OpenUCT :: Browsing by Author "Frankental, Sally"

Browsing by Author "Frankental, Sally"

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Open Access
Aging and residence in an urban environment : an anthropological perspective
(1979) Frankental, Sally; West, Martin; Whisson, M G
This study investigates the nature and meaning of the aging process for old people in the urban environment of Cafe Town. It employs methods of participant observation, interviews and life-histories. The study particularly emphasises the role of different residential settings ('normal' housing, total institutions, part institutions) in the aging process and examines their relevance in the formation of a new self-image in this phase of the life-cycle. The presentation of detailed case material shows that old people share the prevailing negative stereotypes of the aged as a category of useless persons. The aged attempt to avoid such categorisations for themselves by substituting notions of activity for the values of youth and/or productivity. The data show the aging process to be a series of adaptations to changing circumstances - essentially changes in health, wealth, composition of social networks, and. frequency and range of social interaction. The adaptations do not emerge as sharp adjustments determined by chronological old age, but as the culmination of coping strategies developed over time and governed by a combination of energy levels, behavioural repertoire, and the opportunities for social interaction provided in the environment. Residence is in itself an important agent of change in this phase because it is perceived as a crucial variable in the projection of the self as independent. The maintenance of an independent image (self-image and projected image) emerges as the key challenge and dilemmas for this phase of the life-cycle – as perceived by the old people themselves. Residence choices are influenced by a variety of factors (health, wealth, proximity of kin and friends, availability of amenities). The analysis shows that final decisions are taken using, cost-benefit assessments which relate, though often implicitly, to notions of independence and security. Residence emerges as a constraining factor in the operation of this cost-benefit analysis. This is shown by comparing the segregate, institutional and congregate dimensions of the institutional settings, and by contrasting these with 'normal' housing. Because the fact of institutionalised living offers greater security, it is perceived to diminish attributes of independence so that old people within the special residential settings devise strategies for maximising an image of independence. Three major strategies are the 'poor dear' syndrome; the identification with the activity programmes offered in these environments (irrespective of actual degree of participation) and the articulation of these activities as work. The final chapter of the thesis examines the potential for community creation in these residences. Turner (1974) notion of 'communitas', or a sense of communality, is considered the crucial element of community. This element is evaluated in relation to a variety of factors: homogeneity, lack of alternative, investment and irreversibility, material distinctions, social exclusivity, leadership, proportion of kinds of contact, interdependance and work. It is argued that the development of 'communitas' remains at the level of potential in the most institutionalised settings because its development is a creative process demanding energy, initiative, and incentive none of which are characteristic of old people in total institutions. The thesis shows that old people are in a state of limbo rather than liminality or marginality (Turner, 1974-) because society has provided no defined status phase for them to enter. They are in large measure statusless - cast aside to wait for death.
Open Access
The benefits of international volunteering in educational institutions in Cape Town
(2008) Steckel, Susanne; Frankental, Sally
The study examines two volunteer programmes in Cape Town offered to international volunteers, presents the positive and negative outcomes of these programmes and analyses their value for all parties concerned. On the basis of the data gathered during eight weeks of fieldwork, I argue that these programmes are of value to both the volunteers and to the recipients of their services, albeit in different ways. The positive responses from both sides were significant indicators of the success of the programmes and of the various benefits for all parties. Open-mindedness, enthusiasm and a positive attitude on the part of the volunteers were key characteristics that had a considerable and positive effect on both their and the recipients' experiences.
Open Access
Constructing identity in diaspora : Jewish Israeli migrants in Cape Town, South Africa
(1998) Frankental, Sally; Sharp, John; Reynolds, Pamela
This study was conducted through systematic participant-observation from July 1994 to December 1996. Basic socio-demographic data were recorded and revealed considerable ·heterogeneity within the population. Formal and informal interviews, three focus group interviews and (selected) informants' diaries provided additional material. The study examines the construction of identity in diaspora and explores the relationships of individuals to places, groups and nation-states. Jews are shown to be the most salient local social category and language, cultural style and a sense of transience are shown to be the most significant boundary markers. The migrants' sharpest differentiation from local Jews is manifested in attitudes towards, and practice of, religion. Whether a partner is South African or Israeli was shown to be the single most important factor influencing patterns of interaction. Most studies treat Israelis abroad as immigrants while noting their insistence on transiency. Such studies also emphasize ambivalence and discomfort. In a South Africa still deeply divided by race and class, the migrants' status as middle-class whites greatly facilitates their integration. Their strong and self-confident identification as Israeli and their ongoing connectedness to Israeli society underlines distinctiveness. The combination of engagement with the local while maintaining distinctiveness, as well as past familiarity with multicultural and multilingual reality is utilized to negotiate the present, and results in a lived reality of 'comfortable contradiction' in the present. This condition accommodates multi-locality, multiple identifications and allegiances, and a simultaneous sense of both permanence and transience. The migrants' conflation of ethnic-religious and 'national' dimensions of identification (Jewishness and Israeliness), born in a particular societal context, leads, paradoxically, to distinguishing between membership of a nation and citizenship of a state. This distinction, it is argued, together with the migrants' middle-class status, further facilitates the comfortable contradiction of their transmigrant position. It is argued that while their instrumental engagement with diaspora and their understanding of responsible citizenship resembles past patterns of Jewish migration and adaptation, the absence of specifically Israeli (ethnic) communal structures suggests a departure from past patterns. The migrants' confidence in a sovereign independent nation-state and in their own identity, removes the sense of vulnerability that permeates most diaspora Jewish communities. These processes enable the migrants to live as 'normalized' Jews in a post-Zionist, post-modern, globalized world characterized by increasing electronic connectedness, mobility and hybridity. The ways in which the migrants in this study have negotiated and defined their place in the world suggests that a strong national identity is compatible with a cosmopolitan orientation to multicultural reality.
Open Access
The cost of (Mis)communication : information routes, power struggles and gender in sport for development
(2009) Clark, Cassandra; Frankental, Sally
Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (57-60). Also available online.
Open Access
Employer perspectives on domestic employment relationships in post-apartheid South Africa
(2008) Archer, Sarah; Frankental, Sally
This dissertation investigates the relationships between domestic workers and employers, as reported by employers, concentrating on food provision as a central dimension. It applies anthropological and sociological approaches that include 10 focus group discussions, 171 completed questionnaires (open- and closed-answer questions) and 10 home observation sessions. The employer sample group is almost exclusively white, middle class, female, English-speaking, tertiary educated residents of Cape Town, South Africa. The research starts from the premise that domestic employment Is an illuminating sphere for analysing the intersection between race, class and gender at the present time in South Africa. It argues that, through an examination of the domestic worker employment relationship, particularly when viewed through the lens of food provision, It becomes possible to judge the extent to which these relationships have changed since the end of apartheid. The research shows that, while a proportion of individual relationships have changed in positive ways, many remain determined by the habituated norms and codes of apartheid-era employment. The study found that the relationship is characterised by contradictions in the attitudes and behaviour of employers, exacerbated by ambiguous communication and employer discomfort and feelings of guilt about past, and present, inequalities. Employer unease and discomfort were particularly evident in the company of peers and in relation to the question of employer responsibility towards workers. The study also found that age and income influenced employer attitudes.
Open Access
Internationalisation in higher education : implications and challenges for the University of Cape Town
(2007) Baker, Felicity Jane; Frankental, Sally
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 136-143).
Open Access
Making art to make identity : shifting perceptions of self amongst historically disadvantaged South African artists
(2005) Gibson, N Jade; Frankental, Sally
This study examines how historically disadvantaged artists shift self-identities through artmaking beyond previously racialised, hierarchised and essentialist constructs in a transforming New South Africa. Fieldwork research involved direct observation, working with artists on art projects, and interviews with visual artists and other arts practitioners in Cape Town, 1998-2001. Artworks are examined as events incorporating social change, and thus as a focal point between unconscious praxis and the cognitive coming-to-awareness of self within-the-world. Using a non-essentialist approach to identity construction, I argue for an understanding of, and approach to, studying individual identity that incorporates complexity, multiplicity, materiality and change as integral to identity formation. The reworking of memory materially within artworks is demonstrated through examining how artists re-presented autobiographical and historical referents of identity to affirm and re-present new narratives of self in South Africa's present. How artists respond to, and negotiate, tensions and contradiction between concepts of 'freedom' and externally-derived categories of value within socio-economic limitations in a transforming South African art world is also explored. I also show how artworks act as sites of transcultural encounter for artists, within their awareness of different gazes and contexts of interpretation, to position identities simultaneously both within the local and beyond the local, through different images, styles, techniques and technologies in their work. Finally, I demonstrate how different collaborative art projects, through artistic praxis, enable mutual processes of social and artistic collective identification between artists of different socio-cultural backgrounds, in relation to processes of nation-building and reconciliation for South Africa in the future. The study not only provides insight into art-making in South Africa and material processes of cognitive identity construction, but also how individuals act as agents in shifting self-identities within processes of collective socio-political transformation.
Open Access
"Nothing changes in the Kalahari" : Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, the Ae!Hai Kalahari Heritage Park Agreement and the effects of difference, discourse and the past
(2005) Hughes, Catherine; Sichone, Owen; Frankental, Sally
Khomani San with access to 26,000 hectares of land in the national park for "symbolic and cultural uses", and is entitled a "Heritage Park". National parks have, in recent years, been required by legislation, popular opinion, and SANP policies to change how they interact with local communities. However, both staff in Kgalagadi and local residents consistently reiterate that "nothing changes in the Kalahari", and this is a dominant discourse in the Park. Experience of living in the region (including the National Park) has demonstrated to residents that little does change in their material social reality. Based on the experience of nine months in the Park as a volunteer with South African National Parks, complemented by a month of fieldwork, this study gauges the interpretation of a "Heritage Park" and co-management by the authority implementing the Agreement. Through interview and survey data this study argues that the power of discursive modes of communication and their control of knowledge and differing uses of and interpretations of the past limit the conceptualization of possible change. The emphasis placed by residents on racial difference restricts possible subject- positions and therefore, the possibility of multiple types of relations beyond apartheid-era categorization. While experience within the place creates its own set of limitations on social life. The Kalahari, I argue, is internalized by its residents and stifles a sense of possibility through a particular sense of the passage of time, the past, and different conceptions of its effect on the present. These factors combine as restrictions on any meaningful social change for the residents of Kgalagadi. I argue that it is the social dynamics within the Park that curb the success of the Ae!Hai Kalahari Heritage Park Agreement. The social world inside Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park can by extension, be seen as a microcosm of the larger South African picture; a nation scored by differences of race, access to information and meaning in knowledge, and influential but ambiguous discourses.
Open Access
Poverty, possessions and proper living : constructing and contesting propriety in Soweto and Lusaka City
(2000) Meintjes, Helen; Spiegel, Mugsy; Frankental, Sally
Recent material culture theory points out how material possessions are woven into the fabric of lives, shaping social relations and texturing people's meanings and interpretation of their world. This study embarks on exploring aspects of this objected fabric, in the context of urban working black South Africans, living in three different township suburbs in Gauteng, in four differing housing circumstances, in the mid-1990s and in the midst of much uncertainty of what the future might hold for poor urban residents. Drawing on participant observation, ethnographic interviews, and household and appliance ownership surveys, the study explores the ways in which domestic objects- appliances specifically - function symbolically for a set of people living in Soweto formal houses, backyard shacks, an informal settlement and in Lusaka City site-and -service settlement on the West Rand, in Gauteng, South Africa. I examine symbolic constructions and creations in these people's homes, gleaning some of the meaning people attributed to particular modes of equipping their homes, and how aspects of their image of themselves and each other were presented, acted out, created, 'conversationed', contested and negotiated through material goods.
Open Access
Prepared for a world that no longer exists : white Afrikaner males revise identity for a transformed world
(2006) Leitch, Roberta Ann; Frankental, Sally
Following the peaceful transition in 1994 from apartheid to democracy, and the political realignment of power from the Afrikaner minority to the Black majority, South Africa has been thrust into a social climate of radical and far reaching change. As one formerly advantaged group in the new dispensation, white Afrikaners are facing new and often bewildering challenges as they struggle to carve out an appropriate space for themselves in the new political ethos of non-racialism and equality for all. This study examines how a particular group of white Afrikaner men between the ages of 28-42 in the town of Stellenbosch in the Western Cape, are negotiating their way in post-apartheid South Africa.
