Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T16:51:48.242Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Hlonipha and health: ancestors, taboos and social medicine in South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2021

Abigail H. Neely
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article examines the abandonment of an important food taboo – the prohibition of milk consumption by newly married women – in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s. Offering a detailed exploration of this hlonipha custom in three rural communities, I start from the position that food always reflects the entanglements of its material and symbolic attributes. By tracing health and illness, shifting livelihoods, diets and an important social medicine intervention, this article reveals that in the 1950s milk was a symbolically and materially different food than it had been in the 1930s. I argue that this difference determined whether or not hlonipha would be abandoned. By centring on understandings of food, health and taboos as material and symbolic, this article draws on scholarship on livestock in Southern Africa and contributes to scholarship on food taboos and hlonipha customs, pushing for the incorporation of material aspects of those customs.

Résumé

Résumé

Cet article examine l'abandon d'un important tabou alimentaire, à savoir l'interdiction, pour les jeunes mariées, de consommer du lait dans le KwaZulu-Natal rural, en Afrique du Sud, dans les années 1940 et 1950. Dans son exploration détaillée de la coutume du hlonepho dans trois communautés rurales, l'auteur part du principe que la nourriture reflète les intrications de ses attributs matériels et symboliques. En étudiant la santé et la maladie, les moyens de subsistance changeants, les régimes alimentaires et une importante intervention en matière de médecine sociale, cet article révèle que dans les années 1950, le lait était un aliment symboliquement et matériellement différent de ce qu'il était dans les années 1930. L'auteur soutient que cette différence a déterminé si l’hlonepho serait abandonné ou non. En se focalisant sur les conceptions de la nourriture, de la santé et des tabous en tant qu’éléments matériels et symboliques, cet article s'appuie sur la recherche sur le bétail en Afrique australe et contribue à la recherche sur les tabous alimentaires et sur la coutume du hlonepho, en prônant l'incorporation d'aspects matériels de cette coutume.

