OpenUCT :: Browsing by Author "Ross, Fiona C"

Browsing by Author "Ross, Fiona C"

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Open Access
AllPay and no work: spheres of belonging under duress
(2012) Versfeld, Anna; Ross, Fiona C
AllPay and No Work explores the consequences of post-apartheid political-economic changes on the social fabric of Manenberg, a residential neighbourhood on the Cape Flats, Cape Town. I show that despite the important benefits of codified human rights for all, recent macro-level changes have meant that young women are currently struggling to establish themselves in their local spheres as socially valued individuals, or achieving "positive personhood". In a context of relative deprivation being socially valued is critical for belonging to "coping systems", the systems of support and reciprocity that cushion the worst aspects of suffering.
Open Access
Ambitions of cidade : war-displacement and concepts of the urban among bairro residents in Benguela, Angola
(2009) Roque, Sandra; Ross, Fiona C
The dissertation explores concepts of upward social mobility, proper personhood and processes of social change as a result of the rural-urban migration provoked by the war in post-colonial Angola between 1975 and 2002. The study focuses on the city of Benguela, which received large numbers of war-displaced people, most of whom settled in bairros, informal settlements surrounding the cidade, the formally structured area of the town. The experience of displacement and establishment in urban areas is not marked only by material struggles and recent experiences of violence, displacement, humanitarian aid and so on, but also by social and historical constructions of rural-urban relationships and of urban space. These frame actors' choices, decisions and actions. I show that 'war-displaced people' are individuals with a history and in history.
Open Access
Ambitions of Cidade: War-Displacement and concepts of the urban among bairro residents in Benguela, Angola
(2009) Rogue, Sandra; Ross, Fiona C
The dissertation explores concepts of upward social mobility, proper personhood and processes of social change as a result of the rural - urban migration provoked by the war in post-colonial Angola between 1975 and 2002. The study focuses on the city of Benguela, which received large numbers of war-displaced people, most of whom settled in bairros, informal settlements surrounding the cidade, the formally structured area of the town. The experience of displacement and establishment in urban areas is not marked only by material struggles and recent experiences of violence, displacement, humanitarian aid and so on, but also by social and historical constructions of rural - urban relationships and of urban space. These frame actors' choices, decisions and actions. I show that 'war-displaced people' are individuals with a history and in history. Drawing on ethnographic work conducted in Bairro CalombotÃ£o, surveys, life histories and historical data, I show how classificatory categories shape imaginings and concepts of the urban and the forms of life appropriate to it. The categories of 'mato (bush) and cidade (city)', 'avanÃ§o (advancement) and atraso (backwardness)', developed and non-developed are often used to describe rural'urban relationships and are strongly entrenched in Angola. Following Bourdieu (1979, 1980), I argue that these categories function as 'classificatory schemes', that is, as socially and historically constructed and embodied structures of perception and appreciation. In exploring the classificatory power of categories, I sought to understand what I call 'ontological development', people's attempts to become avanÃ§ados (advanced, developed). I show that cidade is not only the place where it is possible to live a proper material life, but it is also the place where one becomes a proper person. I draw on theories that ground analysis in history and structural relations. However, mine is not a determinist argument. Using the concept of conjuncture I highlight possibilities for mobility and social change. The notion of vital conjunctures (Johnson-Hanks, 2002) helps me understand social change in a country where a succession of wars forced considerable and sometimes abrupt contextual change onto many people. But, the outcome of vital conjunctures does not necessarily result in significant change at either an individual or a social level. I therefore propose the analytic concept of 'transformative conjunctures' to demonstrate how change is possible.
