Cookies?
Library Header Image
LSE Research Online LSE Library Services

'A sentimental attachment to the neighbourhood': African Christians and land claims in South Africa

James, Deborah and Nkadimeng, Geoffrey (2003) 'A sentimental attachment to the neighbourhood': African Christians and land claims in South Africa. Itinerario, 27 (3/4). pp. 243-262. ISSN 0165-1153

[img]
Preview
PDF
Download (677kB) | Preview
Identification Number: 10.1017/S0165115300020854

Abstract

As part of its attempt to understand ‘an apartheid of souls’, this volume is concerned to show how mission activity, particularly that of European-based churches with close links to the expansion of Dutch/Calvinist influence, may have nurtured the local construction of race or ethnic difference in Indonesian and South African society. One well-known account of Christianity in South Africa shows how the interaction between mission and missionised produced a sharply dichotomised sense - experienced by the Tshidi Tswana as the contrast between setsivana and segoa - of difference between indigenous and imported culture. While this shows how processes devoted to undermining it may paradoxically strengthen a sense of cultural identity, what it does not yield is a sense of how Christianity, appropriated within Tswana and other African societies, furnished a means of marking internal distinctions of social class, dovetailing in unexpected ways with ethnic difference. It is such divisions - potently fusing class with ethnicity and having crucial implications for the ownership, reclaiming, and use of land - with which the present paper is concerned.

Item Type: Article
Official URL: http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/history/itinerario/
Additional Information: © 2004 Institute for the History of European Expansion, Leiden University
Divisions: LSE Human Rights
Anthropology
Subjects: H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races
H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
Date Deposited: 05 Feb 2008
Last Modified: 13 Jan 2024 18:09
URI: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/3000

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

View more statistics