Type
Toxicity and taboos
Information
Africa , Volume 91 , Issue 3 , May 2021 , pp. 473 - 492
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adams, V. (2016) Metrics: what counts in global health. Durham NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Adeokun, L. A. (1982) ‘Marital sexual relationships and birth spacing among two Yoruba sub-groups’, Africa 52 (4): 1–14.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Aquina, M. (1969) ‘Zionists in Rhodesia’, Africa 39 (2): 113–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Beinart, W. (2000) ‘African history and environmental history’, African Affairs 99: 269–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beinart, W. (2001) Twentieth-century South Africa. New York NY: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bjerk, P. K. (2006) ‘They poured themselves into the milk: Zulu political philosophy under Shaka’, Journal of African History 47 (1): 1–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Breckenridge, K. (2000) ‘Love letters and amanuenses: beginning the cultural history of the working class private sphere in southern Africa, 1900–1933’, Journal of Southern African Studies 26 (2): 337–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carton, B. and Morrell, R. (2012) ‘Zulu masculinities, warrior culture and stick fighting: reassessing male violence and virtue in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 38 (1): 31–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cassel, J. (1955) ‘A comprehensive health program among South African Zulus’ in Paul, B. D. and Miller, W. B. (eds), Health, Culture, and Community: case studies of public reactions to health programs. New York NY: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Cassel, J. (1957) ‘Social and cultural implications of food and food habits’, American Journal of Public Health and the Nation's Health 47 (6): 732–40.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Castree, N. and Braun, B. (2001) Social Nature: theory, practice, and politics. Malden MA: Blackwell Publishers.Google Scholar
Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J. L. (1990) ‘Goodly beasts, beastly goods: cattle and commodities in a South African context’, American Ethnologist 17 (2): 195–216.Google Scholar
Douglas, M. (1984) Purity and Danger: an analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Ark.Google Scholar
Dubow, S. and Jeeves, A. (2005) South Africa's 1940s: worlds of possibilities. Cape Town: Double Storey.Google Scholar
Feierman, S. (1985) ‘Struggles for control: the social roots of health and healing in modern Africa’, African Studies Review 28 (2–3): 73–147.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Feierman, S. (2000) ‘Explanation and uncertainty in the medical world of Ghaambo’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74 (2): 317–44.Google Scholar
Feierman, S. and Janzen, J. M. (1992) The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa: comparative studies of health systems and medical care. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Ferguson, J. (1985) ‘The bovine mystique: power, property and livestock in rural Lesotho’, Man 20 (4): 647–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fox, R. (2003) ‘Food and eating: an anthropological perspective’. Oxford: Social Issues Research Centre.Google Scholar
Gausset, Q. (2002) ‘The cognitive rationality of taboos on production and reproduction in sub-Saharan Africa’, Africa 72 (4): 628–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geiger, H. J. (1993) ‘Community-oriented primary care: the legacy of Sidney Kark’, American Journal of Public Health 83 (7): 946–7.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gluckman, M. (1938) ‘Social aspects of first fruits ceremonies among the south-eastern Bantu’, Africa 11 (1): 25–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guthman, J. (2011) ‘Bodies and accumulation: revisiting labour in the “production of nature”’, New Political Economy 16 (2): 233–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hammond-Tooke, W. D. (1992) ‘Twins, incest and mediators: the structure of four Zulu folk tales’, Africa 62 (2): 203–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herskovits, M. J. (1926) ‘The cattle complex in East Africa’, American Anthropologist 28 (1): 230–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunter, M. (1933) ‘The effects of contact with Europeans on the status of Pondo women’, Africa 6 (3): 259–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackson, P. and Neely, A. H. (2015) ‘Triangulating health: toward a practice of a political ecology of health’, Progress in Human Geography 39 (1): 47–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
James, D. (1990) ‘A question of ethnicity: Ndzundza Ndebele in a Lebowa village’, Journal of Southern African Studies 16 (1): 33–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kark, S. L. (1962) ‘Migrant labour and family health’ in Kark, S. L. and Steuart, G. W. (eds), A Practice of Social Medicine: a South African team's experiences in different African communities. Edinburgh: E. and S. Livingstone.Google Scholar
Kark, S. L. (1974) Epidemiology and Community Medicine. New York NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts.Google Scholar
Kark, S. L. (1981) The Practice of Community-oriented Primary Health Care. New York NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts.Google Scholar
Kark, S. L. and Cassel, J. (1952) ‘The Pholela Health Centre: a progress report’, South African Medical Journal 26 (6): 101–4, 131–6.Google Scholar
Kark, S. L. and Kark, E. (1962) ‘Epidemiological considerations of malnutrition in rural African school children’ in Kark, S. L. and Steuart, G. W. (eds), A Practice of Social Medicine: a South African team's experiences in different African communities. Edinburgh: E. and S. Livingstone.Google Scholar
Kark, S. L. and Kark, E. (1999) Promoting Community Health: from Pholela to Jerusalem. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.Google Scholar
Kark, S. L. and Steuart, G. W. (eds) (1962) A Practice of Social Medicine: a South African team's experiences in different African communities. Edinburgh: E. and S. Livingstone.Google Scholar
King, B. (2010) ‘Political ecologies of health’, Progress in Human Geography 34 (1): 38–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Langwick, S. A. (2011) Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: the matter of maladies in Tanzania. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Lepowsky, M. A. (1985) ‘Food taboos, malaria and dietary change: infant feeding and cultural adaptation on a Papua New Guinea island’, Ecology of Food and Nutrition 16 (2): 105–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Livingston, J. (2005) Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Lock, M. (1993) Encounters with Aging: mythologies of menopause in Japan and North America. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Lock, M. and Kaufert, P. (2001) ‘Menopause, local biologies, and cultures of aging’, American Journal of Human Biology 13 (4): 494–504.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mansfield, B. (2008) ‘Health as a nature–society question’, Environment and Planning A 40: 1015–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mathis, S. M. (2011) ‘Disobedient daughters? Changing women's roles in rural households in KwaZulu-Natal’, Journal of Southern African Studies 37 (4): 831–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mintz, S. W. and Du Bois, C. M. (2002) ‘The anthropology of food and eating’, Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 99–119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moore, D. S. (2005) Suffering for Territory: race, place, and power in Zimbabwe. Durham NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moore, H. L. and Vaughan, M. (1994) Cutting Down Trees: gender, nutrition, and agricultural change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890–1990. Portsmouth NH: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Nading, A. M. (2014) Mosquito Trails: ecology, health, and the politics of entanglement. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Neely, A. H. (2015) ‘Internal ecologies and the limits of local biologies: a political ecology of tuberculosis in the time of AIDS’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105 (4): 791–805.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Neely, A. H. (forthcoming 2021) Reimagining Social Medicine from the South. Durham NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Neely, A. H. and Nguse, T. (2015) ‘Relationships and research methods: entanglements, intra-actions, and diffraction’ in Perreault, T., Bridge, G. and McCarthy, J. (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology. London and New York NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ngubane, H. (1977) Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine: an ethnography of health and disease in Nyuswa-Zulu thought and practice. London and New York NY: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Slome, C. (1962) ‘Community health in rural Pholela’ in Kark, S. L. and Steuart, G. W. (eds), A Practice of Social Medicine: a South African team's experiences in different African communities. Edinburgh: E. and S. Livingstone.Google Scholar
Stevenson, L. (2014) Life Beside Itself: imagining care in the Canadian Arctic. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tollman, S. M. and Pick, W. M. (2002) ‘Roots, shoots, but too little fruit: assessing the contribution of COPC in South Africa’, American Journal of Public Health 92 (11): 1725–8.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vaughan, M. (1985) ‘Famine analysis and family relations: 1949 in Nyasaland’, Past and Present 108: 177–205.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Webster, D. J. (1986) ‘The political economy of food production and nutrition in Southern Africa in historical perspective’, Journal of Modern African Studies 24 (3): 447–63.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
White, H. (2002) ‘Combining quantitative and qualitative approaches in poverty analysis’, World Development 30 (3): 511–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, H. (2011) ‘Beastly whiteness: animal kinds and the social imagination in South Africa’, Anthropology Southern Africa 34 (3–4): 104–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, H. (2017) ‘The materiality of marriage payments’, Anthropology Southern Africa 39 (4): 297–308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wylie, D. (2001) Starving on a Full Stomach: hunger and the triumph of cultural racism in modern South Africa. Charlottesville VA: University Press of Virginia.Google Scholar