Arun Saldanha. Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Pp. 239. ISBN10: 0-8166-4993-6.

ARUN SALDANHA. Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Pp. 239. ISBN10: 0-8166-4993-6

“My House is Protected by a Dragon”: White South Africans, magic and sacred spaces in post-apartheid Cape Town

Until the end of apartheid, White South Africans were solely presented as Christians, with other religious practices all but forbidden to them. Since the negotiated revolution of 1994, the new liberal constitution has guaranteed religious freedom to all, with the global New Religious Movements gaining popularity. Tens of thousands of White South Africans have seized the opportunity to explore charismatic churches, New Age-practices as well as traditional African religions, while the popularity of traditional Christianity has dropped. The informants of this research are White South Africans from Cape Town,  neopagans who practice Wiccan witchcraft and sangomas who practice traditional African religion. In South Africa, Whites are seldom regarded as practitioners of witchcraft or magic. Yet there are thousands of Whites who believe in and practice both, and create their own sacred spaces within the urban spaces which were previously subjected to rules and regulations of racialised social engineering. This article examines how witchcraft, magic and new global religions meet in the conjunctions of global and local, where new concerns arise and where new heterotopias and spatial practices are established as answers to White neopagans’ anxieties about spiritual insecurity and racial boundaries. The places where these sacred urban spaces are created are at homes, in public spaces, and on the Internet. Keywords: African religion, Cape Town, magic, sacred spaces, post-apartheid urban space, White South Africans, Wicca, witchcraf

Wynn, Peter Kirby (ed.). Boundless Worlds: An Anthropological Approach to Movement

WYNN, PETER KIRBY (ed.). Boundless Worlds: An Anthropological Approach to Movement. New York: Berghahn Books, 2009. Pp. 232. ISBN: 978-1-84545-538-5

Afrikaners and the Boundaries of Faith in Post-Apartheid South Africa

This book examines the shifting moral and spiritual lives of white Afrikaners in South Africa after apartheid. The end of South Africa’s apartheid system of racial and spatial segregation sparked wide-reaching social change as social, cultural, spatial and racial boundaries were transgressed and transformed. This book investigates how Afrikaners have mediated the country’s shifting boundaries within the realm of religion. For instance, one in every three Afrikaners used these new freedoms to leave the traditional Dutch Reformed Church (NGK), often for an entirely new religious affiliation within the Pentecostal or Charismatic churches, or New Religious Movements such as Wiccan neopaganism. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Western Cape area, the book investigates what spiritual life after racial totalitarianism means for the members of the ethnic group that constructed and maintained that very totalitarianism. Ultimately, the book asks how these new Afrikaner religious practices contribute to social solidarity and integration in a persistently segregated society, and what they can tell us about racial relations in the country today. This book will be of interest to scholars of religious studies, social and cultural anthropology and African studies

Challenges in publishing: producing, assuring and communicating quality

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Afrikaners and the Boundaries of Faith in Post-Apartheid South Africa

This book examines the shifting moral and spiritual lives of white Afrikaners in South Africa after apartheid. The end of South Africa’s apartheid system of racial and spatial segregation sparked wide-reaching social change as social, cultural, spatial and racial boundaries were transgressed and transformed. This book investigates how Afrikaners have mediated the country’s shifting boundaries within the realm of religion. For instance, one in every three Afrikaners used these new freedoms to leave the traditional Dutch Reformed Church (NGK), often for an entirely new religious affiliation within the Pentecostal or Charismatic churches, or New Religious Movements such as Wiccan neopaganism. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Western Cape area, the book investigates what spiritual life after racial totalitarianism means for the members of the ethnic group that constructed and maintained that very totalitarianism. Ultimately, the book asks how these new Afrikaner religious practices contribute to social solidarity and integration in a persistently segregated society, and what they can tell us about racial relations in the country today. This book will be of interest to scholars of religious studies, social and cultural anthropology and African studies

A mall for all? Race and public space in post-apartheid Cape Town

International audienceThis article analyses post-apartheid public spaces through social and spatial practices at the Victoria & Alfred (V&A) Waterfront mall in Cape Town. Our empirical evidence suggests that these public spaces involve much more than just consumption patterns, as they sustain and support novel ways of asserting social identities in a new political situation. These changes are, however, quite complex and fraught with ambivalence. Consequently, we scrutinize how race is staged in that space, and how racial diversity produces various kinds of boundaries. We then argue that these urban practices lead us to an understanding of the precarious balance between private and public spaces. We propose the notion of `publicization' -- the process whereby private spaces acquire a more public dimension

"Poor Whites" Do Matter

WOS:000325188500009Peer reviewe

Forest management planning as a tool to enhance biodiversity protection

Non peer reviewe