Performing Natures and Land in the iSimangaliso Wetland Park, South Africa

Abstract

The article experiments with a performative approach to examine the changing relationships between humans, animals and flora around South Africa's first World Heritage Site as enacted, multiple realities. These relations are explored by using two strategies: first, describing the transformation of earlier sets of relationships into present-day conservation natures – from hunting, through preservation of big game, to the establishment of game reserves and later their transformation into contemporary conservation natures. The second part of the article shifts ordering strategy and tells of competing enactments in and around the park today. By using both these approaches, the article seeks to address the way in which some actors seem to be able to impose their version of nature to the exclusion of other realities.

Keywords:

• Conservation
• land
• performativity
• South Africa

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Marianne Lien and Simone Abram for their valuable comments on earlier drafts, as well as the two readers for Ethnos for their very helpful suggestions. Frode Sundnes has commented on several versions of the paper and provided constructive comments. Earlier versions of this paper have been presented at the Association for Social Anthropology meeting in Auckland, at the research Seminar Series at the Centre for African Studies, University of Cambridge and at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen. I wish to thank participants as these events for important inputs and ideas. Research on which this article was based was supported by the Norwegian Research Council grant no. 178798/S30.

Notes

He and other people we spoke to used the old apartheid name for what is today the Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife.