Essentialism and the Indigenous Politics of Recognition in Southern Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT In this essay, I explore familiar tensions between anthropological theories of identity and activism on behalf of indigenous causes, with special attention to strategic uses of theoretically dubious forms of essentialism. I examine the contradictions between essentialism and constructionism, and between recognition and redistribution, in light of San struggles for rights to traditional territories in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) in Botswana. I begin by outlining how the politics of theorizing in an apartheid context imposed a false choice between essentialist and deconstructionist views of identity. I then discuss the controversial relocation of San from the CKGR and how the opposition between an essentialist politics of recognition and a deconstructionist emphasis on redistribution framed public debates. I show how the competing positions shared a racial epistemology that requires us to see San as “prepolitical” people transitioning into a modern world, and in conclusion, I suggest that this shared epistemology sustains a racialized politics of recognition.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".