Nationalism, Politics and Anthropology

In this book, Ilana van Wyk and Jimmy Pieterse interrogate the question of political subjectivity and its role in the making of anthropology and anthropologists by revisiting the pitched battles between so-called liberal social anthropologists and conservative, nationalist volkekundiges in South Africa. They pay particular attention to the social and cultural lives of two men who were central proponents of South African anthropology's 'two tales'; Kees van der Waal, a former volkekundige, and John Sharp, once one of volkekunde's fiercest critics. Through a series of conversations with Kees and John, they show that the issues that once divided a local field still animate the ways in which centres and peripheries of global anthropology relate to one another and to foundational questions about the discipline's epistemology and political positionality.