Paper short abstract:

The present paper discusses the constructive role funerals play in South African political struggles for land restitution. Our work is based on ethnographic research in Kwazulu-Natal among Landless Peoples Movement activists whose major aim is to reach their land back: a land from where they were evicted but where their ancestors remain deeply grounded. In their struggle to bury their relatives in farms that belong to white farmers, LPM´s activists settle a political claim and at the same time challenge our modernist concept of history for which the past is unreachable. The active presence of their ancestors in their actual lives continually reshapes their attachment to the land and therefore their projects for the future.

Paper long abstract:

In Kwazulu-Natal, as in many other parts of South Africa, different social movements settle their claims in order to challenge inequality. Many make their claims having ¨places¨ as political targets. Land in rural and urban areas is a main issue of dispute, since spatial segregation was the fundamental base for apartheid and former regimes of racial discrimination. Nowadays, while waiting for a slow restitution process, LPM activists in KZN wave many flags: the most important is the right to bury their relatives in farms from where they were former evicted. Usually LPM members have to settle judicial claims when farm owners don't allow them to bury their deceased relatives in old burial sites where their ancestors stay. A funeral becomes a political battle. Although considered successful if finally performed in the envisioned farm, in many occasions the judges deliberate against the plea and the burial must be performed in other place. In a context marked by rampant death having the land back means not only your own piece of ground but a different way to guarantee a futureexistence to any beloved person who passes away. In the present paper we analyze some rituals we have attended in order to discuss the anthropological implication of both ancestor´s presence as active subjects in the contemporary world and land as a plastic ground for human experience. Along with LPM members theories on historical transformation we aim to discuss a persistent modernist vision of history as a lineal succession of events.