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Els Hoorelbeke

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Address: Parkstraat 45 (P.O. Box 3615), 3000 Leuven
Room: 04.39
Phone: 016/323185
E-mail: Els.Hoorelbeke@soc.kuleuven.be
Website: http://soc.kuleuven.be/iara

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Doctorate: In January 2007 Els Hoorelbeke joined the IARA research project Beyond the Border: The Political Ecology of the Kunene Frontier, 1850-1950. Funded by the Research Foundation Flanders and directed by Prof. Steven Van Wolputte, the project probes into the history and anthropology of an arid and mountainous border zone in north-western Namibia and south-western Angola. More specifically, it looks at what happened on both the northern and the southern bank of the Kunene river during the onset and consolidation of colonial rule in the region (1850-1950). Combining political ecology thoughts with an approach based on notions such as subjectivity and subjunctivity, the project wants to go beyond the state as central focus of analysis and to offer some innovative analytical entries for both colonial anthropology and political ecology. It aims for a dynamic genealogy of the ‘borderscape’: a tribology (the study of friction, wear, lubrication, the science of interacting surfaces in relative motion) of the different agents in the region, each with his or her own ambitions, hopes, fears, frustrations, norms, values and worldviews, within and in interaction with the landscape - which thus not only contributes to shape (colonial) history but is also always in a state of being shaped by those dialectical interplays of actions and perceptions of the different individuals and groups. Concretely, Els Hoorelbeke’s research focuses on the making of the border landscape between Angola and Namibia. More in particular, it probes into the Dhimba memory and history of social and political changes.
Research: Grounded in the Beyond the Border-project, this research probes into the experiences of past life in south-western Angola and north(-west)ern Namibia and how these are remembered and lived through nowadays. Attempting to bring a phenomenological and political ecological stance into historical anthropology, the study examines praise songs, local histories and memories of colonisation as clues to the dynamic and interdependent making of landscape and lifeworld in the Dhimba community in Namibia. Interviews are combined with participant observation so as to situate painful accounts of violence, entertaining songs about heros or cattle, and lengthy ‘magic realistic’ stories of e.g. the Kuvale war (1940-1941) into the lived complexity of today’s (ever-)changing world and the negotiated character of history. The dialectics of bodily ways of knowing and discursive knowledge, of uncertainty and control all make part of the focus. One specific research question relates to the border, what it is made to mean by different interest groups (locals, representatives of the states) throughout time and what the interplay of those meanings implicates for landscape and lives.

Through multi-sited fieldwork, different case studies are met along the way, and different threads as reached on in interviews and interactions are followed (to eg Ovahakaona, Ovahimba, Ovatjavikwa, Ovankumbi, Ovangambwe, Ovadongona, Portuguese, English, German and Afrikaner people). Archival research in Namibia, Angola and Portugal plays here a complementary methodological role.
Link to Lirias: Publications