Bitterkomix – A South African Comic as an Indigenous Ethnography

By means of a South African comic – Bitterkomix – this study deals with two current debates in Cultural Anthropology: Visual Culture and Indigenous Ethnography. Bitterkomix is a comic anthology which criticises and subverts the Afrikaans culture from within. The main contributors – Afrikaner themselves – do so mostly in the fields of sexuality, racism, religious and cultural bigotry and the use of Afrikaans as the ideological and psychological connection of the Boers. In Visual Culture the producer and the recipient are in close correlation, therefore the editors are looked at as such – recipients and producers of comics and thereby culture. Their ethnographic comics about childhood, sexuality, conscription and identity through language are treated as a self-reflecting project, and so this book is able to contribute in an extraordinary way as an indigenous ethnography of the Boers.