From exposé to care: Preliminary thoughts about shifting the ethical concerns of South African social anthropology

Abstract

Social anthropologists working in South Africa during the late apartheid period expressed their abhorrence of the apartheid system in the preamble to the association that they formed. Many set as their goal the work of ‘exposé anthropology’, using anthropology to reveal the iniquitous consequences of apartheid. Apartheid's formal collapse and the institution of a democratic constitutional regime has reduced the need for such exposé, but current political-economic circumstances preclude easy or rapid transformation of the extreme poverty and deprivation that continue to plague the country's population. The article addresses the question of what an appropriate ethics for anthropology in such circumstances might be and proposes an ethic of care.