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This article analyses Zulu constructions of mental illness, as according to Zulu Psychology Masters Students from universities in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, by means of Foucauldian Discourse analysis. Analysis of qualitative interviews highlighted the complexity surrounding mental illness and psychology within the Zulu culture in South Africa, and revealed various cultural constructions of the mentally ill and psychopathology that have not previously been researched. Elucidated cultural constructions of the mentally ill included constructions of the ill as a contagious diseased state; a threat to peace; a deviant; a vagrant; and a non-social being and non-functional. These constructions placed the mentally ill at the lowest strata level within society. Historically rooted discourses of the black South African's fight to be resilient, and the philosophical idea of 'Ubuntu', intersect with these constructions of the mentally ill. Furthermore, the constructions of the mentally ill are impacted by rural and urban geographic location. Also explored is the discourse of the Zulu mentally ill's oppressed subject position as the 'mad' and black. These elicited constructions and discourses of the mentally ill within Zulu communities, in South Africa, provide a basis for vital future research into the cultural relativity and nosologies of mental illness within the South African context, and wider African context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the state of knowledge construction within the South African academe. This, I do by looking at how issues of epistemology and ontology are prioritised or negated in the social construction of knowledge. Focusing on what I have called 'the problem of perspectives', I show how 'epistemological narcissism' has often limited the scope of methodological and theoretical innovativeness. I argue that by relying on a set of certain theories that scholars have known and used over the years, and dismissing those that are considered 'foreign' (or non-African), the exercise of knowledge construction has become largely polemical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African intellectuals are debating the future of knowledge construction in the wake of the collapse of colonization, European settlerism, and apartheid. Tawanda Sydesky Nyawasha has posited the debate between Afrocentricity and Eurocentrism in his paper "I am of Popper; I am of Asante: The Polemics of Scholarship in South Africa" published in Studies in Philosophy and Education as an expression of this contested ground. This response article argues that Africans have a duty to interrogate their own epistemological discourses in order to understand the history of knowledge construction on the continent of Africa. As the construction of the first pyramid at Sakkara was a consolidating event of human study, detailed investigations, elaboration of ideas, and advancement of the sciences and arts around 2700 BCE, clearly, African studies should stand at the head of the discourses about knowledge. Therefore, in this response, the author challenges Nyawasha's understanding of Afrocentricity and criticizes the marginalization of African perspectives as just another assertion of Eurocentric ideas as universal when in fact they arise from a specific history and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author engages with the question 'what is so theological about theological education', which he calls the genealogy of theology. This matter is approached from a very specific vantage point as the author was the former Dean of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Pretoria (South Africa) and has been engaged in this research project over the last 5 years as the Faculty was under severe review as to its composition and ultimately its very future. This article endeavours to bring to the surface the underlying theology of the author and the paradigm he is operating from. It concludes with a definition of theology as he sees it, but with the explicit qualification of it being situated at a research-intensive university competing for a notable position on the ranking indexes of world universities. A new niche is thus opening up for theology (vis-à-vis a seminary or even a Christian university), namely, a 'scholarly endeavour of believers in the public sphere in order to inquire into a multi-dimensional reality in a manner that matters'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More often than not, academics of African descent—from the continent, the diaspora, or other parts of the world—have been trained in Western and Middle Eastern-oriented disciplines that espouse the race paradigm. Imbued with race theory, they seek spiritual, social, and political solutions to critical race issues, in some cases unwittingly maintaining the cultural structure of the dominant group from which the construct arises. This article highlights the creation of race and race identity by European, Indo-Aryan (white), and Middle Eastern (Semitic) men and women, sanctified by religious ideals that advanced their societies and stigmatised Africans, based on the melanin content of their skin. In these cultural orientations, the blackest-skinned women, men, and children are devalued, debased, and demonised. Race is used as a cultural strategy for fabricating human history and distinctions, shaping thinking, behaviours, and exploits that continue to have deleterious, far-reaching consequences for dark-skinned people across the