Open Access
As long as they don't bury me here : social relations of poverty in a Southern African shantytown
(2008) Tvedten, Inge; Spiegel, Andrew; Ross, Fiona C
Focusing on four shantytowns in the northern Namibian town of Oshakati, this study analyses the coping strategies of the poorest sections of such populations. I ask what it is that enables some people living in oppressed and poor urban shantytowns to strive to go on with their lives or improve their situation, while others living in the same context and under the same conditions seem trapped in chronic poverty and apparently give up making much of their lives? The study is based on fieldwork conducted intermittently from 1991 to 2001, using qualitative anthropological methods supplemented by quantitative measures of material poverty. It combines theories of political, economic and cultural structuration, and of the material and cultural basis for social relations of inclusion and exclusion as practise.
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.
Open Access
Conflicted cure: explorting concepts of default and adherence in drug resistant tuberculosis patients in Khayelitsha
(2013) Winterton, Laura; Macdonald, Helen; Ross, Fiona C
This dissertation examines default and adherence in drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) patients in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa. The ethnographic data is drawn from three and a half months of participant-observation, illness-narrative interviews, in-depth interviews, focus groups, support-group sessions and creative methodologies such as collage and emotional mapping. The various methods revealed some contradictory experiences with treatment and cure that some patients faced when undergoing treatment for DR-TB. Through an analytical framework of affect and emotions, this paper traces the complexities and disparate conceptions of default and adherence that circulate amongst patients. This paper argues that default and adherence do not operate in isolation but are part of dynamic entanglements of relationships and self-introspection that surface throughout the course of treatment for DR-TB.
Open Access
Cultivations on the frontiers of modernity : power, welfare and belonging on commercial farms before and after "fast-track land reform" in Zimbabwe
(2015) Hartnack, Andrew Michael Carl; Ross, Fiona C
Forms of power on commercial farms and power relations between white farm owners and black farmworkers in Zimbabwe have been explored by scholars such as Clarke (1977), Loewenson (1992), Amanor-Wilks (1995), Tandon (2001) and especially Rutherford (2001a). While most focus on the capitalist exploitation of farmworkers and forms of structural violence, Rutherford has gone beyond political-economy to understand power relations on farms in terms of the histories and complex forms of identity formation among both white farmers and black workers in pre- and post-independence Zimbabwe. However, the subtle and often obscured role of the "farmer's wife" in farm power relations, determined by the dynamics of a system Rutherford (2001a) has called "domestic government", has not been examined much in the literature. In this thesis I address this omission through an examination of the role of welfare initiatives and related activities intimately linked to domesticity and white "farmer's wives" within Rhodesian/Zimbabwean white settler society. I show that this "maternalistic" role was not only important in the colonial civilising and modernising endeavours of white farmers as they "cultivated" African fields, African workers and their own identities, but also became an important foundation on which post-independence welfare endeavours (linked to a new kind of civilising mission: that of neoliberal "civil society") were built. I then trace the impacts of the radical agrarian shifts introduced in 2000 with the "Fast-track Land Reform Programme" (FTLRP) on such interventions and on their beneficiaries, black farmworkers, as well as on the emergent power relations which farmworkers and dwellers now negotiate. Based on nine months of fieldwork, and on archival and library research, this multi-sited study takes a historical-ethnographic approach which pays attention to the longue durÃ©e and the entanglement of political-economic and gendered socio-cultural factors shaping power regimes and relations in rural Zimbabwe. The dissertation weaves together several strands of argument relating to the changing dynamics of power, welfare, modernity and belonging and how these changes are affecting white farmers and their wives, NGOs and (former) farmworkers and dwellers in contemporary Zimbabwe. It contributes to a fuller, more nuanced and gendered understanding of the (dynamic) nature of labour relations and the role of welfare and "improvement" endeavours on (former) commercial farms over the course of more than a century.
