In 1999, the former Rand Afrikaans University commissioned Willem Boshoff to make an artwork to celebrate the institution's shift into the new millennium. Placed within and just outside the entrance of the primary buildings of what would subsequently become the Auckland Park Kingsway campus of the University of Johannesburg, Boshoff's Kring van Kennis (or Circle of Knowledge) is comprised of eleven black granite boulders with planed tops and rough-hewn sides (Figures 1–5). Invoking reference to the remains of a site where sacred gatherings once took place, the rocks look as if their arrangement may have been determined by an early belief system. This allusion to the remnants of arcane knowledge production provides an apt context for spirals of script inscribed onto the boulders (Figures 6–7). Offering definitions for a set of obscure English words, each boulder provides its explanations in one of South Africa's eleven official languages.

The words chosen are all ‘ologies’ and ‘isms’. Boshoff selected them, he suggests, because they ‘are the things that are taught at the university: they are things that people study’. But these are not regular or predictable research topics. Some make us laugh because they suggest fields too esoteric to be probable in a contemporary context:

Others make us smile because, while sounding highly erudite, they in fact describe actions far removed from the realms of the highbrow:

Still others refer amusingly to modes of conduct, the nouns for which are generally unknown:

But the words and their definitions do not involve only light humour. They may also discomfort the viewer, invoking reference to prejudice or guilt, and thus to ‘ologies’ and ‘isms’ which we perhaps ought to study rather more than we do: