The University of Johannesburg welcomed the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies’ Professor Joost Fontein into its Professorship. His inauguration ceremony presided over by Vice-Chancellor functionary, Dries Pretorious (UJ General Council) and the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities Professor Kammila Naidoo celebrated his contribution to academia and society.
Professor Fontein is a published author of three monographs, one recently published collaborative book, numerous special issues and journal articles, and editor of several leading African Studies journals. He delivered a talk titled; “Human-ness, Excessivity & Stuff: Some thoughts on subjunctive anthropology and the future of ethnographic museums”.
Pretorious celebrated the lecture as a “proud moment”.
“This is indeed a proud, joyful and landmark moment for Professor Fontein, for us here at UJ, for higher education in South Africa, and beyond.”
He further reflected on the importance of the professorial inauguration, and how it has its roots in the mediaeval University. Pretorious added that while Prof Fontein has been a professor for some time now, this inauguration serves to formally introduce him to his colleagues at UJ.
One world ethnographic museums and subjunctive museology
Professor Fontein began his lecture by discussing humanism and the materiality turn, and taking stock of what museums have been and what their mission has been up to this point. This, he discussed in relation to the discipline of social anthropology and museology exploring how both can move forward.
“Like anthropology, ethnographic museums remain, for many people, something of a problem. Weighed down with the dubious legacies of their accumulating colonial pasts, and doomed, it seems, to endlessly fix people and things into artificial geographies of difference and exclusion, their futures often seem limited to reacting to and undoing (to the extent that they are able) some of the more nefarious effects of their difficult pasts. The problem is at once both conceptual and material; and is often hindered by policies and politics that seem antithetical to each other,” he said.
Prof Joost provided a solution to this, in what he called subjunctive anthropology and museology.
“I imagine a future for ethnographic museums that is heavy less with the weight of past legacies demanding resolution than with the promise of future possibilities. Contingent, multi-modal and emergent; shaped but not determined by the presence of multiple temporalities and diverse could be. In short, a museum orientated as much towards what happens next, as towards the troubling remnants of yesterday and today,” he said.
A citizen of planet Earth: academically and otherwise
Always searching for the margins, wherever they appear, Prof Fontein found himself reading anthropology in Scotland, where he made some lifelong friends with many others also looking for the creative possibilities that come from movement, migration and the edges of life. With a heavy dub bass line rapidly shaping the sound track and temporalities of his life, he travelled far, widely and determinedly, until he found himself in Zimbabwe. There he spent many long hours, over many years, talking to and living with people who were deeply preoccupied with their lost pasts, lands and sacred places. These experiences forged more Iifelong friendships, helped him learn to speak yet another language, ChiShona, and fed into his doctoral writing which was published as his first book in 2006: The Silence of Great Zimbabwe.
He continued learning from the people of Masvingo, in southern Zimbabwe, even as he found himself teaching anthropology at Edinburgh. With restless, itchy feet and never one to take the artificial boundaries of geography, class, race or citizenship any more seriously than they deserve (which in his view, is not very much at all), when an opportunity came to move to East Africa in 2014, he jumped without hesitation. Soon after publishing his second monograph on Zimbabwe, Remaking Mutirikwi, and already deeply drawn into what he sometimes calls ‘the macabre phase’ of his research – the writing of his third monograph, The Politics of the Dead – he found himself increasingly drawn to the sharp erudition, optimistic confidence, contradictions, and lively energy of the always emergent city of Nairobi. There he found intellectual inspiration amongst that city’s creative thinkers and doers, leading to a series of exhibitions at the National Museum of Kenya, and more recently, another book, Nairobi Becoming, assembled in collaboration with many new lifelong friends and colleagues in East Africa. A month in exile in Dar es Salam helped Joost improve his nascent Kiswahili, much needed as he continues work on his fourth monograph, Nairobi Materialities.
As the egg timer of life ticked on, he found himself in South Africa, teaching and learning from students and colleagues at the University of Johannesburg, where The Politics of the Dead was published in 2022, followed by Nairobi Becoming earlier this year. Never content with focusing only on the conceptual creativity of his own word-smithery, Joost has, through the years, devoted much time and energy to the writings of others both as educator and as editor, having edited the Journal of Southern African Studies, cofounded a journal called Critical African Studies, and currently as editor of the leading anthropology journal about this enormously diverse and exciting continent, Africa. But thought and creativity are not limited to language or text, and in his non-professional life he plays with paint and with sound, running a radio show and a sound system. Impatient to see and engage with the creative possibilities of all people and places, he aspires to keep moving across and learning from the place he calls home, our one world.
Watch the full ceremony here:
