Katleho Shoro

Wolf Humanities Center Associate Scholar

20262027 Forum on Practice

Katleho Shoro

Ph.D. Candidate, Anthropology

Katleho Kano Shoro is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Within her dissertation project, she explores conceptions of African art and aesthetics as well as personhood through women-centred creative and embodied practices. She specifically anchors this exploration in ethnographic research with practitioners of Litema and Bambolse in Lesotho and Ghana. As an artist-scholar and an affiliate of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at UPenn, Katleho also incorporates multimodal methods within her dissertation as well as other projects. Her other creative work and interests extend into poetry, curation, workshop facilitation and editing. Katleho is the recipient of the Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, Penn Dissertation Research Award, Rodin Fellowship, as well as the Women at Work Fieldwork Grant (European Research Council Project)—all of which have supported this project.

Litema and Bambolse: Grasping at a Beyond-Colonial African Aesthetic Philosophy Through Women's Creative Practices and Embodied Knowledges

What kind of philosophies of aesthetics and personhood lay dormant when the creative, embodied practices and knowledge of Black, African women are invisibilized? Could research focused on litema and bambolse: seemingly similar, multisensorial, women-dominated practices existing in Lesotho, South Africa and Ghana give us insight into these philosophies? If philosophical threads can be drawn across these disparate countries and regions through these practices, could a broader, beyond-colonial philosophy of African aesthetics be attainable, too? This project is multi-sited and multimodal ethnographic and aims to grapple with these questions by examining litema and bambolse and taking seriously the kinds of embodied and conceptual knowledge that undergird the practices. This project further grapples with the possibility of understanding these practices—named “mural arts” in academia—in ways not overdetermined by colonial logics. Fundamental to the question of whether an African aesthetic philosophy exists is the understanding that valuations of art and aesthetics have implications for the ways that objects, people and anthropological knowledge are understood and ordered. Thus, what is at stake is not simply the philosophies of the practices but the conceptualizing of humanness.