Page 39 - University of Pretoria Research Review 2017
P. 39

         Foreword
Introductory Messages
An ethnographic
encounter
with a hyena
Fraser McNeill, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology
Professor Fraser McNeill in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology has been conducting ethnographic research in the Venda region of
South Africa for 15 years, and has developed an approach to anthropological analysis he calls medical ethnomusicology. As part of this research, he has learned the music and magic of female initiation, through which young girls are transformed into socially responsible adults. The ritual elder of this process, a teacher and long-term friend, holds the reputation as a powerful traditional healer, and was in the process of teaching him her craft when disaster struck. He relates the story as follows:
Her ex-husband bewitched their eldest son, and I witnessed the process. ‘You will be dead before the
sun comes up’ he whispered, and indeed, the son died in a car crash that night. As an act of retaliation, the traditional healer cut off her husband’s head as he slept in a drunken stupor, and she was duly arrested the next day. ‘Talk to Thitupulwi (my Venda name), he will explain everything,’ she told the investigating officer. I had been informed by the King to remove myself from the process, and did not get involved. Driving past the scene of the crime late at night a few weeks later, a huge Brown Hyena ran parallel to the car. I turned and stared at it, and it returned the stare. It was the length of my bakkie, and kept up the pace with ease. This was in a reasonably built up area, hundreds of kilometres from the Kruger National Park. In all my years working there, I had never heard of hyenas in the region. I knew
what it was. I had to go and visit my friend in jail. She laughed as I entered the visitors’ room. ‘Ah, so you saw me last night? Where were you going at such an hour, anyway?’ ‘OK,’ I replied, I’ll talk to the police, I’ll tell them what I saw, and why you did what you did’. ‘I know you will,’ she said – and changed the subject to ask about my family in Scotland.
How does an anthropologist write about such an encounter? How do we make sense of things that we cannot explain from the frames of reference available to scientifically trained researchers? What does it mean? These are questions anthropologists grapple with, and which bring into focus contemporary debates around the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology and the social sciences more generally. What is truth?
McNeill writes that science and its practitioners like to hold up a specific form of sorcery as providing ‘proof’. But it does this by constantly proving itself wrong. So the ‘truth’ can only ever be fleeting and partial. Did the traditional healer control her shape to shift into the form of a hyena? She firmly believes that she did become the hyena running alongside his vehicle, and some contemporary anthropological theories urge us to take our interlocutors’ ideas seriously. His current work deliberately weaves the local political economy of traditional leadership in Venda with threads of the ontological turn in an attempt to make sense of what would appear to be an act of witchcraft, and in which he, as researcher, has become deeply embedded.
DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE
PEOPLE AND CONTEXTS
Context
HEALTH AND WELL-BEING
PLANET AND SUSTAINABILITY
Awards
Lead Researchers
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   Anthropology is the field of study in the social sciences that reveals most starkly the methodological limits of studying ‘the other’, that
is, beliefs and practices that are unfamiliar. The positionality of the researcher either renders understanding through the eyes of the other impossible, or limits the accuracy or usefulness of analyses because of what becomes known and is therefore taken for granted.
Chris Eason











































































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