world. In the light of this critical dilemma, and from an Afrocentric perspective, this article interrogates whether Black academicians in non-African and African cultures can shed the cultural constraints of race as identity, and understand the development of cultural identity as the basis of more progressive ideas regarding humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African hair braiding on Bree Street offers a glimpse into how immigration, black female sexuality and shifts in urban retail economies provide important economic and cultural resources to urban residents and users. As both ontology and epistemology, black hair braiding practices recalibrate local economies, spaces, and aesthetic codes, and thus co-constitute emergent urban identities and a way of knowing the city. The intimate, networked, and fractal nature of black hair braiding spaces disrupts the rigid colonial spatial orders of the city and its architecture. As an epistemology, braiding disrupts the grand narrative of Johannesburg in ‘crisis’, while also disrupting the colonizing and gendered structure of urban studies itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing together 10 years of surveillance data on and material gathered through ethnographic engagements with a small group of 20 young people and families, the article interrogates tensions and complementarities in the ways in which divergent research modalities come to represent kinship, family life, and changing forms of child vulnerability over time. The article begins by drawing out some of the tensions between demographic and ethnographic modes of inquiry, exploring the divergent objects and values of each. The focus then shifts from these broader epistemological debates to explore the life of a selected 'case' as it unfolds within both a demographic database and through ethnographic research in one locality in South Africa. To resolve the tensions between these perspectives, the article concludes that we must move beyond a focus on empirical divergences between forms of research representation. Rather, we must develop more rigorous methodologies for critical, comparative, 'multi-sited' analyses of forms of experience and local-life worlds. Understanding the divergent insights that can be gained through different modes of inquiry, and the ways in which they shape and are shaped by everyday experiences in locality, is essential to coming to terms with contemporary forms of governance and everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working with the recollections of everyday experiences of apartheid collected by the Apartheid Archives project, and drawing on the emerging theorization of ignorance in the critical philosophy of race, this article explores how an ‘ignorance contract’ – the tacit agreement to entertain ignorance – lies at the heart of a society structured in racial hierarchy. Unlike the conventional theorization of ignorance that regards ignorance as a matter of faulty individual cognition, or a collective absence of yet-to-be-acquired knowledge, ignorance is understood as a social achievement with strategic value. The apartheid narratives illustrate that for ignorance to function as social regulation, subjectivities must be formed that are appropriate performers of ignorance, disciplined in cognition, affect and ethics. Both white and black South Africans produced epistemologies of ignorance, although the terms of the contract were set by white society as the group with the dominant power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Complex systems are shaped by cross-scale interactions, nonlinear feedbacks, and uncertainty, among other factors. Transdisciplinary approaches that combine participatory and conventional methods and democratize knowledge to enable diverse inputs, including those from local, informal experts, are essential tools in understanding such systems. The metaphor of a ‘bridge’ to overcome the divide between different disciplines and knowledge systems is often used to advocate for more inclusive approaches. However, there is a shortage of information and consensus on the process, methodologies, and techniques that are appropriate to achieve this. This paper compares two case studies from Peru and South Africa in which community-level assessments were conducted as part of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and explores the different conceptual models used to deal with scale and complexity, the methods adopted to deal with epistemology, and the different means of dealing with uncertainty in each assessment. The paper highlights the conceptual and practical challenges encountered by each assessment and discusses some of the conceptual and practical trade-offs involved in the selection of particular approaches. We argue that a boat navigating between unknown shores may be a more appropriate metaphor than a bridge, whose starting and end points are fixed and known. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses what constrains an extended insightful anthropological analysis from within South Africa. Some conditions must be met to satisfy the continued existence of anthropology in South Africa. Anthropologists must put up an opposition against the existing order, and the closed and undemocratic universities in South Africa must embrace democratization. Furthermore, structural and material conditions must allow the continued professionalization of the profession. Finally, the discipline must be regarded as appropriate both by its practitioners and the society within which it operates.