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10 July 2018 Photo Supplied
Inaugural lecture focuses on understanding society
Dr Kristina Riedel, Head of the UFS Department of Linguistics and Language Practice with Prof Kobus Marais at his inaugural lecture in May.
Understanding what the terms ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ mean and where they come from is important for Prof Kobus Marais. “If one thinks about it carefully, there was a time in the history of the universe and Earth that terms like ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ did not exist. So, if they did not exist from the very beginning, they must have emerged through some process,” he said at his inaugural lecture held earlier this year.

Prof Marais is a senior lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Language Practice at the University of the Free State (UFS). His interest is in translation studies, but he is conceptualising translation as a technical term that refers to the semiotic process   in other words, the process through which living organisms create meaningful responses to an environment. 

Semiotics entails the study of signs, and it holds that anything in the universe can act as a sign or be interpreted as one. “A tune can be a sign of resistance against political domination, such as Give me hope, Jo’anna, a song by Eddie Grant, and smoke can be a sign of fire, just as the word ‘rose’ could be a sign of a sweet-smelling flower of any colour,” Prof Marais said. 

The universe is perfused by signs, and we are constantly interpreting them, from traffic signs to buildings to agricultural practices to more abstract things like ‘the law’, ‘politics’, ‘economics’ or ‘religion’. All of these things mean something to us and were made as meaningful responses to an environment.

Inaugural lectures vital part of any university
“Inaugural lectures afford professors the opportunity to table a broader research agenda as well as the opportunity to reflect on meta-disciplinary concerns,” Prof Marais said.

He said during the lecture, he had worked out “a theory of translation that explains some aspects of where social/cultural things come from and how they come to be”. An idea that society, and or culture, are a result of translation processes, that is, “processes in which organisms (human beings in this case) respond to an environment in a meaningful way by creating social relationships and cultural phenomena”. 
“Social and cultural phenomena thus all have a meaningful (semiotic) dimension or aspect that I would like to study,” he said.

News Archive

Professor Antjie Krog to deliver public lecture at UFS Bloemfontein Campus
2015-06-19

Professor Antjie Krog – illustrious author, poet, and academic – will deliver a public lecture at the University of the Free State’s (UFS) Bloemfontein Campus. The topic of her discussion will be ‘They Couldn’t Achieve their Goal with Me: Narrating Rape during the South African War’.

Prof Krog’s lecture will be the third instalment of the Vice-Chancellor’s Lecture Series on Trauma, Memory and Representations of the Past. The lecture series is hosted by Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Senior Research Professor in Trauma, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation Studies at the UFS, as part of a five-year research project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Details of the event:
Date: Tuesday 23 June 2015
Time: 12:00
Venue: Albert Wessels Auditorium, UFS Bloemfontein Campus
Members of the public are welcome to attend
RSVP to Jo-Anne Naidoo: NaidooJA@ufs.ac.za

Acts of rape during South African War

To set the context of her lecture, Prof Krog explains that, about two months before the South African War officially ended on 31 May 1902, affidavits were taken from women about transgressions experienced at the hands of British soldiers. These acts included plunder, killing of stock, abduction, sexual assault, and rape. Her lecture is the first scholarly focus in terms of narrative and agency on the affidavits of 24 incidents of sexual assaults and rape since the 25-year embargo on these documents was lifted in 1982. The shelving of these affidavits is indicative of how even transcultural multiple processes failed to create an honest discourse in post-colonial South Africa about sexual violence.

Paving the way to healing historical wounds

The series focuses on the portrayal of trauma and memory in multiple ways – such as the narrative arts represented by Prof Krog. These forms of expression may ultimately pave the way to healing historical wounds.

“This topic is very timely, given a recent NRF grant we’ve been awarded for research on transgenerational trauma related to the South African war,” Prof Gobodo-Madikizela says in anticipation of the lecture.

Previous instalments of Vice-Chancellor’s Lecture Series

The first instalment of the Vice-Chancellor’s Lecture Series on Trauma, Memory and Representations of the Past was delivered by former Constitutional Court Judge, Albie Sachs, in which he discussed ‘Sites of memory, sites of conscience’. Internationally acclaimed composer and sound artist, Philip Miller, delivered the second lecture, ‘Disrupting the Silence: The Past and Transnational Memory’.


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