Dr Ilana van Wyk

Ilana van Wyk

My first fieldwork in 2000-2001 was conducted among Zulu-speaking people in Maputaland, a rural corner of South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province. As part of a former apartheid ‘homeland’, the area’s inhabitants were economically and politically marginalised and as such became the focus of a new government’s multi-billion Rand Spatial Development Initiative. During my eighteen month research project, I focussed on issues of land, local ideas of nature conservation, re-traditionalisation, gender conflict and the commercialisation of ethnicity in the face of tourism development.

In 2004 I returned to KwaZulu-Natal to do more fieldwork. This time I spent eighteen months in the bustling metropolitan city of Durban doing research on a Pentecostal-Charismatic church (PCC) of Brazilian origins. The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) opened its first branch in South Africa in 1993, one year before the country’s first democratic elections. Post-apartheid, large numbers of marginalised black people streamed to the church to claim luxury houses situated in previously whites-only suburbs, BMW’s, and designer clothes. The UCKG quickly became one of the fastest growing churches in South Africa. It is in this context that I paid attention to the church’s spectacular prosperity gospel, churchgoers’ understandings of their bodies, local ontologies, witchcraft, rumours, and money.

Selected Papers and Forthcoming Publications

Forthcoming. “A church of strangers: The case of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) in Durban”

Forthcoming. “Gossiping demons and the snake in the baptismal font: Rumour and language in the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, Durban”

Forthcoming. “Gambling on God in post-apartheid South Africa: Money and sacrifice in the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God”

2007 (with A Boskovic). “Troubles with Identity: South African Anthropology, 1921–2005” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, vol 16.

2003. Land claims and corporate imitation: Brokering development in Maputaland, KwaZulu-Natal. Anthropology Southern Africa, vol 26, no 1/2:63-71.

2003. “The Elephants are Eating Our Money": A Critical Ethnography of Development Practice in Maputaland, South Africa. MA thesis. University of Pretoria.