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employed on-site. The Platfontein community’s role as ‘hosts’ at Wildebeest Kuil is strongly founded on their capacity as custodians of the site.
Morris, Bafana Ndebele and Petrus Wilson were key informants as were Platfontein community leaders Zeka Shiwarra (Khwe leadership) and Reverend Mario Mahongo (!Xun leadership). Originating as an ethnographic research method and now widely used in other social science research, the key informant technique depicts the use of qualitative, in-depth interviews conducted with informants who are expert sources of information (Marshall 1996;
Burgess 1989). Otherwise described as ‘strategic informants’, key informants have first-hand knowledge of a topic/area of study and “as a result of their personal skills, or position within a society, are able to provide more information and a deeper insight into what is going on around them” (1996:92).
As the curator at the site, having worked in the South African museum sphere for a number of years and having published on the topic of rock art in terms of heritage and on Wildebeest Kuil in particular, Morris was a valuable source of information. Ndebele and Wilson’s years as employees at Wildebeest Kuil meant that they possessed an acute understanding of the everyday functioning and goings-on of the site. Community leaders Shiwarra and Mahongo are members of the Wildebeest Kuil Steering Committee as well as the !Xun and Khwe Communal Property Association. Their involvement in multiple areas of leadership meant that they had access to much community-related information. At important note is that the research differs from pure ethnography in that it does not fully satisfy the requirements of long-term anthropological study. Rather, regularised research trips provided a manner in which to engage in a longitudinal study and contend with the institutional and economic challenges of the global South (cf. Dyll-Myklebust 2011; Tomaselli, Dyll & Francis 2008).
Visits to the field included short-term trips, approximately every six months.
Fieldwork was conducted under the auspices of the Centre for Communication, Media and Society’s (CCMS) Rethinking Indigeneity Project in which researchers participate in fieldtrips to the main subject communities (the !Xun and Khwe, the ≠Khomani and the !Xoo).
Since its inception in 1995 the project has involved nearly 230 postgraduate students from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a number of local and international affiliates in a range of
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research topics14 explored together with indigenous communities. Research themes include representation, identity construction, and development of marginalised communities (cf.
Tomaselli 2012, 2001, 1999). For a number of years the focus had been predominantly on the
≠Khomani of the Northern Cape and to a lesser extent the !Xoo of Botswana as subject communities. Research on the !Xun and Khwe began much later in the project, the earliest of which was conducted in 2006 (cf. Hart 2006; Mhlanga 2006). The research output of the larger project aims, among other things, to include both researcher and researched “in elaborating perspectives that are always in dialogue with each other” (Tomaselli et al.
2008:368). Research subjects/participants are written into the text and reference is made to ways in which they engage with researchers and by extension the research (Dyll 2003;
McLennan-Dodd 2003a). The contradictions of academic discourse and knowledge production are exposed in open discussion of the research process, therefore drawing attention to the impact of interactions and encounters with informants in shaping and structuring “texts, argument, and explanations” (Tomaselli et al. 2008:353; Mboti 2012).
Paradigms and approaches framing the study
The qualitative research methodology employed in this study involves an interpretive and naturalistic approach to the subject matter. Empirical data was collected by means of interviews, interactions and observations within a case study design. With its ability to provide rich insight into human behaviour, qualitative data is often used to evidence the epistemic and ontological underpinnings of subjects’ actions, behaviours, thoughts and processes of meaning-making (cf. Denzin & Lincoln 2005). Certainly, qualitative data is
“useful for uncovering emic views” (Guba & Lincoln, 1994:106); more specifically, it is the ontological objective of qualitative research to understand the complex world of lived experience from the emic point of view. In this way qualitative methodologies may redress the disjuncture between grand theories and local contexts—the etic/emic dilemma where the proposed hypothesis of the outsider investigating a group or community may have little or no meaning/bearing on the emic (insider) perspective (cf. Denzin & Lincoln 2005). The provision of contextual information offered within qualitative data may also redress the imbalance that occurs with ‘context stripping’ in which selected variables and sub-sets are the
14 The combined project “encompasses a number of topics, including representation, cultural tourism, development, media, identity, marginalization, and auto-ethnographic methodology as a topic in its own right”
(Tomaselli et al. 2008:351).
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foci in an exclusionary and controlled quantitative design (ibid). Qualitative research is organised by certain key paradigms: positivism, post-positivism, constructivism and critical theory to name a few (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). This research has been conducted from a constructivist/interpretivist perspective which holds that meaning is found in interpretation and that to prepare an interpretation is to construct a reading of the meanings research subjects/participants attribute to phenomena (ibid). The final work is thus a self-aware
“construction of the constructions of the actors one studies” (Schwandt, 1998:223).
The research tracks paradigm changes within an institutional setting concerning practices of heritage-making, interpretation and presentation. The trajectory of these institutional changes is pursued in relation to a southern African approach to cultural studies. The following section offers a discussion of cultural studies, the prevailing approach of this study, which by virtue of its abiding concerns is inherently interpretivist. The study objectives include an exploration into the host community’s engagement and presentation at Wildebeest Kuil;
negotiations of this presentation; power relations between the hosts and site management in this regard; obstacles to community involvement; and the role of the project at Wildebeest Kuil in the life of the community at Platfontein. Power structures, representation, belonging and identity politics are themes central to the focus of cultural studies.
The cultural studies paradigm
Cultural studies “designates a wide-ranging and expanding domain of research questions concerning processes and structures of sense-making and, more specifically, the way in which ‘sense’ becomes ‘lived’ in practices of everyday life” (Van Loon, 2001:273). Having splintered from the discipline of English, present-day cultural studies is multi-disciplinary15 in nature, borrowing method and theory from disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, political science, psychology, and development studies. The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies became the crucible of this field of study with an interest in resistance forged in the 1970s; the Centre focussed on contemporary society and their associated popular cultures considered by most disciplines at the time as unworthy of academic enquiry (cf. Hartley 2003; Saukko 2003; During 1999). Cultural studies “was on
15 Method as technique, approach, commitment and epistemology do not belong to any one discipline. Even while some methods are developed in certain disciplines these are often taken up by others and used as and where appropriate. Therefore, regardless of epistemological differences the “methods by which we collect and analyze our data belong to everyone across the social sciences” (Bernard, 1998:14).
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the lookout for the workings of power, curious about the everyday as a symptom of something else—struggles, ideologies, oppressions, [and] power structures” (Hartley, 2003:121). The cultural studies approach to empirical research is often characterised by an interest in the interplay between lived experience, discursive mediation and the socio-political landscape arising out of the humanism, structuralism and new leftism of the 1970s (cf.
Hartley 2003; Williams 1995; Hall 1990). These currents:
…enabled cultural studies to articulate a mediating space between right-wing optimism and left-wing pessimism that allowed the paradigm to examine how people’s everyday life was strife with creative and critical potential, while their lives and imagination were also constrained by problematic cultural ideologies as well as structures of social inequality. (Saukko, 2003:13)
This mediating space in an otherwise polarised setting was not without its problems.
Discrepancies arose between a desire to understand the life worlds of other cultural groups and a “distanced, critical structuralist interest in ‘analysing’ linguistic tropes, which guide people’s perceptions and understanding” (Saukko, 2003:13). Furthermore, interest in the cultures and language that mediate our perceptions of reality is in contradiction with the tendency to make statements about the social and political situation “which is always, to an extent, wedded to a realist quest to find out how the world or reality simply ‘is’” (ibid). The positivist notion of scientific objectivity, while placating these concerns during the early days of cultural studies, proved less helpful in the face of developments often grouped under postmodernity, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, late capitalism, globalisation and neo- liberalism (cf. Rose 1999; Tomlinson 1999; Jameson 1991; Baudrillard 1983).
Three historical and social developments have indirectly worked to form present-day cultural studies, giving rise to innovative research and methodological orientations. Firstly, since the 1960s institutions such as the state, the media and educational bodies have been accused of institutionalised discrimination (Saukko, 2003). Researchers have been criticised for depicting marginalised and minority groups in ways that validate already established western theories (cf. Welsch & Endicott, 2003). Secondly, a critique of technologically advanced societies’ experience is that there exists a loss of the distinction between public and private
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space, thus ‘imploding’ a subject-object distinction (Best, 1995:51) in a hyperreal16 space
“where everything is exposed to the harsh and inexorable light of information and communication” (Baudrillard, 1990:130). The ‘real’ is therefore “no longer real”
(Baudrillard, 1988:np) since simulacra (copies without a referent) have become abiding artificial referentials (Baudrillard 1988, 1983). This phenomenon has advanced critical discourse on objectivity (Saukko, 2003). Thirdly, the collapse of state-run socialism in Eastern Europe and the rise of Western democracy across the globe brought a:
…new division between an exhilarated talk about multiculturalism and the possibilities of creating and disseminating alternative, previously silenced knowledges [sic] and cultures, and steep inequalities and mistrust and feuding between different groups of people. (Saukko, 2003:14; cf. Castells 1996, 1997, 1998)
African cultural and media studies (CMS) followed with its own critical explorations of race, struggles for democracy, post-colonialism, popular participation and issues of indigeneity (cf.
Tomaselli & Wright 2010; Wright 2004, 1998, 1996; Ngugi 1986, 1981; Fanon17 1967, 1963). Described as a variant of African CMS (Tomaselli & Mboti, 2013), the Centre for Communication, Media and Society (CCMS) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal was founded in 1985 as the Contemporary Cultural Studies Unit at the then University of Natal.
