Outside the Dwelling of Culture: Estrangement and Difference in Postcolonial Zululand

Abstract

Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance was distinguished by its strongly dialectical analysis of Zionist Christian practice in apartheid South Africa, showing how Zionist ritual worked with the largest questions of power under a form of colonial capitalism. In this paper, I explore how dialectics of estrangement structure practices directed at the spirits of the dead in post-apartheid South Africa. I do so through an ethnographic study of the practice of building dwellings for the dead in the Zululand region, showing how this practice works with the legacies of political violence and labor migration, while enacting the deeply ambivalent production of forms of ethno-cultural difference.

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