The Heart of the Cheetah: Biography, Identity and Social Change in North-western Namibia
22-09-2004 (Paris)
The collaboration between a filmmaker, an anthropologist and a translator has succeeded in making visible the often unacknowledged life-story of Cornelius Mukuena Tjiuma, a translator whose particular positioning as “cultural broker” between ethnographers and indigenous communities is unmapped.
In a new “Pont of View” for WebWorld, Joëlle Chesselet and Susan Levine, in collaboration with Cornelius Mukuena Tjiuma (a Himba nomadic herder and consultant/translator), explore the possibilities of biography for understanding the politics of geography over time and the role of the individual and the individuation process.
The particular life history of Mukuena Cornelius Tjiuma challenges the matrix of stereotypes that bind the Himba to reductionist versions of Himba culture that deny historical and potential processes of social change.
The paper aims to document how Mukuena’s biography provides a phenomenological map of the fault lines interfacing modernity and tradition despite the overt remoteness of the space in which it unfolds. In the context of a perceived threat to the integrity of Himba identity in northwestern Namibia and southern Angola, the authors chart the experiences of a boy who, through a chance knee injury and the journey that ensues, questions his allegiance to his father’s conservative expectations.
This biography forms part of a much larger collaborative project between the University of Cape Town, the University of Köln and independent documentary filmmakers and researchers Joëlle Chesselet and Craig Matthew that is entitled: “The Spatial Knowledge Archives Project: Proposal for Piloting Interactive Archives of Historical and Contemporary Ethnographic Data in the Kaokoveld (Namibia) and the Area Indigena do Uaca (Brazil)”.
Chesselet et al. are also implementing The Fountain of stories – Omu Yo Mahungi – The Kaoko Local Knowledge Living Archive Project, one of the six pilot initiatives supported by UNESCO within the context of its cross-cutting theme project ICT4ID: ICTs for Intercultural Dialogue - Developing communication capacities of indigenous communities.
Bibliographic reference:
Joëlle Chesselet, Susan Levine: The heart of the cheetah: Biography, identity and social change in north-western Namibia. in collaboration with Cornelius Mukuena Tjiuma, First publishe in : Anthropology Southern Africa, 2004, 27(1&2)
The particular life history of Mukuena Cornelius Tjiuma challenges the matrix of stereotypes that bind the Himba to reductionist versions of Himba culture that deny historical and potential processes of social change.
The paper aims to document how Mukuena’s biography provides a phenomenological map of the fault lines interfacing modernity and tradition despite the overt remoteness of the space in which it unfolds. In the context of a perceived threat to the integrity of Himba identity in northwestern Namibia and southern Angola, the authors chart the experiences of a boy who, through a chance knee injury and the journey that ensues, questions his allegiance to his father’s conservative expectations.
This biography forms part of a much larger collaborative project between the University of Cape Town, the University of Köln and independent documentary filmmakers and researchers Joëlle Chesselet and Craig Matthew that is entitled: “The Spatial Knowledge Archives Project: Proposal for Piloting Interactive Archives of Historical and Contemporary Ethnographic Data in the Kaokoveld (Namibia) and the Area Indigena do Uaca (Brazil)”.
Chesselet et al. are also implementing The Fountain of stories – Omu Yo Mahungi – The Kaoko Local Knowledge Living Archive Project, one of the six pilot initiatives supported by UNESCO within the context of its cross-cutting theme project ICT4ID: ICTs for Intercultural Dialogue - Developing communication capacities of indigenous communities.
Bibliographic reference:
Joëlle Chesselet, Susan Levine: The heart of the cheetah: Biography, identity and social change in north-western Namibia. in collaboration with Cornelius Mukuena Tjiuma, First publishe in : Anthropology Southern Africa, 2004, 27(1&2)
Related themes/countries
· Indigenous People and Information Society: News Archives 2004
· Namibia: News Archive
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- UNESCO
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