Dr Caroline Jeannerat
Caroline Jeannerat completed her undergraduate BA degree with majors in social anthropology and archaeology at the University of the Witwatersrand. She continued her tertiary education with a BA Honours and a MA degree in Social Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand. For the latter, she focused on the Venda-speaking region and studied intergenerational conflict.
She was awarded her PhD in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, USA, in 2007, on the basis of a thesis entitled “An Ethnography of Faith: Personal Conceptions of Religiosity in the Soutpansberg, South Africa, in the 19th and 20th Centuries”.
She has worked on two interdisciplinary research projects, the first on the Swiss Mission in South Africa and the second on the role that religion plays for Nigerian and Congolese migrants to South Africa. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Johannesburg.
Lectures in History of Africa, Mission Christianity
Research Interests:
Caroline Jeannerat’s research interests are dominated by applying anthropological questions
on religion to the study of mission Christianity in South Africa. She is interested in the role
that religion plays and has played in South Africa and in Africa more generally.
Current Research Projects:
1. Religion and Migration: This research project focuses on Nigerian migrants in Johannesburg
who are members of Pentecostal churches, and Congolese (DRC) who are members of the
Kimbanguist church, to explore how these migrants have established new lives in their host
countries, and how religious institutions and the theologies they represent are changed by
accommodating migrant communities and their concerns.
2. Lutheran ideas of authority in Venda
This project examines how the Lutheran church in South Africa (ELCSA) (that originated from
former Lutheran mission churches) imagined authority that it held and practiced during the
apartheid period and in the post-apartheid period when the new state of liberation is being
implemented.
3. Ethnographic Objects and Missionaries: The Berlin Mission Society collection and Friedrich
Ratzel
This project examines the interlinkages between the Berlin Mission Society in its work in
southern Natal and the ethnographic and museum work of the historian and anthropologist
Friedrich Ratzel in Berlin, Germany. It analyses how ethnographic information collected by
missionaries, in particular in the form of ethnographic objects, informed and influenced the
creation of anthropological theory and practice in Germany.
Publications:
Jeannerat, Caroline, Eric Morier-Genoud and Didier Péclard. 2010. Embroiled: Swiss
Churches, Apartheid and South Africa. LIT Verlag: Münster and Hamburg.
Contact Details:
Email: c.jeannerat@staugustine.ac.za
Telephone: 011 380 9037
Fax: 011 380 9237
Other: academia.org, linkedIn