Documentary photography has undergone a process of devaluation in post-apartheid South Africa. In response, Patricia Hayes has introduced the term “empty photographs” into the scholarly conversation, using it to designate images that have been derided as “‘bad,’ ‘boring,’ or repetitious” in post-apartheid settings (“The Uneven Citizenry,” 189). This article revisits a subset of such images to contest their seeming emptiness—pallbearers escorting dead activists to their graves during political funerals in late-apartheid South Africa. Focusing specifically on Afrapix photographer, Gille de Vlieg’s images of Themba Dlamini’s funeral in Driefontein in 1990, the paper restores their local history to view and unpacks the visual cultural and material cultural circuits of militant mourning in which they were embedded. It then uses various orders of metonymy in the visual field to comment on the “necropolitics” of the apartheid regime (Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”). The paper concludes with a reflection on Ariella Azoulay’s notion of the “civil gaze” (Civil Imagination) and considers what unfolds when a reckoning with the differential distribution of death that characterizes necropower reorients this faculty away from the individual photograph towards series, genre or corpus.

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr's anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths that have shaped influential recent accounts of the city? This article outlines the contours of a “hydrocolonial Johannesburg” though combining Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery and Sarah Nuttall's invitation to “read for water” with existing methodologies that read for infrastructure. It sets these strategies to work in the context of Lauren Beukes' second work of speculative fiction, Zoo City (Beukes, Lauren. 2010. Zoo City. Johannesburg: Jacana Media). The novel propels its readers into a noiresque fantasy world whose spatial coordinates closely reflect the extra-textual city of Johannesburg. Taking my cue from Beukes' infrastructural allusions, I mobilize her text to provide the struts for my own as I explore the intertextuality of Zoo City with works by William Kentridge and Sarah Gertrude Millin. Alternately foregrounded or barely perceptible until deliberately sought out, water helps to distinguish the various locales of the novel from one another. My essay turns to Zoo City to offer three vignettes that trace the flows of water and the contiguous presence of infrastructures in Johannesburg, pursuing their intersection beyond the boundaries of the novel into a larger expressive cultural archive to reflect on the relations between privilege and forms of anthropogenic degradation in the life of the city.

This article examines the varying ways religious devotees utilize, negotiate, embrace, and reject religious authorities in their everyday lives. Ethnographically exploring the ways that Orthodox Jews share reproductive decisions with rabbinic authorities, I demonstrate how some sanctify rabbinic rulings, while others dismiss them, or continue to “shop around” until they find a rabbinic opinion that resonates with their personal desires. These negotiations of religious authority and ethical freedom are worked out across a biographical trajectory, opening new possibilities to explore how religious authority fluctuates and changes over the life course. I argue that analysis of engagement with rabbis without attention to the inner diversity of interpretations and practices perpetuates a hegemonic and overly harmonious picture of religious authority. Highlighting these variations, I show how the process of consultation was more significant than mere submission to religious rulings. Religious consultation, in itself, then constitutes a significant node for making an ethical Jewish life. Attending to these aspects of religious authority has great potential to further develop and contextualize the field of ethical freedom while complicating binary models of submission versus resistance. My approach demonstrates the need to broaden our anthropological tools to better understand the ways individuals share everyday decisions with mediators of authoritative knowledge.

This paper explores thumb-typing as a cultural technique stemming from the mutual development of typing interfaces and practices. Focusing on the work of the typing fingers, it examines how the assignment of thumbs to be the primary writing digits is an innovation that correlates—and in some respects causes—textual and social changes that are central to digital culture. It argues that thumb-typing embodies recursive relations between behavioral patterns, technological infrastructure, and textual creation. The analysis shows how the invention of the typewriter keyboard introduced the fingers to typing, and how developments of digital media refined the finger-work in interacting with the device, resulting in thumb-typing. The new functionality of the thumb as an executing rather than supporting finger, promotes a novel equivalency and interchangeability in finger employment to typing. This, I propose, problematizes traditional concepts of textuality, its performance, and authorship.

Drawing on thirty in-depth interviews with faith leaders in the UK (including Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Sikhism), we examine the diverse ways religious groups reorient religious life during COVID-19. Analysing the shift to virtual and home-based worship, we show the creative ways religious communities altered their customs, rituals, and practices to fit a new virtual reality amidst rigid social distancing guidelines. This study offers a distinctive comparative perspective into religious creativity amidst acute social change, allowing us to showcase notable differences, especially in terms of the possibility to fully perform worship online. We found that whilst all faith communities faced the same challenge of ministering and supporting their communities online, some were able to deliver services and perform worship online but others, for theological reasons, could not offer communal prayer. These differences existed within each religion rather than across religious boundaries, representing intra-faith divergence at the same time as cross-faith convergence. This analysis allows us to go beyond common socio-religious categories of religion, while showcasing the diverse forms of religious life amidst COVID-19. This study also offers a diverse case study of the relationship between religions as well as between religion, state, and society amidst COVID-19.

