prison’ in Race/Ethnicity, Vol 2 (1).
  (with Bernard Dubbeld). 2007. ‘The possibility of a critical anthropology after apartheid: relevance, intervention, politics’. Anthropology Southern Africa. Vol 30(3&4).

Associate Professor Sakhumzi Mfecane

Email: smfecane@uwc.ac.za

Sakhumzi is an Associate Professor at UWC with a background in Medical Anthropology. He received his PhD from Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) in 2010. His research areas of specialisation are gender, masculinities, medical anthropology, men’s health, and social theory. Before joining UWC in 2010, he researched social and behavioural aspects of HIV and Health for the Perinatal HIV Research Unit (2001-2002); Human Sciences Research (2002-2005) and Centre for AIDS, Development and Research and Evaluation (2009-2010). His current research focuses on developing African-centred theories of masculinity.

Publications

Hameedah Parker

Email: haparker@uwc.ac.za

Hameedah is a PhD Anthropology candidate and lecturer. She also holds the position of book review editor for the Anthropology Southern African (ASNA) Journal. Her research interests are varied but include medicine, health, and healing practices. In particular, she has an interest in the relationships between diseases, technology and spaces of treatment and management for chronic medical conditions. Her PhD research focuses on Metabolic Syndrome (MetS), emphasising medical knowledge systems (both clinical and ethnobotanical) in South Africa. This research project is motivated by biocultural narratives of both clinical and plant medicine practices within and beyond anthropology. Her fieldwork explores walking ethnography and the rethinking of anthropological analyses. Hameedah has also collaborated in formulating clinical guidelines for Primary Health Care (PHC) practices through the NRF at Stellenbosch University. In addition, she has worked on an International Development Research Centre (IDRC) project titled Promoting inclusive policies and approaches to address youth networks of gang violence in South Africa. Working in Manenberg, her research involved rewriting narratives of place-making and resilience amidst gang violence through the lenses of female youth.

Publications

• Parker, H. 2020. Women in the Making of Place, Social Networks and Surviving the Gang Streets. Politeia, 39(1) https://doi.org/10.25159/2663-6689/6607
• Louw, Q; Grimmer, K; Dizon, J.M; Machingaizde S; Parker, H. & Ernstzen, D. 2018. Building capacity in primary health care rehabilitation clinical practice guidelines. A South African initiative. Health Research Policy and Systems 16(96) https://doi.org/10.1186/s12961-018-0368-z
• Dizon, J.M; Grimmer, K; Louw, Q; Machingaizde S & Parker, H. 2018. South African primary health care allied health clinical practice guidelines: the big picture. BMC Health Services Research 18(48) https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-018-2837-z
• Parker, H. 2018. “Doing” diabetes: the unobtrusive presence of plants. Anthropology Southern Africa, 41(2) https://doi.org/10.1080/23323256.2018.1474120
• Dizon, J.M; Grimmer, K; Louw, Q; Machingaizde S; Parker, H & Pillen, H. 2017. Barriers and Enablers for the development and implementation of allied health clinical practice guidelines in South African primary healthcare settings: a qualitative study. Health Research Policy and Systems 15(79) https://doi.org/10.1186/s12961-017-0243-3
• Creative Outputs – Poem titled: Obstructed, published online – https://loratomokwena.com/2022/08/10/obstructed-by-hameedah-parker/

Dr Lindy-Lee Prince

Email: lprince@uwc.ac.za

Lindy-Lee Prince is a social anthropologist with a primary focus on gender, feminist theory, queer theory, studies in performance, performativity, mass culture, visual anthropology, and digital anthropology. They completed their PhD at UCT through an interdisciplinary study as a research fellow at HUMA, the Institute for Humanities in Africa. Following this, they completed two post-doctoral research fellowships at UCT, first, at the African Gender Institute, followed by a research fellowship at the Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies in Africa, where they researched online sexism and digital harassment. Their MA and PhD research focuses on queer studies and archiving, male gaze theory, performance art studies, and image making as knowledge creation, as related to hyper feminine performances – mainly focusing on Drag performance in the Western Cape, and Neo-Burlesque performance.

Publications

• Prince, L. 2023. Queer Femme Drag Futures. Nordic Journal of African Studies, 32(3), 206-228 https://doi.org/10.53228/njas.v32i3.1086
• Prince, L. 2023. “Drag Lives Here” in Beyond the Mountain: Queer Life in ‘Africa’s Gay Capital’, University of South Africa Press
• Prince, L. 2017. All Drag, all the time – One night in Cape Town with Lola Fine. Anthropology Southern Africa, 40(2), 122-137 https://doi.org/10.1080/23323256.2017.1318709