Why and when should we (not) distinguish between academic and therapeutic discourses on the past? A response to Burnett et al.’s ‘Indigenous resurgence, collective “reminding”, and insidious binaries’

ABSTRACT

In this final response to Burnett et al., I make my case for why and when we should and should not distinguish between academic and therapeutic discourses on the past when studying how marginalized people engage with the past. Whereas Burnett et al. regard this as an ‘insidious binary’, I point to various reasons for why it is productive to think through these categories as productive, albeit imperfect analytical lenses.

KEYWORDS:

• Therapeutic history; academic historiography; indigenous people; settler colonialism; historical discourse; indigenous resurgence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Research Foundation Flanders: [Grant Number 12ZT622N].

Notes on contributors

Rafael Verbuyst

Rafael Verbuyst holds a joint PhD in History and Anthropology. He is currently a Junior Postdoctoral Researcher at Ghent University's History Department and a Senior Research Affiliate at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg. His research focuses on the revival of indigenous identity in post-apartheid South Africa, land (re)claims, settler colonialism, decolonization and resistance, ethnographic methodology, the political uses of the past and the concept of indigeneity. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in South Africa since 2014. He is the author of Khoisan Consciousness: An Ethnography of Emic Histories and Indigenous Revivalism in Post-Apartheid Cape Town (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2022).