The long career of Dr Coert Grobbelaar: engaging the history of physical anthropology at Stellenbosch University

People in Motion: Introduction to Transnational Movements and Transwar Connections in the Anthropological and Genetic Study of Human Populations

This essay explores the significance of political and ideological context as well as experimental culture for the participation of women in radioactivity research. It argues that the politics of Red Vienna and the culture of radioactivity research specific to the Viennese setting encouraged exceptional gender politics within the Institute for Radium Research in the interwar years. The essay further attempts to provide an alternative approach to narratives that concentrate on personal dispositions and stereotypical images of women in science to explain the disproportionately large number of women in radioactivity research. Instead, the emphasis here is on the institutional context in which women involved themselves in radioactivity in interwar Vienna. This approach places greater importance on contingencies of time and place and highlights the significance of the cultural and political context in a historical study while at the same time shedding light on the interrelation between scientific practices and gender.

Commentary: Nationalism and Transnationalism in Anthropological Research

The importance of Willi Werner Max Eiselen (1899–1977) as the lecturer, supervisor and mentor of the first generation of volkekundiges at Stellenbosch University has been greatly underestimated. He supervised no fewer than 11 MA and doctoral theses in this field between 1930 and 1936, texts which are remarkable for the coherence of the backgrounds of their authors — male, rural, Christian, right-wing — and for the uniformity of their ethnological method — extensive reliance on German linguistics and imperial ethnography as core secondary sources, limited and detached fieldwork practice oriented towards the verbatim recording of texts from elderly men and collection of ethnographic objects on Berlin Mission Society mission stations, and an almost obsessive preoccupation with African sexuality, particularly the alleged promiscuity of women in African cultures. Through a close reading of their theses and published writing, I argue that these pious Afrikaner nationalist men of the post-“English War” generation consolidated volkekunde on the lines established by their mentor in his writings and teachings of the 1920s: that is, as a rigid ideology of difference, powerfully underpinned by concepts of race and racism, deeply informed by a masculine Afrikaner nationalism and the associated politics of segregation. An important subtheme in the theses and correspondence of Eiselen and his protégés is the threatening figure of the liberal woman anthropologist. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that there was a moment of convergence of interests and approaches during the early and mid-1930s between the English-speaking liberal school of social anthropology and “the Stellenbosch school of volkekunde,” I conclude that the latter tradition remained, as it had been when fathered by Eiselen in the 1920s, radically different from social anthropology in its racial politics, its anthropological method and its ethnographic focus.

History of Anthropology is a series of annual volumes, inaugurated in 1983, each broadly unified around a theme of major importance to both the history and the present practice of anthropological inquiry. Bones, Bodies, Behavior, the fifth in the series, treats a number of issues relating to the history of biological or physical anthropology: the application of the idea to humankind, the comparison of animals minds to those of humans, the evolution of humans from primate forms, and the relation of science to racial ideology. Following an introductory overview of biological anthropology in Western tradition, the seven essays focus on a series of particular historical episodes from 1830 to 1980: the emergence of the race idea in restoration France, the comparative psychological thought of the American ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan, the archeological background of the forgery of the remains discovered at Piltdown in 1912, their impact on paleoanthropology in the interwar period, the background and development of physical anthropology in Nazi Germany, and the attempts of Franx Boas and others to organize a consensus against racialism among British and American scientists in the late 1930s. The volume concludes with a provocative essay on physical anthropology and primate studies in the United States in the years since such a consensus was established by the UNESCO Statements on Race of 1950 and 1951. Bringing together the contributions of a physical anthropologist (Frank Spencer), a historical sociologist (Michael Hammond), and a number of historians of science (Elazar Barkan, Claude Blanckaert, Donna Haraway, Robert Proctor, and Marc Swetlitz), this volume will appeal to a wide range of students, scholars, and general readers interested in the place of biological assumptions in the modern anthropological tradition, in the biological bases of human behavior, in racial ideologies, and in the development of the modern human sciences.

Community‐driven science and science education: Living in and navigating the edges of equity, justice, and science learning

Hermann Giliomee is a liberal Afrikaner historian and respected political commentator formerly based at the University of Stellenbosch and now teaching at the University of Cape Town. This extract first appeared as a chapter in a book jointly authored with the Canadian-based sociologist Heribert Adam. Giliomee was responding in part to a much mythologized interpretation of Afrikaner history which suggested that apartheid was the consequence of the racism of Afrikaners as well as their stubborn commitment to doctrinaire neo-Calvinist thought. Giliomee was also reacting to an alternative Marxist interpretation of South African history which located the rise of Afrikaner nationalism as an expression of class interests. Giliomee’s outline of the development of Afrikaner identity rests instead on the idea of ‘ethnic mobilization’ and he argues that Afrikaner identity has undergone constant redefinition in response to different historical circumstances. He recognizes that the rise of modern Afrikaner nationalism in the first half of the twentieth century was shaped by the desire to secure collective economic advantage, in particular to ‘uplift’ Afrikaans-speaking ‘poor whites’. But it also had a vital psychological and cultural dimension, affording a sense of collective security and solidarity. In the post-1948 period Afrikaner identity was powerfully asserted through apartheid ideology. Underlying Afrikaners’ insistence on protecting their political and economic supremacy were lingering fears of their vulnerability. According to Giliomee, apartheid was not a sacrosanct ideology. It was first and foremost a means of securing group survival. From this it followed that if the insistence on Afrikaner exclusivity was no longer perceived to be in their own interests-as was increasingly apparent from the mid-1970sAfrikaners would be prepared to engage in a painful process of personal redefinition and political reform.

In response to the case study by Kass et al. on research ethics committees (RECs) in Africa [1], the following additional information is provided about capacity building for research ethics in South Africa. South Africa has two programs funded by the Fogarty International Center: the International Research Ethics Network for Southern Africa (IRENSA; see http://www.irensa.org) based in Cape Town and the South African Research Ethics Training Initiative (SARETI; see http://shsph.up.ac.za/sareti/sareti.htm) that allies the Universities of Pretoria and KwaZulu-Natal. Each of these programs has a different focus and both are making highly valued contributions to capacity building in international research ethics in Southern Africa. The goal of the IRENSA diploma program is to develop and nourish sustainable multidisciplinary expertise in international research ethics and bioethics in southern Africa. It prepares mid-career health and allied professionals from South Africa and other developing nations in Africa to assume positions of leadership in research ethics in their home institutions. This program is unique on the African continent in focusing exclusively on training mid-career professionals (who cannot take the time or leave to undertake full-time graduate work), in three intensive two-week modules spread throughout one year, with assignments carried out at their home institutions. In four years IRENSA trained 49 mid-career professionals (17 men, 32 women, 20 white, 29 black) drawn from 20 institutions in South Africa and from 11 institutions in eight other low-income African countries. Sixteen students serve as chairs, deputy chairs, or secretaries of RECs. Students reflect professional training in many disciplines, including science, medicine, nursing, social sciences, law, and pharmacology. Eighteen students hold doctoral degrees and represent a broad spectrum of health organizations. In addition, our annual two-day seminars in research ethics have reached over 400 attendees. SARETI's goal is to build capacity for ethical review of health research and strengthen Africa's institutional training capacity necessary to achieve and sustain this aim. It offers a multidisciplinary, modular master's degree program with funding for nine trainees over four years, an advanced, non-degree program resulting in a certificate with funding for 16 trainees, and a training program for 40 ethics review committee members. In 2003 SARETI co-hosted, with the HIV/AIDS Vaccines Ethics Group, a two-day training workshop for over 40 members of South African RECs, and in 2004 it offered a three-week Ethics Review Committee Training Program sponsorship to nine South African applicants. A spin-off of these educational programs has been the formation of a network of Chairs of South African Human Health Research Ethics Committees. This has significantly improved liaison across the country, reduced the potential for shopping around by researchers, and has enhanced the stringency with which protocols are reviewed. A newsletter from Stellenbosch University on research ethics activities in the country draws attention to current debates and events and facilitates networking [2]. The recent stand taken by the chairpersons of RECS in South Africa not to permit studies that do not provide insurance cover for research-related injuries is one example of how improved knowledge and coordination in South African RECs are making such a contribution [3].

