Public Research Presentation

Abstract:  This presentation takes the assassination of South African anthropologist and activist David Webster, murdered on May 1, 1989, as a point of departure for reflecting on the intersections between politics and disciplinary history in anthropology.  It examines the events that followed his death, including his funeral, the memorial held at the University of the Witwatersrand, letters of condolence, public tributes, and obituaries.  The paper seeks to understand how Webster's assassination became an emblematic event both in the political context of the end of apartheid and in the intellectual history of the discipline.  The episode reveals how the biography of an anthropologist, his public engagement, and his networks of intellectual solidarity became part of a collective memory and a site of symbolic dispute over anthropology's social role.  The presentation advances a reading that combines ethical, political, and historiographical dimensions, proposing Webster's assassination as a biographical event that illuminates the connections between political commitment and knowledge production in South Africa during the 1980s.