Open Access
Remembering St. Therese : a Namibian mission school and the possibilities for its students
(2002) Williams, Christian A; Frankental, Sally; Ross, Fiona C
Bibliography: leaves 141-145.
Open Access
A retrospective field experience : a reflexive journey through day-to-day work with the 'street children' at Street Universe
(2002) Horsten, Cecilia Bermûdez; Frankental, Sally
This thesis critically reviews thoughts and experiences that arose out of a nine-week internship and post-internship volunteer work at Street Universe, a local Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) working with 'street children' living in Cape Town's city centre and surrounds. It touches on two main topics, 'street children' and the NGO. Although I did not work exclusively with the 'street children', I interacted with them on a daily basis and therefore part of this thesis touches on issues pertaining to their lives. My main focus is the inner workings of an NGO and the context within which it strives to achieve its goals. I explore methodological and ethical aspects of doing fieldwork in an NGO setting, which coalesce with the problem of positionality, of situating myself as a researcher within webs of fluid interpersonal and professional relationships. Grounding my research in the day-to-day work of Street Universe allows me to identify how internal organisational matters affect the presentation and implementation of the organisation's aims. My aim is to link the two topics by showing how organisational matters are ,enacted in the relationship between 'street children' and Street Universe as a whole.
Open Access
Seeking solidarity : categorisation and the politics of alienism in the migration of Zimbabweans to South Africa
(2009) Morreira, Shannon; Frankental, Sally; Ross, Fiona C
This ethnographic study is concerned with the process of movement of Zimbabwean nationals to Cape Town, South Africa, that results in their categorisation by the South African state as "illegal immigrants." Based on ﬁeldwork carried out in Harare and Cape Town in 2006 and 2007, it explores the effects of state-based categorisation of people within Zimbabwe on migration. The study argues that migrants had often been multiply displaced in Zimbabwe as a result of the political situation before crossing the border to South Africa. It explores the factors, both political and economic, that affected migrants’ decisions to move over great distances, and to move multiple times. Drawing on informants’ experiences both in Zimbabwe and South Africa, the study is further concerned with informants’ expectations of South Africa and the differing realities they encountered upon arrival. It considers informants’ experiences of crossing the border, exploring the anthropology of the borderlands to investigate the political economy of movement from Zimbabwe to South Africa. The study further argues that Zimbabwean migrants to South Africa draw upon localised discourses of human rights, based upon ideas of morality, in their expectations of welcome by the South African state. These expectations are found to be erroneous in that undocumented migrants’ notions of violation differ to those employed by the South African state. Whilst migrants assert that conditions of structural violence in Zimbabwe are serious enough to warrant asylum, the South African state considers these reasons to be less valid than those of physical political violence. Within the South African discourses around the Zimbabwean crisis, there are thus forms of suffering that are considered more valid than others.
Open Access
Tuberculosis and the phenomenology of existence in South Africa's rural Western Cape
(2009) De Souza Santos, Maria Francisca O; Frankental, Sally; Levine, Susan
According to the World Health Organization's (WHO) 2008 report on tuberculosis (TB), South Africa has the highest rate ofTB in the world after Swaziland. It is estimated that there are nearly half a million South Africans living with TB. This paper explores how people interact with embodied manifestations of TB within a specific macrocosm of existence, namely a South African grape-farming region. I argue that in addition to classic factors of biosocial significance the lives of those living with TB are by and large marked by the associated symptoms of insecurity, instability, and precariousness.
Open Access
The zoo as paradoxical discourse : a social space of paradoxical construction and deconstruction of knowledge about animals
(2003) Ainslie, Ordit; Frankental, Sally
The thesis focuses on the role of the zoo for people in today's context. It explores the construction, deconstruction or reconstruction of the knowledge and meaning of non-domestic animals. It examines the influence of current animal rights and conservation discourse on the evolution of the zoo's architecture and purpose, and its effect on those that use the zoo. Fieldwork was conducted in three different zoos in Cape Town; Tygerberg Zoo Park was the main area of fieldwork. Additional fieldwork took place in the Aquarium and the Bee Farm for comparison. Fieldwork took place during six weeks in 2001 and included conservations as well as participant observation, in the zoo, and outside the zoo, with ninety-five visitors.

Browsing by Author "Frankental, Sally"

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