Rita Kesselring

Bodies of Truth

Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Rita Kesselring is Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Social Anthropology at the University of Basel, Switzerland.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 272
• Erscheinungstermin: 12. Oktober 2016
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 228mm x 151mm x 17mm
• Gewicht: 376g
• ISBN-13: 9780804799782
• ISBN-10: 0804799784
• Artikelnr.: 45003137

Autorenporträt

Rita Kesselring is Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Social Anthropology at the University of Basel, Switzerland.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction
chapter abstract
The introduction provides an overview of how the political and social
environment has changed for apartheid-era victims in South Africa since
apartheid rule formally ended. Although the question of apartheid
victimhood was prominent in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
hearings, since then, victims have experienced a stark decline in attention
and support. Yet for most victims, the past lingers on in their lives and
in their bodies. The chapter provides an overview of the two strands of
analysis-the law and the body-through which the book examines the legacy of
apartheid and the impact of the TRC on victims' social standing today. It
presents the main theme of the book: how legal avenues and embodied
memories of violence shape the possibility for new forms of sociality in a
postconflict society.
1Apartheid Victimhood before the Courts
chapter abstract
This chapter documents the emergence of a victims' subject position during
the TRC hearings, in post-TRC politics, and in the legal cases filed in
South African and US courts. It outlines the gradual formation of a
victims' consciousness around the Khulumani Support Group, a victims'
advocacy group established in the early 1990s. In contrast to the
reconciliatory approach of the TRC, there has been a juridification of the
issue of apartheid victimhood. In reaction to the Mbeki administration's
lack of interest in matters of victimhood and its preoccupation with
pardoning the perpetrators, civil society has brought victimhood back to
the attention of the state and the broader society through prominent civil
lawsuits. Focusing on national and international politics, the chapter
details how the apartheid litigations, which allege that multinational
companies aided and abetted the apartheid regime, came to be filed under
the Alien Tort Statute, and evaluates their significance.
2Reparation, Representation, and Class Actions
chapter abstract
This chapter looks at the actual workings of both South African and US
courts hearing class actions. For plaintiffs, class actions offer the
opportunity to make their claims heard as a collective. The law, however,
needs to personalize an act of injury in order to adjudicate it. In South
Africa, class actions are an emerging legal means. The chapter shows that
both the judges and the victims who submit their shared social concerns to
the courts must grapple with the tension between structural injury and
individual injury. Although the law provides a discourse for articulating
experiences vis-à-vis a public, drawing on the logic of the law may also
break up a social collective. This force the law derives from a societal
postconflict situation in which being different potentially makes one
suspect and a target for accusations of witchcraft.
3Embodied Memory and the Social
chapter abstract
The chapter explores the different ways in which apartheid victims seek to
make their victimhood social by communicating it to others. Many victims
suffer from chronic pain or injuries. Chronic pain is particular, because
it becomes part of a person's habituated being. It is unpredictable,
because it is a restless habit that constantly threatens to disrupt one's
life. The ethnographic data suggest that there is a real risk in speaking
publicly about one's experiences. Society offers victims a limited number
of social roles to occupy and to claim. However, victims' experiences of
pain are not always malleable enough to adapt to these roles. As a result,
victims' injured personhood often turns them into suspicious subjects in
the eyes of the society. Silence is thus a solution for many victims to
protect their painful memories.
4The Formation of the Political
chapter abstract
The TRC was a governing institution that has had lasting effects for
victims and their standing in society. Ever since it completed its work
victims have to relate their personhood to the strong discourses shaped by
the TRC. This chapter looks at how a new discourse can emerge in a hardened
political and legalized environment. Employing several ethnographic
vignettes, it shows that victims have to emancipate themselves from the
bodily dimension of their victimhood to some degree in order to be
politically effective. When people with similar experiences recognize one
another in their subjectivities, collective political action may come
about. Lawyers, precisely because their professional mandate is limited,
play a key role in the emergence of a critical political mass.
5Emancipation from Victimhood
chapter abstract
The chapter addresses the question of how social change can happen if
experiences of structural and socioeconomic violations of human rights are
embodied. What kind of responses do people develop to routinized forms of
suffering? It presents ethnographic data on the reconcilability of the body
and outlines the social conditions that make it possible to change an
injured personhood. Through new social and sensory experiences, people try
to add new layers of habit memories to their subjective and social being.
The tentative forms of sociality that emerge may help them to assume a new
social position. Broader society needs to be receptive to these practices
for them to be successful, though.
6Ethnographic Experience and Anthropological Knowledge
chapter abstract
This chapter is a methodological postscript to the book. Ethnographies
originate in everyday interactions with others, but anthropologists'
analysis and interpretation of people's social world is often restricted to
their words and identifiable actions. As is the case in every social
setting, much of the knowledge we acquire during fieldwork remains
unarticulated and habitual. We often lack the tools to even become aware of
it, let alone to bring it into the predicated realm. Still, its existence
is the only basis we have for recognizing unarticulated experiences of
others. Anthropologists have become very interested in bodily experiences
but have tended either to cognitively interpret the experience of others or
to privilege their own experiences as a basis for ethnography. The chapter
argues that we should instead use our own bodily experiences to
intersubjectively recognize those of others, and proposes avenues for doing
so.
Conclusion: The Embodiment of Experiences of Violence as Seeds of New Forms
of Sociality
chapter abstract
The conclusion revises the anthropology of the law and suggests new avenues
for the study of the body. In post-apartheid South Africa, ordinary victims
do not have sufficiently differentiated public acknowledgment that will
allow them to claim their victimhood in a positive way. As a result, there
is a schism between persons who struggle to overcome their victimhood and
those who have managed to reap the harvest of the "new South Africa." Legal
developments in post-apartheid South Africa are manifestations of this
tension. The chapter evaluates transitional justice mechanisms, which often
work by proxy but fail to address lived experience. In contrast, the
mundane and unspectacular practices of victims are emancipatory in the
sense that they explore new forms of sociality based on lived experiences
not directly related to dominant discourses.