New Publication: ‘Farming God’s Way’ in Post-Apartheid South Africa
CAS guest researcher Hans Olsson has published a new article in the Journal of Southern African Studies, examining 'Evangelical Cosmologies of Land and ‘Crisis’ in Post-Apartheid South Africa'.
Centre of African Studies guest researcher and former Marie Curie fellow Hans Olsson has published an article in the Journal of Southern African Studies: ‘Farming God’s Way’: Evangelical Cosmologies of Land and ‘Crisis’ in Post-Apartheid South Africa, based on his research conducted at CAS on Evangelical Charismatic Christians relationship to farming in post apartheid South Africa.
The article addresses how cultivating food ‘God’s way’ interplays with discourses of social, ecological and economic crisis in South Africa and employs ethnographic observation and interviews of practitioners and instructors of the Farming God’s Way network, a parachurch organisation operating in promoting regenerative agricultural principles as authentic Christian practice. Olsson analyses Christians’ emotional attachments and personal histories of agricultural production, land use and ownership while arguing for understanding Christian farming as encompassing a space of both mediation and contestation between hopes of restoring an ideal ecological past and frustrations with attempts at transforming a morally degraded present. By addressing Farming God’s Way as an emotional project entangled in discourses of (non)belonging and questions of change, the study reveals tensions around representations of race, class and gender in Charismatic Christians’ approach to biodiversity.
The article is available open access and can be read or listened to here: https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2024.2367388