South African writer Peter Abrahams’s literary mediation of the Harlem Renaissance is often seen as foundational for black literary production in apartheid South Africa. Abrahams’s exilic trajectories have also been widely noted. Despite scholarly interest in Abrahams’s transnational involvement with pan-Africanism and communism however, existing research has not sufficiently addressed the circulation of his work in the Soviet Union, and particularly that of The Path of Thunder (1948). One of the first works by a black South African to reach Soviet readers, the novel circulated on an unprecedented scale beginning with its initial Russian translation in 1949 and was steadily republished in multiple languages until the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union. It inspired a film, an opera, several dramatic plays, as well as a ballet adaptation staged to great acclaim in leading Soviet venues. This 1958 adaptation on the part of librettist Yuri Slonimsky; Gara Garaev, a major Azerbaijani composer; and Konstantin Sergeev, an influential choreographer and dancer at the Kirov Ballet; stands at the center of our investigation. The importance of Soviet ballet to the pedagogical aspirations of “the Soviet cultural project” (Ezrahi, 2012, 3–4) renders the production a particularly engaging “site of contest” where processes of ideological appropriation attuned to Cold War geopolitics stand revealed as they augment, downplay, or sometimes fully erase the South African specificity of Peter Abrahams’ original narrative. Moreover, investigating the economy of representation employed in the adaptation along its various dimensions, textual, performative and musicological offers insights into contesting imaginaries of blackness operating in Soviet space.

One of the basic features facilitating communication on the Internet in a variety of languages is Unicode code-layout. It standardizes the representation of most of the world’s writing systems on digital media, thus enabling the process and transmission of information through such technologies. Unicode is a contemporary character code, and this paper traces its evolvement out of previous code-layouts, starting with Morse code in telegraphy. Focusing on the adaptations of character codes to Modern Hebrew, I show how representing languages in technology is intertwined with internal and transnational regional concerns, and argue that from its beginning character code has been a locus of struggle over power and sovereignty: first between colonial regimes and resistance movements, and then between global corporations and local agents.

Variants and versions are key concepts in narrative studies. This article reconsiders these concepts in light of Walter Anderson's pioneering studies of Yiddish folklore in the 1920s. Anderson collected Yiddish narratives in Minsk while he was a teacher in Jewish gymnasia, turning them into versions of international tale types in his publications. An analysis of these studies demonstrate how folk narratives and scholarly narratives are intertwined. By examining teacher-pupil relations and the political context of these Yiddish narratives, this article stresses the collaborative nature of version-making, substituting the question of which stories are versions with the question of when a story becomes a version.

The field of integrated dance brings together dancers with and without disabilities to create a novel art form. In dancing together, participants engage in a process of “translation” to interpret and enact movement, a practice I term embodied translation. This practice involves distilling a movement to its kinesthetic and expressive core, then exploring potential manifestations of those elements through various uses of space, objects, and bodies. Performed among people whose means and range of movement vary widely, embodied translation necessitates the recognition of multiple pathways toward shared expression, engendering a collective of kinesthetic multiplicities. Based on fieldwork with projects of integrated dance in Israel and the United States, I examine participants’ verbal, embodied, kinesthetic, and material means of translation, questioning whether translation can in fact produce commensurability among diverse bodies.

When people with widely diverse bodily characteristics collaborate in dancing together, an exploration and communication of movement and embodied knowledge takes place through dialogue and shared practice. Engagement in these activities develops participants’ awareness of and appreciation for kinaesthetic complexities and diverse embodiments, promoting an understanding of bodily difference as contributing to, rather than detracting from, the realm of physical arts and society as a whole. Based on fieldwork conducted in Israel and the United States with integrated dance projects bringing together people with and without disabilities, this article offers an ethnographic analysis that continues the anthropological endeavour of revealing the ways kinaesthetic knowledge (awareness and knowledge of the movement and spatial orientation of one's body) is fostered. Introducing disability into movement theory, I offer an understanding of movement/stasis as a spectrum of ways of moving, looking at what happens when individuals who are different from one another engage in shared, critical reflection upon their movement practices.

Élargir la conscience intersubjective : anthropologie de la diversité kinesthésique

Résumé

Quand des personnes présentant des caractéristiques physiques diverses collaborent pour danser ensemble, une exploration et une communication du mouvement et du savoir incorporé se produisent par le dialogue et la pratique partagée. La participation à ces activités développe la sensibilité à la complexité kinesthésique et l'appréciation des incorporations différentes, favorisant ainsi la compréhension de la différence physique et enrichissant le domaine des arts physiques et la société dans son ensemble au lieu d'en éloigner. Sur la base d'un travail de terrain mené en Israël et aux États-Unis, dans des projets de danse intégrés réunissant des personnes sans handicap et handicapées, l'analyse ethnographique présentée dans cet article prolonge l’étude anthropologique des moyens par lesquels est favorisée la connaissance kinesthésique (conscience et connaissance du mouvement et de l'orientation dans l'espace de son corps). En introduisant le handicap dans la théorie du mouvement, l'autrice offre une compréhension du mouvement et de la stase comme un éventail de manières de bouger, et observe ce qui se passe quand des personnes différentes les unes des autres participent à une réflexion critique partagée sur leurs pratiques motrices.