Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa

In 1997, M. E. R. Mathivha, an elder of the black Jewish Lemba people of South Africa, announced to the Lemba Cultural Association that a recent DNA study substantiated their ancestral connections to Jews. Lemba people subsequently leveraged their genetic test results to seek recognition from the post-apartheid government as indigenous Africans with rights to traditional leadership and land, retheorizing genetic ancestry in the process. In Genetic Afterlives, Noah Tamarkin illustrates how Lemba people give their own meanings to the results of DNA tests and employ them to manage competing claims of Jewish ethnic and religious identity, African indigeneity, and South African citizenship. Tamarkin turns away from genetics researchers' results that defined a single story of Lemba peoples' "true" origins and toward Lemba understandings of their own genealogy as multivalent. Guided by Lemba people's negotiations of their belonging as diasporic Jews, South African citizens, and indigenous Africans, Tamarkin considers new ways to think about belonging that can acknowledge the importance of historical and sacred ties to land without valorizing autochthony, borders, or other technologies of exclusion.

Author: Noah Tamarkin
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 10/16/2020
Pages: 280
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.83lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.59d
ISBN13: 9781478009689
ISBN10: 1478009683
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social
- History | Africa | South | Republic of South Africa
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | General

About the Author
Noah Tamarkin is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University and Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research.