Stellenbosch University (SU) was the first university in Africa to introduce a dedicated physical education certificate course in 1937. In defining the Physical Education Department's raison d'etre, the first head of the department, Dr Ernst Jokl, declared that his main aim was to transform SU into the recognised centre for scientific physical education in South Africa. Beyond this purpose, the institutionalisation of physical education resonated with the institution's Afrikaner-nationalist ethos. At the volksuniversiteit, standardised physical education was intended to contribute to the strengthening of the corporate and individual Afrikaner body. While Jokl played a pivotal role in the establishment of standardised physical education at SU, his tenure was abruptly terminated following controversy surrounding medical examinations of female physical education students. In examining the events that led up to Jokl's swift departure, we explore the origins of physical education at SU and the ways in which the university's institutional culture shaped the trajectory of this nascent discipline. In essence, we argue that Jokl's exit was precipitated by his 'scientific methods' that required students to undress for their medical inspections. While all the students underwent the same examination, the uproar was rooted in the fact that women students were subjected to the inspections. While he argued that his approach was an extension of his scientific endeavours, Jokl transgressed the traditionalist and strongly gendered values of SU and the idealised Afrikaner nation that it sought to both represent and shape.

Several critical exposés of volkekunde at Stellenbosch University have focused on dominant figures up to the 1960s but have not sufficiently considered how they engaged with Afrikaner nationalism. This article introduces questions around solidarity, discontinuity and dissent amongst volkekundiges up to the closure of their department. The article uses a network approach to unravel how volkekundiges at the university were entangled with Afrikaner organisations and how their work reflected Afrikaner nationalism. Given tightly knit networks at Afrikaans universities and the appearance of monolithic unity, the limited scope for dissent is of interest. The article follows the development of volkekunde at Stellenbosch in tandem with major changes in the apartheid project for which volkekundiges provided theoretical confirmation of the social categories required to divide and rule black people. Three periods (policy development, implementation, and implosion of apartheid) organise the material, illustrating trends towards solidarity of networks but also (minor) disruptions showing differentiation and dissent. Close connections between academic work and ideological support for nationalist politics characterised the rise of volkekunde at Stellenbosch. This trend also led to the abandonment of volkekunde (then “anthropology”), despite last-attempt retooling of an unsustainable tradition during South Africa’s democratic transition.

Prejudice against Jews was part of the political, cultural, economic and social landscape in the Union of South Africa long before Nazism made inroads into the country during the 1930s, at which stage Jews constituted approximately 4.5% of the country’s white or European population. Racial discrimination in a country with diversified racial elements and intense political complexities was synonymous with life in the Union long before Apartheid, with its strictly enforced legal, political and economic segregation, became the country’s official policy with the accession to power of the National Party under Prime Minister Dr Daniel François Malan in May 1948. Although the Jews, while maintaining their own sub-cultural identity, were classified within the country’s racial hierarchy as part of the privileged white minority, the emergence of recurrent anti-Jewish stereotypes and themes became manifest in a country permeated by the ideology of race and white superiority. This was exacerbated by the growth of a powerful Afrikaner nationalist movement, underpinned by conservative Calvinist theology. Fear of Communism in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the First World War; disquiet over the arrival of what was seen as disproportionately large numbers of Jewish immigrants during the 1920s; and the effects of the severe world-wide economic depression after the Wall Street stock market crash in October 1929, set the scene for an unprecedented period of antisemitic activity. This was reflected, in part, in legislation aimed at curbing Jewish immigration and the emergence of several antisemitic movements. This dissertation, which covers the period between the First and Second World Wars, explores the perception that South African antisemitism was a foreign import. Based on an examination of archival sources and contemporary publications, the study concludes that prejudice against the Jews was evident in the weltanschauung of right-wing and extremist Afrikaner nationalists long before the influence of Nazism became apparent and was not dependent on the influence of Nazi propagandists in the country. Aggressive Afrikaner nationalism along with economic antisemitism characterised the years between the end of the Great Depression and the outbreak of the Second World War. Antisemitism became a significant issue in elections and towards the end of the 1930s opposition to Jewish immigration was included as an official plank in the political platform of the opposition Purified National Party. Jews were also banned from party membership in the Transvaal, where most Jews resided. Attempts by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies and its affiliates together with several non-Jewish organisations to counter the increasing influence of antisemitism, principally among the Right and Radical Right in the ranks of the Afrikaner nationalists, also marked the inter bellum period on which this study focuses.

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.

