Browsing by Author "Deacon, Harriet"

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    AIDS and heritage management in South Africa: the case of traditional male circumcision
    (2008) Deacon, Harriet
    The AIDS pandemic poses a serious threat to heritage resources, tangible and intangible, and to communities who practice and value these heritage resources, especially in Southern Africa. Cultural practices, such as male circumcision and initiation rites, will also have an impact on the progress and effects of the AIDS pandemic. There has not been enough debate about how to deal with heritage issues in mitigating the impact of the pandemic and how to deal with HIV and AIDS issues in the heritage sector. This paper discusses how culture is represented as both problem and solution in AIDS discourse, and suggests how intangible heritage management can inform management of HIV risk. It then discusses the implications of a heritage management perspective for AIDS programming, using the case study of traditional male circumcision (MC) in South Africa. It concludes that by focusing on heritage safeguarding, AIDS programming can acknowledge the value that local cultural practices have for people, while negotiating acceptable change where necessary. This helps to engage communities and takes us beyond simply 'educating' people to change their behaviour.
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    A history of the Breakwater Prison from 1859 to 1905
    (1989) Deacon, Harriet; Thornton, Robert; Van Zyl Smit, Dirk
    This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment of a B.A (Hons.) degree in African Studies, for which my home department was Social Anthropology. The project arose out of my interest in the interdisciplinary work of Michel Foucault and its application to the history of Africa. This has been broadened into an interest in post-structuralist theory, and has been particularly focussed on the "institution". A prime example of Foucault's "complete" or "austere" institution is the prison. The Breakwater convict station, a colonial prison in Cape Town during the nineteenth century, suited both my theoretical and empirical interests. I chose this particular institution because it was the prison from which the linguist W.H.I. Bleek drew his San informants in the 1870s, and because the prison and its records were based in Cape Town. I wanted to incorporate ideas from secondary sources on Bleek and his work (e.g. Thornton 1983, Deacon 1988a). But the work took its own directions, and I have focussed here on the organization of the prison and on the prisoners in general rather than on the San.
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    The Social Penis. Traditional Male Circumcision and Initiation in Southern Africa, 1800-2000: A Literature Review
    (2012) Deacon, Harriet; Thomson, Kirsten
    Since pre-colonial times, TMC has been practiced in Muslim and African communities in Africa as part of initiation into manhood. In this paper we therefore refer also to the broader practice of traditional male circumcision and initiation as TMCI. In the 1990s, differences in HIV prevalence across Africa were linked to patterns of traditional male circumcision (TMC). After some randomised clinical trials conducted in the early 2000s, it was established that male circumcision (MC) was linked to significantly reduced HIV risk (Siegfried et al. 2009). However, the notion that MC should be 'rolled out' as a public health intervention to protect against the transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases has some elicited controversy in public health and human rights literature (e.g. Denniston et al 2001), although over time the acceptability of MC as an intervention has grown (Wamai et al, 2011). UNAIDS and the WHO developed operational guidelines for scaling up MC but programmatic development has been slow, largely because of sub-optimal funding (Wamai et al, 2011: 6-10). As of the end of 2010, 555,202 MCs were performed as part of the MC rollout in Sub-Saharan Africa, of which over threequarters took place in 2010. This suggests that there is momentum behind this policy but that with less than 2.7% of the estimated 20.8 million men targeted for circumcision being reached, progress is slow indeed (Wamai et al, 2011).