Open Access
Enduring "lateness": biomedicalisation and the unfolding of reproductive life, sociality, and antenatal care
(2016) Ferreira, Nicole; Ross, Fiona C
The dissertation examines how pregnant women seeking antenatal care at a state facility in the Southern Peninsula of Cape Town conceptualise and experience their pregnancies in relation to the biomedical model that informs state practices of care. I specifically explore the experiences that contribute to the state's definition of 'late' presentation at antenatal clinics (i.e. after the first trimester). The antenatal care model advises that pregnant women report "early", at 12 weeks, and have regular follow up visits up until 40 week period, yet recent public health research showed that women present "late" to the antenatal clinics, with only 40.2% of first antenatal visits occurring in the first trimester in South Africa. The women who were a part of the research were chosen in the clinic space, in waiting rooms, booking rooms and while waiting for ultrasounds. The women were selected based on age (17 upwards), and gestational age at first antenatal booking. I examine the ways biomedicine frames temporality, and the way that health policy enacts this through antenatal care. I contest the brackets of 'lateness' and biomedicalisation of pregnancy, and the state's version of the female reproductive body as I describe the unfolding experiences of a reproductive life, showing how pregnancy and health care seeking are enmeshed in social worlds. The discursive framings of antenatal attendance exhorts women to seek antennal care at 12 weeks gestation, to "be responsible" "good women" managing their sexual and reproductive lives with a mode surveillance that presumes a certain way of knowing and counting the body. I explore the other ways of experiencing, knowing, and counting, showing how pregnancy experiences and healthcare seeking behaviours are influenced by social, economic, political, and historical factors, and by the moral and religious values that shape daily life for women. My thesis is grounded in the growing literature on anthropology of reproduction and the biosocial. In doing so, I examine what it means to have and experience a reproductive body within the unfolding events of everyday life, where moments and 'quasievents' (such as structural inequalities, and the daily bouts of gang violence and domestic violence) become enmeshed, such that they influence temporality, differing perceptions of trust, distrust, risk and testing, and differing social values of testing. I further show how maternal kinship networks of support are valued, yet precarious as are intimate partnerships, which both influence experiences of care, neglect, abuse, punishment and shape antenatal attendance. In contesting temporal boundaries of biomedicine I show how women's bodily and relational experiences, their everyday lives and quasi-events within them are inseparable in shaping antenatal health seeking practices and how pregnancies are imagined.
Open Access
Fruit of the Vine, work of human hands : farm workers and alcohol on a farm in Stellenbosch, South Africa
(2002) De Kock, Alana Eileen; Ross, Fiona C
I argue that alcohol is embedded in forces of structural violence that create circumstances of social suffering amongst farm workers in the Western Cape. argue that the labour relations on the research farm are shot through with violence and I trace the use of paternalism as a means to control the work force. I argue that the principles of paternalism have been internalised by the majority of the workers. I further explore the current changes in labour relations as they are played out the field work farm and demonstrate that exploitation and oppression continue to be features of structural violence exercised today. In order to understand alcohol consumption amongst farm workers in the light of structural violence, I argue that farm workers who drink heavily in the mode of the weekend binge do so in an attempt to ameliorate the conditions of their existence. I argue that alcohol consumption is ritualised and that ritual serves to provide a space outside the everyday that facilitates escape from suffering and legitimates drinking. It is my contention that the ritual fails to provide real escape and instead serves to further immiserate farm workers. In an attempt to escape the negative consequences of alcohol consumption those who are able to abstain from drinking alcohol do so largely by converting to a form of Christianity that prohibits alcohol use. I employ the notion of unlearning drinking behaviour to understand the creation of a new person within a support system that enables new ways of being in the world, I contend though, that this new identity is fragile and the potential to revert to previous identities is always present.In addressing the phenomena of alcohol consumption and abstinence, I argue that the social suffering caused by structural violence and the perceived negative effects of alcohol use must not be conflated.
Open Access
Girls in war, women in peace : reintegration and (in)justice in post-war Mozambique
(2011) Bunker, Lillian K; Ross, Fiona C; Du Toit, André
This study explores the longitudinal reintegration of girls involved in the post-independence war in Mozambique using in-depth qualitative research based on semi-structured interviews, and a wide range of documents. Piecing together the narratives of over 70 informants, the dissertation chronicles the way in which the war and the post-conflict environment, and to a lesser extent, the historical cultural milieu, have contributed to these women’s current realities.
