OpenUCT :: Browsing by Author "Spiegel, Andrew"

Browsing by Author "Spiegel, Andrew"

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Open Access
'Airing dirty linen': the problems of establishing a women's rights organisation in contemporary Swaziland
(2002) Wolf, Zanine Nadia; Spiegel, Andrew
This dissertation is about the power of tradition to influence domestic behavioural norms in Swaziland. I set out to demonstrate that, although the Swaziland Action Group Against Abuse (SWAGAA) has rendered itself indispensable to Swazi women, it still has a long way to go before realising its goal of the empowerment of abused women. This is due, primarily, to the organisation's adherence to international standards of women's human rights which cannot readily be applied in the particular context of Swaziland because they are resisted by those who seek to preserve what is claimed to be the traditional order. SWAGAA's counselling service is based on the premise that if an abused woman can be encouraged to make an informed, independent decision then she will have been empowered to take control of her life, and, ultimately, to free herself of the abuse. I argue that this approach, despite good intentions, is highly unrealistic in the locality of Swaziland. When a woman attempts to confront gender andlor domestic violence using the empowerment approach advocated by SWAGAA, she comes up against a number of entrenched ideological and practical constraints that undermine her power to negotiate. Foremost amongst these is the strong negative responses to any practice of 'airing dirty linen in public', such as consulting SWAGAA, for which a woman may be severely chastised. Women are reprimanded for seeking counsel beyond what are regarded as family boundaries because, they are told, by the police and by those around them, that this is inconsistent with acceptable and normative 'traditional' practice. I argue that the pressure placed upon women to adhere to practices of social organisation which are upheld as traditional, is rooted in a legacy of mistrust of foreign ideologies and practices. The leadership of the country has been, and continues to be engaged in an ongoing struggle to retain some semblance of what it regards as the traditional order. SWAGAA comes up directly against this legacy. Firstly, the women whom they counsel are constrained from making the individualistic decisions that SWAGAA wishes them to make. Secondly, women themselves are so embroiled in a social situation where men act as their advocates that they do not easily relate to the idea of individual empowerment. Yet SWAGAA persists with an approach that tries to undermine everyday normative practices, rather than working within the parameters of those norms. Its radical approach renders SWAGAA's counselling service too ambitious in Swaziland. What I thus advocate is an incremental approach that aims, gradually, to encourage women to empower themselves, given the persistence of the ideological and practical resistance to those attempts.
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
'Becoming' and overcoming : girls’ changing bodies and toilets in Zwelihle, Hermanus
(2015) Vice, Kerry Leigh; Spiegel, Andrew
The dissertation draws on ethnographic research conducted in 2012 and 2013 in a South African township called Zwelihle in the Western Cape coastal town of Hermanus. Leading up to this period, protests motivated by a long growing dissatisfaction with shared temporary sanitation facilities and services were rife within townships and informal settlements across the Western Cape, and the provision of toilets by municipalities that formed part of a national “Water is Life, Sanitation is Dignity” campaign became a highly politicised issue. Against this backdrop, and drawing on evidence gathered while doing ten weeks of ethnographic fieldwork in and around Zwelihle, the dissertation highlights the relationship between reproductive health and sanitation. Specifically, it focuses on the experiences, embodied practices and imaginings of adolescent girls in Zwelihle who use predominantly public toilet facilities; and it uses Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of “becoming-woman” as a lens through which to consider how girls experience their changing bodies. The dissertation shows that, within South Africa’s climate of extreme sexual violence, the experiences, embodied practices and imaginings of adolescent girls in Zwelihle reflect the presence of fear in the everyday and their perceptions of public toilets and other ‘dark’ spaces as unsafe. Finally, it shows the value of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept “becoming-woman” as a theoretical lens through which to view how girls inhabit spaces in Zwelihle and adjacent areas, and how they inhabit their bodies; and it provides a means for an analysis that recognises the potential for girls and women to overcome imposed expectations that may appear to be simple realities.
