White claimants and the moral community of South African land restitution
In: Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Working Papers No. 151
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In: Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Working Papers No. 151
In: Working papers 134
World Affairs Online
In: Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology working papers No. 115
Longstanding political violence often leads to specific socio-cultures of trauma characterised socially by mass traumatisation and culturally by specific ways of representing and handling these traumatic experiences. While there is variation within such socio-cultures, certain ways of processing trauma become more hegemonic than others as powerful political actors back them. This creates context-specific configurations in which locals must find their way through empowered narratives of 'chosen trauma' and enforced silences of 'chosen amnesia'. In this article, based on in-depth life story interviews contextualised by fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in 2003–2004, I follow an exemplary informant from Catholic West Belfast, Northern Ireland, through his difficulties in locating himself within his local socio-culture of trauma. Characterising the ambivalence and problems he experienced when identifying himself as 'Irish', I suggest that these difficulties should be interpreted as resulting from his position 'between the lines': his ways of handling traumatic experiences did not square up with the hegemonic Republican trauma narrative but rather read 'between the lines' by filling in the blanks in Republican representations. Thereby de facto establishing a counter-narrative, this individual also positioned himself 'between the (front-)lines' of power, producing local encounters that were characterised, at best, by incomprehension and, at worst, by threatening silence and repudiation. The article concludes that this 'meta-trauma' – that is the traumatic experience of repeatedly failing to socio-culturally integrate one's own traumatic experiences – needs to be conceptualised and thereby processed against the politicised background of such socio-cultures of trauma rather than misinterpreted as an individualised failure to cope with a personal experience of suffering.
In: The Cambridge journal of anthropology, Band 33, Heft 1
ISSN: 2047-7716
In: Development and change, Band 45, Heft 3, S. 502-523
ISSN: 1467-7660
ABSTRACTBased on a case study of the so‐called 'Kafferskraal' land claim, this article scrutinizes the ongoing land restitution process in post‐apartheid South Africa with regard to its capacity to provide a transition towards 'justice'. After sketching the legal and institutional set‐up of land restitution, the justice of the actual restitution process is explored with reference to conflicting interpretations by various actors involved in this exemplary case. Here, a focus on divergent understandings of what historically constituted valid rights in land as well as forms of past compensation reveals continuing discrepancies regarding the legitimacy of various property regimes. These differences, leading to divergent evaluations of 'the justice' of this claim's final outcome, are shown to be ultimately rooted in incompatible logics of exceptionality and the ordinary, which conceive of land restitution in terms of either 'law making' or 'law preserving'. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of such a configuration of land restitution as a measure of transitional justice.
In: Integration and conflict studies 6
In: Nations and nationalism: journal of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism, Band 15, Heft 4, S. 720-722
ISSN: 1469-8129
In: Nations and nationalism: journal of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism, Band 15, Heft 4, S. 696-715
ISSN: 1354-5078
In: Nations and nationalism: journal of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism, Band 15, Heft 4, S. 720-722
ISSN: 1354-5078
In: Nations and nationalism: journal of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism, Band 15, Heft 4, S. 696-715
ISSN: 1469-8129
ABSTRACT. This article argues for dissolving the civic–ethnic dichotomy into several analytical dimensions and suggests 'autochthony' and 'activism' as two such alternatives. It does so by first presenting a case study of Irish language revivalism and identity discourses in the North of Ireland, in which locals turn out to be both 'civic' nationalists and 'ethno'‐cultural revivalists. The article then advocates treating these aspects as belonging to two distinct dimensions: the first is concerned with the causal logic underlying the reproduction of nationhood in terms of autochthony, while the second specifies different forms of activism aimed at (re)constituting the nation. Finally, reinterpreting the empirical case in terms of these two dimensions, it is shown that the type of activism is dependent on the specificities of 'threats' to the nation rather than on the underlying type of autochthony, which further substantiates the necessity to disambiguate the civic–ethnic distinction.
In: Development and change book series
In: Development and change book series
"This book examines a series of cases where peaceful 'new beginnings' have been declared after periods of violence and where transitional justice institutions played a role in defining justice and the new socio-political order"--
In: Development and change, Band 45, Heft 3, S. 395-414
ISSN: 1467-7660
ABSTRACTSince the end of the Cold War, political new beginnings have increasingly been linked to questions of transitional justice. The contributions to this collection examine a series of cases from across the African continent where peaceful 'new beginnings' have been declared after periods of violence and where transitional justice institutions played a role in defining justice and the new socio‐political order. Three issues seem to be crucial to the understanding of transitional justice in the context of wider social debates on justice and political change: the problem of 'new beginnings', of finding a foundation for that which explicitly breaks with the past; the discrepancies between lofty promises and the messy realities of transitional justice in action; and the dialectic between logics of the exception and the ordinary, employed to legitimize or resist transitional justice mechanisms. These are the particular focus of this Introduction.