Open Access
HIV/AIDS, food insecurity and the burden of history: An ethnographic study from North-eastern Tanzania
(2011) Mangesho, Peter Ernest; Levine, Susan; Ross, Fiona C
The main argument in this study draws on ethnographic research conducted in Maramba, a rural community in north eastern Tanzania, with poor people living with HIV/AIDS who struggled to obtain food, care and support in spite of the availability of free treatment.
Open Access
Homes or houses? : strategies of home-making among some amaXhosa in the Western Cape
(2003) Ngxabi, Ntombizodumo Emmerencia; Spiegel, Andrew; Ross, Fiona C
Bibliography: leaves 148-152.
Open Access
Houses without doors : diffusing domesticity in Die Bos
(1993) Ross, Fiona C; Spiegel, Andrew David
This ethnography is the product of fourteen months of communication with residents of a squatter settlement near Somerset West in the Western Cape. The thesis explores the ways in which domestic relationships altered over the research period, locating these changing patterns in the contexts of informal settlement in the region. I show that in the context of the settlement the use of household as an analytic term was problematic because domestic relationships were fluid and ephemeral, making it difficult to establish patterns of 'belonging' over time. Network approaches are more effective than household in describing social relationships, but networks were also problematic in that they tend to assume patterns of reciprocity which were not always echoed in the behaviours of residents of Die Bos. The thesis concentrates on three main areas of social interaction. I explore labour relationships within and between households, showing that a focus solely on households obscures the processes of labour allocation within domestic units, and those which occur across their (permeable) boundaries. I examine changing patterns of commensality among some members of the population of Die Bos, showing how movement and labour were intimately linked with eating patterns. Here I show how the most effective way of describing these patterns is in terms of networks of informal interaction which are formalised briefly. I then discuss of how movements of certain sections of the population render the boundaries of domestic units extremely permeable. I conclude by showing that although the notion of household is useful in some contexts in describing interactions in Die Bos, it tends to assume too much homogeneity and constancy to describe accurately the fluidity of social relationships. Network approaches are possibly of greater use in such descriptions, but are shown to be problematic in that they assume constancy (although of a lesser degree than households do) in interaction.
Open Access
Imagined communities, divided realities : engaging the apartheid past through 'healing of memories' in a post-TRC South Africa
(2005) Kayser, Undine; Ross, Fiona C
The dissertation argues that, in the attempt to build a shared democratic culture among ordinary citizens in post-apartheid South Africa, insufficient attention has been paid to transformations of interpersonal domains. The dissertation examines the process and effects of the Healing of Memories (HOM) project in Cape Town. HOM is a civil society initiative established in 1996 to facilitate storytelling workshops between South Africans, previously divided on the basis of race and class. Critiquing reconciliation discourses in South Africa, in particular that generated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the research points the importance of lived, local, ongoing encounters between ordinary people who take cognizance of the apartheid past. Given the context of apartheid's stark socio-spatial legacies, the dissertation argues that there are few spaces in and processes through which ordinary social actors can explore their respective subject positions under apartheid and grapple with the emerging subjectivities of the post-apartheid sphere. HOM offered face-to-face encounters with the former racial 'Other'. In an immediate and participatory process of witnessing each other's personal memories of apartheid, participants' conventional understandings of self, 'Other' and history were unsettled, leading participants to 'make connections' between past and present, between the personal and the political, and between their own and other's expectations and hopes for change. The dissertation argues that this led to the forging of a temporary 'community of sentiment', based on a core set of 'new' social skills: response-ability, conflict-ability and sociability. The fraught experiential-emotional dimension of the encounters revealed some of the underlying 'structures of feeling' and their impact on the 'formations of relationship', which continuously hinder the search for new and meaningful ways of being social. The encounters produced the imaginative ground for new forms of inter-subjectivity in the post-apartheid sphere. Those who engaged in the process regularly were able to make substantial changes in their interpersonal relations. In its discussion of HOM. as a healing intervention in a post-authoritarian state, the discussion also draws on the author's experiences of post-Holocaust Germany and extensive library research in this field.