A brief overview of South Africa's higher education history contextualizes this article's examination of how admissions policies and procedures at the University of Cape Town (UCT), an historically White South African university, have been affected by increasing enrollments of Black students since the passage of the 1983 Universities Amendment Act. This is followed by an institutional profile that delineates the specific changes in admissions policies and procedures related to Black students at UCT from 1983 to 1995. Data are presented by race and gender. The article concludes with a critical analysis of UCT's academic development programs and alternative admissions criteria. INTRODUCTION The origins of higher education in South Africa date back to 1829 and the establishment of the University of the Cape of Good Hope-the present-day University of Cape Town (UCT)-and the University of Stellenbosch, founded in 1874. These early institutions of higher learning were established primarily to prepare White males for further educational training abroad. They were modeled after British institutions; their students were White, and their academic staff came primarily from Britain and other European countries. It was not until early in the 20th century, with the passage of the University Act of 1916, that provisions were made for the establishment of the first university for non-White South Africans. That legislation established the South African Native College, now known as the University of Fort Hare, and the University of South Africa, a correspondence university for the nation's Blacks, or its African, Colored, and Indian/ Asian populations. As this article makes plain, the history of South African higher education is intricately bound to and influenced by political developments. Upon assuming leadership in 1948 until the 1994 democratic elections, the National Party (NP) government of the nation's White minority played a decisive role in the development of higher education. With its doctrine of apartheid, the NP introduced the plethora of legislation that systematically entrenched racial segregation at all levels of society, including the educational system. Within five years of taking power, the NP government passed the Bantu Education Act of 1953, which created separate systems of education for Africans, Coloreds, Indians/ Asians, and Whites. This Act was followed by the Universities Amendment Act of 1959 that prohibited the admission of Blacks to historically White universities and established separate universities for Blacks along racial/ethnic lines. Subsequently, between 1951 and 1968, six South African colleges became full-fledged, independent universities serving Whites only: the University of the Witwatersrand (1922), the University of Pretoria (1930), Natal University (1949), the University of the Orange Free State (1950), Rhodes University (1951), and Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education (1951). Two new Whites-only universities were founded during this period: the University of Port Elizabeth in 1965 and Rand Afrikaans University in 1968 (Muller, 1991). Institutional development in South African higher education also reflected the cultural and linguistic duality of the South African settler population. The Afrikaans-language universities of Stellenbosch, Pretoria, Orange Free State, Potchefstroom, and Rand Afrikaans-became the nucleus of Afrikaner (Dutch Boer) nationalism and cultural consciousness (Booysen, 1989; Gwala, 1988; Marcum, 1982). The English-language universitiesCape Town, Witwatersrand, Rhodes, and Natal-have historically been perceived as politically liberal in the South African context for their strong commitment to the ideals of academic freedom and interracial and interethnic relations (Taylor, 1990; Vale, 1987). The Extension of Universities Act, passed in 1959, set forth provisions for ethnically based institutions of higher learning designed to serve South Africa's African, Colored, and Indian/Asian populations. …

Fredrik Barth, Andre Gingrich, Robert Parkin, and Sydel Silverman, One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology. University of Chicago Press, 2005. This book developed out of lectures delivered on the history of anthropology to mark the inauguration of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, in June 2002. The contributors are distinguished anthropologists who in two cases were key actors in the traditions of anthropology on which they report. In the present climate of reflexivity (in both the Bourdieuan sense of positionality and as a form of self-consciousness) in anthropology, there is a growing literature (at least in English) on the history of anthropology—including biographies of and autobiographies by anthropologists, general histories, and histories of particular aspects of national traditions, including institutions for training and teaching anthropology.1 Historians and literary critics have also taken an interest in the history of our discipline, following in the steps of George Stocking, Jr. (1992 and 1995) who has contributed so much to our understandings of our past. The present work makes an important contribution in the midst of all of this other production in its bringing together a set of essays in one volume that address developments in four separate national traditions of anthropology—British, German, French, and American (U.S.). Following an earlier statement [End Page 741] by Portuguese anthropologist João de Pina-Cabral, the convener of the lecture series on which the essays are based, Chris Hann, poses the question in his forward of whether or not there is a trend toward a "global" anthropology. In their own way, each author of these essays addresses this question. Each essay is unique, and reflects to some degree the idiosyncratic interests and intellectual history of its anthropologist-author as well as the particular national context discussed. The histories given here illuminate a mutivocality in the development of anthropology, and balance an emphasis on personalities and major figures in the history with one on the social, intellectual, and institutional contexts in which the discipline grew in each national context. These essays read like four separate mini-books, each with five chapters. Fredrik Barth begins his overview of British anthropology in the early 19th century and takes it up almost to the present. Bringing his own theoretical sensitivities to this enterprise, he states early on in his essay that it is not sufficient to deal only with the history of ideas in anthropology, but "we must also take account of the interests and prejudices that prevailed in the larger society, to which these scholars had to accommodate, and of the particular organizations and resources in academic life that were available to them as the means of pursuing their goals" (3). In his first chapter, he explains the origins and rise of anthropology in Britain as connected not only to an overall interest in exploration and colonial expansion, but also to more general interest in knowledge about the wider world. Barth's second chapter charts the rise of the fieldwork tradition in British anthropology, and covers the period from the late 19th century to 1922—the famous year in which both Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific and Radcliffe-Brown's The Andaman Islanders were published. Barth begins his discussion of the institutional history of British anthropology at the end of this second chapter, mentioning the position Sir James Frazer had at the University of Liverpool in the first decade of the 20th century and then the growing role of the London School of Economics (LSE), where Barth was later trained. A third chapter deals exclusively with Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, whose rivalry is legendary in anthropological mythology. For Barth, the divergent approaches of Malinowski, "multivocal and deeply inspiring, but theoretically ad hoc" (29) and of Radcliffe-Brown, who brought theory, structure, and a focus on political organization, were usefully complementary in the development of the field. Barth characterizes in his fourth chapter...

