Fathering volkekunde: race and culture in the ethnological writings of Werner Eiselen, Stellenbosch University, 1926–1936

Abstract

Werner Willi Max Eiselen (1899–1977) has been celebrated for having consolidated the liberal functionalist school of social anthropology in South Africa. In the standard androcentric narrative, David Hammond-Tooke (1997) argues that during his decade-long tenure as head of “Bantology” at Stellenbosch University between 1926 and 1936, and in close collaboration with Isaac Schapera (1905–2003), Werner Eiselen developed the tradition of social anthropology founded in the five years before his appointment by Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955) at the University of Cape Town. This essay fundamentally challenges this narrative. Through a close reading of the political and ethnological writings of Meinhof-trained Eiselen, it argues that race rather than culture was the central theme in his Stellenbosch years, especially during the mid- to late 1920s. Racial classification, racial science and Afrikaner nationalism played a central role in the alternative ethnological tradition that Eiselen self-consciously crafted at Stellenbosch University. His partial shift in emphasis from race to culture in his relatively sparse ethnological writings of the early to mid-1930s was prompted by another German mentor, the linguist Diedrich Westermann (1887–1956), rather than by South African liberal scholars like Isaac Schapera.