Imagining the Post-Apartheid State

In north-west Namibia, local people’s political imagination offers a powerful insight into the post-apartheid state. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork, this book focuses on the former South African apartheid regime and the present democratic government; it compares the perceptions and practices of state and customary forms of judicial administration, reflects upon the historical trajectory of a chieftaincy dispute in relation to the rooting of state power, and examines everyday forms of belonging in the independent Namibian State. By elucidating the State through a focus on the social, historical, and cultural processes that help constitute it, this study helps chart new territory for anthropology, and it contributes an ethnographicperspective to a wider set of interdisciplinary debates on the State and state processes.