Open Access
Boundary work in the process of informal job seeking : an ethnographic study of Cape Town roadside workseekers
(2010) Sterken, Hanneke; Spiegel, Andrew
In the context of rising unemployment, an NGO called Men on the Side of the Road (MSR) was established to provide men who stand by the side of the road waiting to be offered jobs with job opportunities and skills. The purpose of the ethnographic study described here was to assess members‘ experiences and attitudes towards the work or income-earning opportunities introduced to members by MSR. The overall goal of the report was to assess why a large proportion of the work opportunities introduced to members were not taken up with great enthusiasm. After completion of the study, the researcher found that the day-labourers used three different labels ('locals', 'networking workers' and 'struggling foreigners') to describe themselves and other roadside workseekers.
Open Access
Co-creating at the threshold : a dialogical approach to festival planning at a Cape Town Waldorf school
(2009) Majoros, Elizabeth M; Spiegel, Andrew
Waldorf schools were first established in Germany in 1919 under the guidance of Rudolf Steiner, with the intention of educating children for the renewal of society. Since the spread of Waldorf schools to South Africa in the 1950's, South African Waldorf teachers have been faced with the challenge of localizing the pedagogy to meet the needs of modern South African children. One arena for this challenge is in planning the school festivals. Through data derived from ethnographic observation of festival planning and enactment at Michael Oak Waldorf School in Cape Town, South Africa, I show that Michael Oak teachers consider the celebration of school festivals to be intrinsic to the education of the children, and that in adapting the festivals to their own context they are confronted with conflicting opinions and ideas about how to juxtapose the Christian and seasonal festivals, how to negotiate religious differences, and to what extent to adapt the festivals to reflect specific aspects of South African culture. Using data obtained from participant observation, predominantly semi-structured, unstructured, and informal interviews with more than seventy people (including Michael Oak teachers, former pupils, and past and present parents), along with background reading and study, I show how the these teachers, recreating each festival anew every year instead of relying solely on established traditions, took a dialogical approach to conceptualizing and planning their festivals - one that, though time-consuming and sometimes complicated, was itself a ritual meaningful to the teachers. This dialogical approach was outwardly manifest in the festival's ritual symbols, particularly the use of time and space, and the objects and performance filling them. It was also observed in the planning meetings and was described by the Michael Oak teachers in interviews. Through this dialogical approach, the teachers experienced what Victor Turner calls communitas, a liminal, threshold state of creativity, changed relationships, and potentiality. I demonstrate through teachers' statements that by remaining on the threshold of these often conflicting ideas, the teachers found in themselves a creative energy that extended to the children as the teachers included them in festival preparation and enactment.
Open Access
Competition for the urban poor : urban community development (Crossroads) : the complexities of giving and receiving
(1991) McDowell, Christopher; Spiegel, Andrew; West, Martin
Black people in South Africa have been the targets - or victims - of massive development intervention by successive South African governments. And in more recent years urbanised Africans in particular have been the targets of increasing levels of development intervention, much of which has been funded and directed through bilateral aid programmes initiated by western governments. It is with those kinds of development intervention that this thesis is concerned. Research, conducted during 1989 and 1990, examined a slice of development activity occurring in an African urban area during what is becoming a period of transition from South Africa's effective isolation to the beginning of its reincorporation into the world "development system".
Open Access
Development and disappointment : an ethnographic study of Kosovo informal settlement's water and sanitation system upgrade
(2010) Beauclair, Roxanne; Spiegel, Andrew
In the context of rapid urbanisation and growing numbers of informal settlements in peri-urban areas of Cape Town, South Africa, a development project was undertaken by the municipality, to provide Kosovo Informal Settlement with a new communal water and sanitation system that uses vacuum sewerage technology. This ethnographic study sought to establish the level of social acceptability of the new infrastructure postupgrade; to monitor how residents used the new and old water and sanitation systems; and to identify any other social or institutional barriers to providing water and sanitation services in similar contexts. It was found that the development project was a complete failure. This dissertation describes the ways in which the municipality engaged with residents and other stakeholders and shows how they contributed to the project's failure.
