This book explores the impact of Covid-19, and the associated state lockdown, on rural lives in a former homeland in South Africa. The 2020 Disaster Management Act saw the state sweep through rural areas, targeting funerals and other customary practices as potential 'super-spreader' events. This unprecedented clampdown produced widespread disruption, fear and anxiety. The authors build on path-breaking work concerning local responses to West Africa's Ebola epidemic, and examine the HIV/AIDS pandemic, to understand the impact of the Covid crisis on these communities, and on rural Africa more broadly. To shed light on the role of custom and ritual in rural social change during the pandemic, Covid and Custom in Rural South Africa applies long-term historical and ethnographic research; theories of people's science, local knowledge and the human economy; and fieldwork conducted in ten rural South African communities during lockdown. The volume highlights differences between developments in Southern Africa and elsewhere on the continent, while exploring how the former apartheid homelands-commonly, yet problematically, represented as former 'labour reserves'-have since been reconstituted as new home-spaces. In short, it explains why rural people have been so angered by the state's assault on their cultural practices and institutions in the time of Covid.
Leslie Bank, Adjunct Professor of Social Anthropology at Walter Sisulu University, is in the South African Human Sciences Research Council's Inclusive Economic Development division.
Title: Covid and Custom in Rural South Africa: Culture, Healthcare and the State
Author: Sharpley, Nelly,Bank, Leslie
ISBN: 9781787385733
Binding:
Publisher: C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd
Publication Date: 2022-06-02
Number of Pages: 320
Weight: 0.5051 kg
'Bank and Sharpley show how the pandemic exacerbated inequality, cultural conflicts, power discrepancies and contested leadership in South Africa. An excellent book, well written and convincing in its analysis, and the detailed ethnography from the Eastern Cape is simply magnificent.' -- Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo
'This detailed study shows how Covid regulations in South Africa prevented the most impacted rural communities from seeking the consolation of custom as they tried to bury their dead. It powerfully criticises the inhumanity of biocentrism in a developing society.' -- Robin Palmer, Professor of Anthropology, Rhodes University
'A devastating indictment of policy failures driven by arrogance and contempt toward custom , this remarkable study also provides an exceptionally revealing account of the changing social and cultural conditions of South Africa's rural periphery. An important and deeply insightful book.' -- James Ferguson, Susan S. and William H. Hindle Professor, School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University
'A compelling ethnography of accentuated precarity in South Africa's rural Eastern Cape, showing how the pandemic has preyed upon and exacerbated existing victimhood and vulnerabilities. Bank and Sharpley explore structural inequalities inherited from apartheid and compounded by corruption and lip-service to transformation under the ANC government.' -- Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cape Town