Hlonipha and health: ancestors, taboos and social medicine in South Africa

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines the abandonment of an important food taboo – the prohibition of milk consumption by newly married women – in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s. Offering a detailed exploration of this hlonipha custom in three rural communities, I start from the position that food always reflects the entanglements of its material and symbolic attributes. By tracing health and illness, shifting livelihoods, diets and an important social medicine intervention, this article reveals that in the 1950s milk was a symbolically and materially different food than it had been in the 1930s. I argue that this difference determined whether or not hlonipha would be abandoned. By centring on understandings of food, health and taboos as material and symbolic, this article draws on scholarship on livestock in Southern Africa and contributes to scholarship on food taboos and hlonipha customs, pushing for the incorporation of material aspects of those customs.