Open Access
The effects on local livelihoods of a Wetland development scheme in a Zimbabwean village : an ethnographic study
(2011) Mangoma, Jaqualine Farai; Spiegel, Andrew
This study explores the effect on local livelihoods of the New Gato Wetland Development Project (NGWP) in a rural village in Zimbabwe, in light of a post development critique which has labelled most development as a failure.
Open Access
Ethical Becoming, Ethical Fetishism, and Capitalist Modernity: An Ethnography of Design Education
(2022) Fore, Grant A; Spiegel, Andrew; Morreira, Shannon
This thesis comprises an ethnography of design education on which a proposed intervention into the theory and praxis of ethics education is created. It is based on an investigation – conducted in conversation with undergraduate interior design/architectural technology students – into the hegemonic structures of higher education and the singularities that may have the potential to transform them. The ethnographic work involved interrogating students' design processes and ethical sense-making across three semesters of a community-engaged course at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. The course was designed to mirror the operations of an architectural firm, and community partners acted as “clients.” As students designed floor plans, they were affected by multiple actants and forces. The design actants and affective forces constituting student designs are identified to reveal the relations of design. These relations were often concealed and devalued through the hegemonic design logic of capitalist modernity that manifested in ideas such as the “American Dream” and discourses of professionalism which were reproduced through the ideological state apparatus that is the university. While students often made meaning of their experience of design relations through such a hegemonic design logic, such meaning making was not absolute and alternative meanings arose, expressing ethico-aesthetic modes of valuation. When students' meaning making was captured by capital, influential relations were concealed and devalued, creating hauntings within designs. Notions of commodity fetishism and dead labor are utilized to further theorize the concept of ethical fetishism and, in doing so, to imagine new ways both to reveal design's ghostly relations and then to value them for the creative role each plays in constituting the present. By seeking to understand how extensively student design processes are or are not captured by an otherwise totalizing system of capitalism and the beliefs, assumptions, and values of modernity, the thesis identifies moments of slippage where singularities flee the articulating forces of capitalist modernity and the discourses and ideologies born from it. The thesis ends with suggestions towards a new potentiality for ethics education (i.e., ethical becoming) that recognizes and cherishes relationality whilst challenging the beliefs and values of capitalist modernity designing us every day.
Open Access
An ethnographically-based critique of sustainable tourism and cruise-boat eco-tourism practices in Galápagos, Ecuador
(2012) Burke, Adam; Spiegel, Andrew
Variations in people's notions of sustainability, eco-tourism, and the intersections between the two, calls fora critical assessment of sustainable eco-tourism practices. This is particularly the case in GalÃ¡pagos, Ecuador, where there has been a recent upsurge in the numbers of eco-tourist visitors and in demand to develop sustainable eco-tourism as also to deal with the social consequences its practices have on people living in the archipelago. My dissertation fieldwork was conducted aboard one of the many catamarans in GalÃ¡pagos providing eco-tourism opportunities and among terrestrial and marine entry points to the archipelago it visited. My data support an argument that GalapagueÃ±os' (GalÃ¡pagos residents') dependency on eco-tourism has produced both social divides amongst them and changes in their ideas about nature and how to relate to it.
Open Access
From shacks to houses : space usage and social change in a Western Cape shanty town
(1999) Yose, Constance Nontobeko; Spiegel, Andrew
The objective of the study is to look at the social impact of development in relation to the relocation of people from an informal settlement to a formal settlement. This is demonstrated by illustrating how the context and flexibility of space influences the social and economic life of people. I show how the spatial flexibility with in, and the context of, an informal settlement enabled people to strategise around their living environment for their survival and well being. This contrasts with the disruption and disturbance to social and economic life in the formal settlement to which they were relocated. Evidence for my argument emerges from ﬁeldwork carried out in the Western Cape between March and June 1997, firstly in the Marconi Beam informal settlement and secondly amongst the same people in their new formal settlement, Joe Slovo Park.
