Race, Animal Bodies and Religion: Sacrifice, Sensory Politics and Public Space in South Africa

Abstract

In South Africa, previous analyses of religious nationalism turn on the apartheid regime and its close ties to the Dutch Reformed Church. Since the fall of apartheid, democracy and pluralism have been emphasized as the discourse of the new South Africa, which aims to accommodate all of South Africa’s many religious traditions. Together with decades of neoliberal economic policy, the outcome is that in South Africa private individuals and organizations make claims on public spaces as rate-payers and property-owners, in the process revealing normative assumptions about proper and improper religions. Drawing attention to two instances of the manipulation of animal bodies in public spaces, the chapter reveals the close connections between religion, animal sacrifice, racial hierarchy and conflicts over the use of and access to public spaces. The public practice of animal sacrifice reveals the existence of a sensory politics enacted by marginalized groups through which entrenched normativities about proper and improper bodies, substances and religions are contested in the name of a future nation to come.