Bodies of Truth

Rita Kesselring is Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Social Anthropology at the University of Basel, Switzerland.

• Introduction1. Apartheid Victimhood before the Courts2. Reparation, Representation, and Class Actions3. Embodied Memory and the Social4. The Formation of the Political5. Emancipation from Victimhood6. Ethnographic Experience and Anthropological KnowledgeConclusion: The Embodiment of Experiences of Violence as Seeds of New Forms of Sociality

"Bodies of Truth is essential reading for all those interested in the twenty-year aftermath of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Kesselring's innovative ethnography with victims seeking redress in the South African and U.S. Courts examines the limits of law and also makes a powerful case for the transformative potential of new forms of shared sociality. The imaginative combination of the anthropology of law and the body to understand the after-effects of violence in people's lives makes this a ground-breaking work."—Richard Ashby Wilson, author of The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa "Deeply serious and imaginative, Bodies of Truth connects anthropology of law and anthropology of the body. Rita Kesselring reveals that even when much is achieved legally in the struggle for transitional justice, bodily experiences of victimhood continue to haunt the victims, and endemic, systematic violence continues to shape the political sphere long after it has ended. Kesselring presents readers with ways in which liberation from habitual victimhood might be achieved."—Paul Connerton, University of Cambridge "In capturing the difficulty of understanding pain, Kesselring's subtle, challenging ethnography will make essential reading for any scholar trying to understand the challenges of coming to terms with victimhood and its aftermath and will be particularly important reading for scholars of apartheid and its wake."—Nicholas Rush Smith, Anthropological Quarterly "Bodies of Truth is essential reading for anyone interested in victims' quests for financial reparations since the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission finalized its work in 1998. Grounded in extensive transnational ethnography with a national victims' group that participated in class action lawsuits in the South African and US courts, Rita Kesselring's inventive monograph identifies the limits of law in recognizing and ameliorating harms committed by official agents of the avowedly racist apartheid government....Crucially, because Bodies of Truth integrates recent developments in the anthropology of the body with long-standing concerns about vernacular understandings of the law, this imaginative combination makes it a ground-breaking work."—Richard Ashby Wilson, American Ethnologist