Browsing by Author "Reynolds, Pamela"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Bearing witness : women and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission
    (2000) Ross, Fiona C; Reynolds, Pamela
    Summary in English. Bibliography: p. 206-215.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    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.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Here you will remain : adolescent experience on farms in the Western Cape
    (1993) Waldman, Pearl Linda; Reynolds, Pamela
    The thesis examines adolescent experience on two grape-growing farms in the Western Cape. Particular attention is paid to the daily lives of farm residents with special reference to adolescents and the power relations between farmers and farm residents and between males and females insofar as they affect adolescents. The current literature on conditions on white-owned farms in South Africa lacks detailed research at the micro-level. This thesis begins to fill the gaps in the literature by providing an understanding of how people on the farms pursue their day-to-day lives. Six months intensive fieldwork was conducted on two farms in the Western Cape. During this time participant observation was supplemented by a household survey, the correction of life-histories and interviews with farm residents. Adolescent labour was documented in both summer and winter by using observations, 24-hour recalls and instant checks. An important theme which recurs throughout the thesis is that of the entrapment and encapsulation of farm residents. I show that despite the fact that different people - men, women and adolescent girls and boys - have different options for resisting the constraints of farm existence, they remain trapped in the valley with few alternative opportunities for employment elsewhere.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Living with fragility : children in New Crossroads
    (1999) Henderson, Patricia Catherine; Reynolds, Pamela
    Living with Fragility, traces the lives of sixteen African children between 1992 and 1995. It explores the intimate spaces of children's social relationships and charts discontinuities they experienced. The eight girls and eight boys, aged between and sixteen years, resided in New Crossroads, Cape Town, a suburb marked by poverty, inadequate schooling, and a history of violent intervention by the apartheid state and other power holders. The thesis shows that institutions of childhood are fragile, that children's social relationships are fragmented, as are their senses of self. Fragility is traced within and the social domains the children inhabited and created. The thesis argues that children's senses of self are subject to flux and interruption. Narrative ethnographies about the children demonstrate their individuality. Nuanced descriptions of children and the changes in their lives over time challenge bald categorisations of, for example, the African child, or, youth at risk. The descriptions demonstrate the agency, dexterity and responsibilities of children in fluid circumstances and lead to a critical appraisal of predominant notions of childhood. The work also outlines processes of social and relational reconstitution to which children and care-givers had recourse. Methods used in gathering data included a series of formal interviews conducted in Xhosa (the children's first language) in which economic descriptions of households, life histories, social networks, and ritual and religious affiliations of children and care-givers were sought. The formal interviews complemented by repeated visits to each child's home to record changes time. The sixteen children were brought together in workshops where discussion directed towards themes to do with mobility between care-givers, violence, sexuality and senses of self the data were enriched by use of dramatic improvisations and drawings. Improvisations yielded insight into children's bodily style and their critical appraisal of trends in social relationships in New Crossroads. The ethnography describes the social circumstances of children in urban South Africa. It is analysed through use of an eclectic set of theoretical fragments because they resonate with the study's ethnographic material. The eclecticism impelled by the data raises questions.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Narrative, conflict and change : journalism in the new South Africa
    (1999) Fordred, Lesley J; Reynolds, Pamela; Coplan, David
    Narrative, Conflict and Change: Journalism in the New South Africa investigates the idea that narrative and reality do not have a mimetic relationship but that news texts take their shape and structure from prior cultural forms. Developing this point, the study argues that news gathering practices are embedded in a common sense of the moment that is radically shaped by prevailing currents of power. Opening with the observation that current disputes about the media and democracy in South Africa have been constrained by a narrow economism, the work sets out to broaden the scope of the debate by identifying news texts as more than informational artefacts but as narratives that reproduce and generate processes of making meaning and claiming identity in society. The study holds that polemic about the media's objectivity (or lack of it) and intentionality (to support white capital or black development) have taken on an exaggerated importance. News texts, it is argued, are cultural products that are formed in established practices and take their significance from meta-narratives that have a long prior history; moreover, subjects of news stories easily communicate this dominant discursive consciousness to journalists. Narrative is not, however, of necessity the province of dominant consciousness; indeed, the need to make sense of the contradictions between practical consciousness and dominant narratives constitutes a major source of creativity and agency for journalists and news audiences alike. The work comprises six theme-driven studies that develop an understanding of the relationship between narrative products and established journalistic practices. Throughout, attention is paid to journalistic agency, in the belief that news media are not homogeneous. Innovative practices highlight areas in which media is beginning to transform, and the pitfalls that attend such efforts. Grounded in ethnographic research and textual analysis, the chapters incorporate ethnographic material from a four-month period of research at the Natal Witness, in the city of Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, as well as material from other newspapers in South Africa and material provided by the writer's experience as a freelance journalist.