The possibility of a critical anthropology after apartheid: relevance, intervention, politics

Abstract

This paper, prompted by an Anthropology Southern Africa conference around the theme ‘Public Anthropology’, argues that any post-apartheid anthropology that abandons criticality as a core disciplinary principle risks dispelling any radical content that anthropology may have to offer South African society. Anthropological practice that, in the name of activism or application, misrecognises the necessary and complicated relationship between thought and action by privileging action, threatens to slip into a positivist position that silences broader political questions and becomes fundamentally repetitive (in Freudian terms). The authors call, on the other hand, for anthropology as ‘negative work’, as an intellectual practice that constantly queries the terms of its own social claims. They argue that this kind of intellectual engagement is itself a form of political action, and that without it post-apartheid anthropology could become, yet again, an uncritical handmaiden of the state or the market and their normative forms of political action.