The teaching and research output of the centre was originally based on the work of the Birmingham Centre but developed a critical indigenous approach over time (Tomaselli, 2012). Cultural studies at the time arose from “Marxist reworking of literary criticism, to develop a broader and less economically dogmatic form of social and political criticism”
(Shepperson, 1996:np). Popular and varied forms of expression were studied as texts in relation to wider socio-political trends. While this presented innovative means of theorising about the Global North, cultural studies in the South African context had to contend with conditions “rooted in a much more violent history of dispossession and exploitation than existing cultural studies approaches were able to explain” (ibid). The approach developed by CCMS during the 1980s took on an activist role, critiquing the dominant discourse of the apartheid government and providing “a fertile ground for an Africanisation of cultural and media studies within the Southern African context” (ibid; cf. Tomaselli 2001, 1998a, 1998b).
16 Baudrillard defines the hyperreal as “a real without origin or reality” (1983:2).
17 Although not a cultural studies scholar himself, Frantz Fanon’s work has been influential in this field and others where studies of anti- and post-colonialism are pursued.
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In the post-apartheid era, the Centre’s approach had moved from one of resistance to reconstruction.18 The Rethinking Indigeneity area of study includes the analysis of failed development projects in indigenous communities where implementations were based on neoliberal Western models (cf. Dicks 2011; Dyll-Myklebust 2011; Finlay 2009a, 2009b).
Where Western methodologies are found lacking in the African context such a perspective offers a critical analysis and re-making of dominant literature and theory (Tomaselli, Rønning
& Mboti, 2013). Research is conducted together with a number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and tourism institutions across the country and is geared to “shaping outcomes along the way… and cautioning power” (2013:12). Critique is focussed on host, subject and partner community beneficiation while simultaneously “retaining a critical distance from new hegemonies, and recognising the value that indigenous ontologies, essentialist as they may be, can bring to the academic table” (ibid).
The present study utilises cultural studies as an “umbrella discourse for undertaking a critical approach” to heritage tourism as it is employed at Wildebeest Kuil (Ryba & Wright, 2005:201). Since the case study details heritage-making at a site with a host community previously disadvantaged and presently under economic strain there is a critical concern pertaining to “the historical, social and political commitments of those discourses that direct people’s, including scholar’s, understanding of themselves and their projects” (Saukko, 2003:14–15). Borrowing from ethnography has proven useful to the task. Typically dated to the Pacific Island studies of Bronislaw Malinowski (1922) and Margaret Mead (1949), the scientific tradition of ethnography is evidenced by a researcher:
…participating overtly or covertly in people’s daily lives for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions—in fact, collecting whatever data are available to throw light on the issues with which he or she is concerned. (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995:2)
Primarily, the influence of cultural studies on ethnography has been that the latter has become both a subject and an instrument of “a continuous process of critical engagement with our own being-in-the-world, beyond the taking for granted of that which already exists” (Van
18 In light of the growing civil unrest in South Africa in recent years, the centre may find itself on the side of resistance once more.
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Loon, 2001:273). In giving voice to the indigenous in the academic text, re-working models based on autistic economic theory, and engaging with theory from the southern African context the work of southern African CMS decolonises “cultural studies’ tendency towards synchronic theoreticism”, ensuring that the oftentimes marginalised Other is not abstracted into First and Second World theory to the point of erasure (Tomaselli, 2005:38).
Ethnographic elements are present in the methods employed and descriptions from the field.
These field descriptions are written in a reflexive form which helps to reveal processes of conducting research with indigenous communities that are often concealed from the academic text (Dyll-Myklebust, 2011). The result is a “process of civil, participatory collaboration that joins the researcher with the researched in an ongoing moral dialogue” (Mhiripiri, 2009:81;
cf. Tomaselli et al. 2008; Denzin & Lincoln 2005).
Research within the Rethinking Indigeneity Project, in which the present study is situated, subscribes to an indigenous epistemology (cf. Tomaselli et al. 2008). Such an epistemology, postcolonial in nature, is driven by a process of decolonising research which involves
“conducting research in such a way that the worldviews of those who have suffered a long history of oppression and marginalisation are given space to communicate from their frames of reference” (Chilisa, 2012:14). A postcolonial indigenous research paradigm is a framework of belief systems emanating from the lived experiences, histories and values of those marginalised and subordinated by Euro-Western research paradigms. Such a paradigm
“articulates the shared aspects of ontology, epistemology, axiology, and research methodologies of the colonized Other” and acknowledges the “colonizing effect of Eurocentric research paradigms” (Chilisa, 2012:19–20).