Open Access
Knowledge, chivanhu and struggles for survival in conflict-torn Manicaland, Zimbabwe
(2014) Nhemachena, Artwell; Green, Lesley; Ross, Fiona C
This dissertation explored how villagers in a district of Manicaland province of Zimbabwe deeply affected by violence and want survived the violence that has characterised Zimbabwe’s most recent politics (from the year 2000). Marked by invasions of white owned farms, by interparty violence, interpersonal violence as well as witchcraft related violence, the period posed immense challenges to life and limb. Yet institutions of welfare, security and law enforcement were not equal to the task of ensuring survival necessitating questions about the sufficiency of “modern” institutions of law enforcement, media, politics, economy and health in guaranteeing survival in moments of want. How villagers survived the contexts of immense want, acute shortages of cash, basic commodities, formal unemployment levels of over ninety percent, hyperinflation (which in 2008 reached over 231 million percent) and direct physical violence is cause for wonder for scholarship of everyday life. Based on ethnographic data gathered over a period of fifteen months, the dissertation interrogates how villagers survived these challenges. Unlike much scholarship on Zimbabwe’s ‘crisis’, it takes seriously matters of knowing and ontology with respect to chivanhu (erroneously understood as “tradition” of the Shona people).
Open Access
Memory, language, self and time : personhood and relationship in dementia
(2013) Grant, Jennifer; Ross, Fiona C
This dissertation contributes to an understanding of how the entanglement of language, memory, self, and time in contemporary Western thought shapes assumptions about the personhood status of elderly persons with dementia and their capacity for meaningful relationship. The ethnographic data that informs the study was drawn from a three-month period of in-depth participant-observation conducted in a dementia ward situated in an exclusive retirement community in the Western Cape, South Africa. By taking the relationship between the elderly 'residents' living in the ward and their professional caregivers as the focus, I show how, in the face of dementia-related language and memory losses, this relationship was established and maintained across time. The focus on relationship allowed me to pay close attention to the face-to-face interactions between caregivers and residents so as to identify and discern the assumptions and practices that shaped the possibilities for personhood and relatedness within the ward. I demonstrate that the relationship between caregivers and residents was established and maintained through myriad and ongoing practices of care. This institutionally structured relation of care must be recognized as both an alternative form of sociality within which 'demented' residents are held in life and relationship, and as an instrument through which old people with dementia are subjected to the routines, norms, and temporal structures on the ward. Invocations and denials of personhood occur at the practical level of intersubjective engagement. I show that despite residents' language impairments, and the consequent importance of embodied gestures for communication and mutual interaction, language was fundamental to the relation of care, and thus to the practical engagements through which personhood was invoked and denied. Caregivers frequently engaged in a practice which involved the recollection and narration of the biographical 'facts' that constituted residents' erstwhile social lives and social identities. Defining this practice as an intersubjective memory practice, I argue that it functions to invoke personhood by establishing continuity between past and present and calling forth residents as socially recognized and situated persons. This intersubjective memory practice can be interpreted both as evidence that personhood is emergent within and through relations of care, and as a normative practice which reinforces the currently taken-for-granted assumption that the self is constructed in and through narrative. I suggest that the widespread acceptance of the notion of the narrative self, in both popular and academic domains, is indicative of the manner in and extent to which language, memory, self, and time are entangled in contemporary Western thought. In order to demonstrate the historical and cultural specificity of this entanglement, I draw attention to the way in which memory, narrative, and temporal continuity became inextricably tied to notions of personhood and relatedness within Western philosophy. I propose that expanding an understanding of the ways in which language, memory, self, and time are entangled in everyday practice provides a means of troubling the widely accepted belief that dementia leads to a loss of personhood and relationship, without resorting to the dichotomous thinking that characterizes much of the scholarly and clinical literature that is influenced by the so-called personhood approach to dementia.
