(Download) "Media, Mediums and Metaphors: The Modern South African Sangoma in Various Texts" by Gitte Postel # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Media, Mediums and Metaphors: The Modern South African Sangoma in Various Texts
- Author : Gitte Postel
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 89 KB
Description
In several Afrikaans and English novels from 1994 onwards, sangomas play a complex and intriguing role; they heal, reconcile, confront, and unsettle. In the same period, South African sangomas have made a renewed public appearance. During the apartheid years, they were bound to practise their profession largely in the dark; laws prevented them from slaughtering in public, and fear of being arrested for what they might say kept them from going into trances. Since 1994, however, new laws have made their performances legal, and new media have put them in the spotlight. An international focus on indigenous knowledge and a national emphasis on cultural regeneration have made room for sangomas in several public spheres. There they have become characters in several, sometimes hardly compatible, narratives, changing when narrators and audiences change. But they themselves are narrators too; they produce their own, often ritual, narratives. In these interactive processes, as in all kinds of globalising processes, problems have arisen in the reproduction of what Arjun Appadurai called localities: "localised spaces and times with local subjects possessed of the knowledge to reproduce locality" (1996: 181). According to Appadurai, rituals are important means to (re)produce both locality and the local subjects participating in that locality. Locality is more than a geographical or social concept; even seemingly universal or non-cultural concepts like space and time are socialised and localised through rituals. The local subjects, in turn, give meaning to the images provided by these rituals. However, as Appadurai observed, in a changing, globalising society, localities lose the self-evident, seamless coherence between place, time, rituals, media and subjects. These changes may cause frictions and uncertainty, but they also create the possibility of forming new localities. In this paper, I want to explore, without pretending to be comprehensive, whether and how these shifting forces work and can be detected in literary and other narratives, and how these narratives interact with each other.
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