Rhodes University Anthropology Department

20/05/2026

Some visuals from Monday’s transcultural wellness essay topic pechakuches

11/05/2026

09/05/2026

Rhodes University Open Day 2026

09/05/2026

Big shoutout to the dream team of honours and masters students who showed up, held it dow, answered every “so what do you actually do in Anthropology?” question for so many times, and somehow still smiled through it all.

And of course to our lecturer, part academic, part hockey coach, part event manager, who guided this dream tea through the day like a captain leading a well practiced team.

Open day reminded us that anthropology is not just about theories and readings. It is about people, stories, curiosity, and learning how to see the world a little differently.

Well done and thank you to this amazing team!

Thank you RUHumanities for featuring us.

06/05/2026

Two conversations. One shared commitment to rethinking how knowledge lives in the world.

Our department is proud to announce a pair of events that speak to each other in powerful ways.

The first invites you into an interactive exhibition that treats the museum as a living space for health. It draws on indigenous plant knowledge, nutrition, and community practice to ask what healing looks like beyond the clinic. This is not just about heritage. It is about how knowledge travels, who it serves, and how it can be made useful in the present.

The second brings us into a different but equally urgent dialogue around disability. Centering lived experience, social work, and media, it challenges the quiet assumptions that shape how ability is understood and valued. It asks us to listen differently and to rethink what inclusion actually requires in practice.

Taken together, these events push us to confront a shared question. How do we build worlds that recognise different ways of knowing, different ways of being, and different ways of caring for one another

Please join us as we continue these conversations in community.

Dates, times, and venues are on the posters.

Come through, bring your questions, and be part of the dialogue.

04/05/2026

Our 2026 Honours students, working within the course Transcultural Approaches to Wellness and Wellbeing, spent a day last week moving through Kenton, Klipfontein, and Ekuphumleni with a simple but demanding task: to take seriously what walking does to perception.

Not sightseeing, not collecting impressions, but allowing the pace of the body to unsettle what feels obvious about place.

What counts as wellness here, and for whom? Where does it sit, and where does it refuse to sit? In the textures of everyday life, in infrastructures that hold or fail, in histories that remain unevenly distributed across the landscape. The route itself began to ask these questions.

The walk to the ocean, held in silence, was not an exercise in calm so much as an encounter with limit. Without conversation to fill the space, attention shifts. The sea does not present itself as metaphor or escape. It insists on its own presence, its own rhythms, its own indifference.

Anthropology often begins in these moments where certainty thins out. Where place is no longer something to describe from a distance, but something that presses back, that complicates, that demands a different kind of listening.

28/04/2026

We are pleased to see our colleague Dr Gabriel Gyang Darong joining an upcoming seminar in an international lecture series.

If you’d like to be part of the conversation, you can access the session through the link attached on our Instagram story.

Please join at 18:15 SAST (UTC+2)

23/04/2026

Snippets from our 2026 Honours and PGDip cohort as they completed their research proposal presentations on Monday and Tuesday.

A clear first step into postgraduate work.

The department wishes these emerging scholars all the best for the year ahead!

22/04/2026

Anthropology has long understood that recognition is never only about the individual. It is shaped by relationships, by structures, and by the often unseen forms of care that make sustained intellectual work possible. Over time, this department has worked to build an environment in which postgraduate students are not only enrolled, but meaningfully supported, guided with care, and challenged with rigour as they develop as scholars.

This is not the work of a few individuals alone. It is sustained by the collective labour of everyone who contributes to the life of the department, from academic staff and supervisors, to administrative colleagues, to institutional partners and families who make continued study possible. Each person plays a role in holding this work together, often in ways that are not always visible but remain essential.

The Del and Doreen Gillam Postgraduate Award reflects this wider commitment. It recognises that postgraduate study is relational, and that intellectual work depends on systems of support that extend beyond the student alone. Luyolo Gqezengele, supervised by Dr Melusi Dlamini, carries this forward as the first recipient in 2026.

We acknowledge the Gillam family for their generosity in establishing the award, and we recognise all those whose daily work sustains the department as a whole, including colleagues, students, and partners who continue to shape its intellectual and institutional life.

As the department of Anthropology, we recognise this achievement, and the collective effort that stands behind it.

Well done, Luyolo!

Frame 7 - From left: John Gillam and his wife, Jeanette, Luyolo Gqezengele, Ms Des Bekker (Office Administrator), and Professor Pascall Taruvinga (Head of Department).

18/04/2026

“each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” frantz fanon, 1961

there is something profound about watching people you have sat beside in seminars, debated with over readings, and grown alongside in ways that only this discipline makes possible, walk across a stage and into the next chapter of their lives.

anthropology does not just teach you about the world. it teaches you how to feel it differently, how to hold other people’s realities with the kind of care that most fields do not even think to ask for. and perhaps that is why a moment like graduation feels so weighted here. because we are trained to see the full picture.

this past graduation season, our department sent some of its finest minds out into that world. first degrees, honours, and doctorates earned not just through academic rigour but through a genuine willingness to be changed by what they studied. that is the mark of a real anthropologist.

and the full picture is this. a department is an ecosystem, and a graduation belongs to everyone inside it. every member of this department, in every capacity and every role, contributed to making this possible. you held the tone, the ideas, the logistics, the voices, and the spaces that allowed greatness to grow here. you are all woven into every single one of these achievements, and this department is what it is because of all of you.

to every graduate, you did not just earn a qualification. you earned your place in a long and important conversation, and the world is better for it.

congratulations. 🎓