Reviewed by: Mothers of the Nation: Women, Families, and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Europe Jill Massino Mothers of the Nation: Women, Families, and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Europe. By Patrizia Albanese. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Pp. 224. $58.00 (cloth). In this book Patrizia Albanese uses gender relations and family policies in select countries in twentieth-century Europe as lenses through which to rethink and resolve debates regarding nationalism, modernity, and citizenship. Her overarching aim is to test "whether nationalism intends to modernize or archaize gender and family relations" (21) and evaluate the degree to which it succeeds in doing so. To this end, she takes a comparative historical approach, focusing on Germany, Italy, Russia, and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia/Croatia during the interwar and post-1989 periods. This is a lot of ground to cover in a short amount of space, and in the end the book sacrifices depth and nuance for breadth. While Albanese claims to examine "the virtually unpublicized side of nationalist traditionalism, xenophobia, and misogyny: what nationalist regimes do to and for their own women when the rest of the world is looking, but not seeing" (3), a good portion of the book synthesizes existing scholarship on gender in twentieth-century Germany, Italy, and Russia. Moreover, while Albanese aptly illustrates the negative impact of nationalist policies on women, she does not examine the diverse ways in which women were affected by and responded to these policies. Nonetheless, by revisiting women's historically complex relationship to nationalism in the European context, the book reminds us that nationalism is not simply something that happens in "distant lands with alien customs," it also exists in societies closer to home. The first two sections of the book sketch the general political, economic, and social contexts in each country, outlining governmental attitudes, policies, and practices as they related to women and the family. The third and final section compares the demographic outcomes of nationalist policies, [End Page 382] evaluating them according to governmental models (the welfare state vs. neoliberalism) and notions of civic and social rights. In section 1 Albanese compares the nationalist states of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to the nonnationalist states of Yugoslavia and revolutionary Russia during the interwar period, while in section 2 she compares the nonnationalist states of Germany and Italy to Croatia and Russia during the post-1989 period. According to Albanese, this comparative two-by-two model is designed to control for the impact of overall changes in the position of women in modern society as well as nation-specific trends and global events, such as recessions. Albanese's choice to focus on revolutionary Russia and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia as her nonnationalist case studies for the interwar period is both curious and problematic. Far from being nonnationalist, Yugoslavia was a hotbed of nationalist tension during the interwar period, especially between Croatia and Serbia. Albanese claims that, as a result of industrialization, traditional family forms were gradually being replaced by nuclear households and that over two hundred feminist groups existed in Yugoslavia by 1921; however, it is unclear what the overall impact of these processes was on women's status and roles, since she offers no information on women's political, legal, and economic status during this period. Instead she notes that marriage and family life was regulated by local, ethnic, and religious groups and that women were subject to "private patriarchy," a situation that, while not nationalist, was presumably considerably restricting for women. Meanwhile, by limiting her analysis to revolutionary Russia, she downplays the significance of nationalist tendencies and some of the conservative gender policies that characterized the majority of the interwar period under Stalin. Like nationalism, Stalinism was, in certain respects, a reaction to modernizing trends. For example, during the 1930s women lost the right to legal abortion and to file paternity suits and found it increasingly difficult to obtain a divorce. Albanese concludes that in all four nationalist regimes "a nationalist leader's rise to power was accompanied by changes to family policies, from relatively less to more traditional and patriarchal ones" (161). Accordingly, birthrates rose in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany during the 1930s (a time when they...