Performing Natures and Land in the iSimangaliso Wetland Park, South Africa

Abstract

The article experiments with a performative approach to examine the changing relationships between humans, animals and flora around South Africa's first World Heritage Site as enacted, multiple realities. These relations are explored by using two strategies: first, describing the transformation of earlier sets of relationships into present-day conservation natures – from hunting, through preservation of big game, to the establishment of game reserves and later their transformation into contemporary conservation natures. The second part of the article shifts ordering strategy and tells of competing enactments in and around the park today. By using both these approaches, the article seeks to address the way in which some actors seem to be able to impose their version of nature to the exclusion of other realities.