Open Access
Milk, meaning and morality : tracing donated breast milk from donor to baby
(2015) Waltz, Miriam H A; Ross, Fiona C
This thesis follows the trajectory of donated breast milk as it leaves the dyadic mother-child relationship and is reconfigured through a series of transformations as bodily fluid, food, or medicine, depending on its context and the practices and discursive structures that seek to stabilise it as a particular object. Research was conducted between November 2014 and May 2015 in Cape Town, South Africa, including interviews with eleven donating women and eight weeks of participant observation at a level two maternity hospital. Donors use a rhetoric of 'saving babies', the effect of which is to deny the social tie between donor and recipient, or the potential for consubstantiation. Technologies play a crucial role in aiding the milk's transformation as it follows its trajectory through four nodal points (expressing and storage, pasteurisation and testing, packaging, and prescription) from donors' homes into the clinical setting, where it is framed in terms of safety and risk. Care enters into the constellation of relations that the milk ensures in unexpected ways and figures into the ways the milk is distributed in the hospital. Thus, donated breast milk shifts back and forth between being a bodily fluid, food, and medicine as its trajectory takes it through different constellations of saving, motherhood, technologies, care, safety, risk and medical authority. Different techniques foreground particular properties of the milk, as ultimately a set of moral decisions converges around saving, securing and sustaining life, materialising relationships and forming the milk form one entity into another and back again.
Open Access
Mothers matter: a critical exploration of motherhood and development through a video card intervention in a local clinic
(2017) Marais, Kylie; Ross, Fiona C
New discourses of foetal and infant development, individual well-being and population futures, argue that mothers matter during the first thousand days of a baby's life, which commences from conception to the age of two. Women, particularly (black, working class) pregnant women and mothers, have consequently become the target of several international and local interventions related to maternal and child health (MCH) and early childhood development (ECD). The Together from the Beginning video card is one such intervention that emphasises the value of MCH and ECD, as supported by the latest scientific research, and that presents diverse childcare knowledge and practices to parents and caregivers. The video card intervention was piloted and evaluated over a two-month period in the waiting areas of the antenatal clinic and Midwife's Obstetrics Unit (MOU) at a Community Health Clinic (CHC) situated outside of Cape Town. A total of eighty participants, including sixty pregnant women, eight partners or fathers of their babies, ten nurses and two counsellors, were interviewed and observed during this time. Based on ethnographic research conducted in the clinic, this thesis argues that while mothers do matter in the physical development of babies, mothers are 'developmentally constructed' and thus 'made to matter' through MCH and ECD development discourses and interventions that reinforce and normalise dominant discourses of motherhood. More specifically, it will be shown how three different maternal figures – 'the waiting mother', 'the educated mother', and 'the ideal mother' – were produced, developed and 'made to matter' within public healthcare spaces for the sake of development, which in turn reframed and undermined the time, knowledge, and experiences of these women.
Open Access
Raw life, new hope: decency, housing and everyday life in a post-apartheid community
(UCT Press, 2010-09) Ross, Fiona C
The book has been designed to demonstrate social science concepts in action. Its narrative is lively and engaging, and materials can be adapted for any level of study. Raw Life, New Hope is the stoy of one community's efforts to secure a decent life in post-apartheid South Africa. For residents of The Park, a squalid shantytown on the outskirts of Cape Town, life was hard and they described their social world as raw. Efforts to get on with the messy business of everyday life were often underut by cruel poverty. Despite inhospitable conditions, they sought to create respectable lives. The opportunity of formal housing fired them with enthusiasm as they saw the possibilities of living respectably with stable families, decent work, enduring social relations and the trappings of consumerism. The book traces their experiences as people struggled with sense-making in a complex world. Based on nearly two decades of research, Raw Life, New Hope examines how everyday lives are fashioned through relationships, reciprocity and language. It offers a rare glimpse into the complex and contradictory ways of life of people living on the margins of society.
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.