Open Access
From shacks to houses : space usage and social change in a Western Cape shanty town
(1999) Yose, Constance Nontobeko; Spiegel, Andrew
The objective of the study is to look at the social impact of development in relation to the relocation of people from an informal settlement to a formal settlement. This is demonstrated by illustrating how the context and flexibility of space influences the social and economic life of people. I show how the spatial flexibility with in, and the context of, an informal settlement enabled people to strategise around their living environment for their survival and well being. This contrasts with the disruption and disturbance to social and economic life in the formal settlement to which they were relocated. Evidence for my argument emerges from ﬁeldwork carried out in the Western Cape between March and June 1997, firstly in the Marconi Beam informal settlement and secondly amongst the same people in their new formal settlement, Joe Slovo Park.
Open Access
Grave expectations : participatory greywater management in two Western Cape shack settlements
(2009) Kruger, E M; Spiegel, Andrew
South Africa faces enormous challenges in the face of burgeoning urbanisation and the growth of underserviced shack settlements. Waste water disposal is but one of many aspects of basic services that are lacking. This anthropological dissertation is focused upon a Water Research Commission funded project, conducted by University of Cape Town academics from the departments of Civil Engineering, Social Anthropology and Environmental and Geographic Sciences, and carried out in two shack settlements in the Western Cape, South Africa. The project's aim was to engender community-level greywater management through participatory methods in the two shack settlements. The dissertation involves close analyses of participatory methods, the legislation and policy which governs service delivery to shack settlements in South Africa, and ethnographic accounts of shack settlement residents' experiences of service delivery. This information is compared with the assumptions upon which the project was predicated, to argue that the project's participatory aims were challenged from the outset by the political and socio-economic context within which the project was carried out. Moreover, in line with enduring criticisms of participatory development - in spite of a professed adherence to the methodologies - was unable to achieve its participatory goals.
Open Access
Growing together: exploring the politics of knowing and conserving (bio) diversity in a small conservancy in Cape Town
(2013) Olwage, Elsemi; Spiegel, Andrew
This dissertation is based on research conducted at a small state-managed conservancy called the Edith Stephens Nature Reserve (ESNR) situated in the low-lying flatlands of the Cape Town metropolis. By tracing some of the complex and varied ways in which different ways of knowing and valuing urban "natures" and practices of conservation co-constitute each other, this dissertation critically engages with the social power relations at work in the continual making and unmaking of Cape Town's "natural" heritages. In doing so, I argue for recognizing the ways in which Cape Town's urban "natures" remain entangled with the epistemological, ecological and spatial legacies of colonialism and apartheid. Moreover, by focusing on the ESNR, I explore the current material and discursive practices by the state in relation to urban "nature" conservation. In recent years, the discursive framework of biodiversity conservation was mapped onto ESNR through the state apparatus. At the same time, ESNR was identified as pilot site for an experimental partnership project that was called Cape Flats Nature (CFN), a project that ran from 2002 till 2010 which explored what biodiversity conservation would mean within marginalized, poverty-stricken and highly unequal urban landscapes. By engaging with ESNR's historically constituted material- discursivity, this dissertation argues that, during this time, a particular relational knowledge emerged which, in turn, co-crafted and configured the emerging poetics, politics and practices at ESNR. In doing so, I foreground my main argument - that urban "nature"conservation, far from only being about conserving and caring for nonhuman life worlds, is rather simultaneously about conserving a particular relation to the world, to others and to oneself.
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
Journeys to health : middle-class Mozambican women assess healthcare service delivery in Mozambique and South Africa
(2011) Chichava, Marina; Henderson, Patti; Spiegel, Andrew
My thesis explores how Mozambican middle-class women perceive official local healthcare services in both their public and private dimensions, within their country, and why they sometimes travel abroad to South Africa in search of healthcare across a range of gynaecological services, ranging from basic procedures to more complex requirements. I trace the stories of fifteen women to convey their experiences and opinions of the Mozambican health system. I show the women negotiating their way through barriers and limitations within this system, in ways that point out its inadequacies and inefficiency. I investigate how searching for 'quality' healthcare, often abroad, is intertwined with middle-class women's crafting of identities that aspire to a certain demonstration of 'modernity' in which social status is claimed.
Open Access
Leading while being led: developing the developer at a Catholic NGO in Cape Town, South Africa
(2012) Fore, Grant A; Spiegel, Andrew
Religion has played a significant role in the historical unfolding of what is now understood as "development." Until recently, however, religious modes of contemporary development have been overlooked in development scholarship. The dissertation uses ethnographic data about the religious ethics undergirding the discourse, and practices of development agents in Catholic Welfare and Development (CWD), a faith-based NGO in Cape Town, South Africa. It explores how the particular modalities for the ethical/moral development of the subjectivities of CWD's developers. Informed by their own development, developers attempted to develop those they considered to be beneficiaries. The dissertation argues, and provides evidence to demonstrate, that, through the shared experience of development as an interpersonal and intersubjective encounter, both developers and beneficiaries were developed and also developed each other.
Open Access
Men's issues, men's solutions : the effects of a South African mythopoetic men's group's activities on gender equality: 2004-2005
(2011) Rothgiesser, Stuart Leon; Spiegel, Andrew
Mythopoetic organisations are popular among largely middle-class (elite) men in well-resourced countries. These organisations have sprung up in the last twenty years to create a space where men come together to address issues of masculinity. Many pro-feminist writers have questioned the capacity of mythopoetic men’s groups to promote gender equality. They see them as more likely to provide support for, rather than undermine, patriarchy.
Open Access
Missions and social identities in the Lower Orange River Basin, 1760-1998
(2005) Klinghardt, Gerald Philip; Spiegel, Andrew
The broad theoretical concern of the thesis is to examine an ambivalent dimension in the formation of social identities in which similarities in attributes and symbolic representations can become the source of conflict when they appear to have been appropriated and alienated. In studies of the role of ethnicity in the creation and reinforcement of social identity there is very often the assumption that social cohesion arises from similarity and that actual or perceived differences lead people to identify one another as members of opposing ethnic groups. I have suggested, however, that differentiation arises from the claims that are made to this distinctiveness, and that disputes over cultural commonalities or shared ethnic symbolism actually serve to sustain ethnic boundaries in situations where powerful external forces are at work in promoting integration. I have used Tambiah's theoretical model for the investigation of ethnic identity to structure a series of case studies drawn from a community study of Pella, a communal area with a Roman Catholic mission station, and studies of other former Coloured and Nama Reserves associated with Christian missions in the Lower Orange River Basin of Namaqualand. A distinctive historical feature of this region is a general trend towards social integration as opposed to the separation found in other parts of southern Africa. In the case studies that make up the body of the thesis I have presented the sociality of the community at Pella from three perspectives, socio- political, religious and material cultural, to show the complex ways in which ethnicity has operated over time in the formation of social identities. Setting the colonial and post-colonial encounters in Gramsci's notion of hegemony as involving asymmetrical class relations and cultural imperialism, I argue that the ongoing role of the universalist Christian churches in shaping patterns of identity has to be understood in terms of their commitment to what has come to be called "inculturation" as a way of indigenizing their versions of Christianity in Africa and throughout the world. In addressing the questions of coercion and resistance, hegemony and accommodation, localization and revitalization, and the role of missions in identity politics, I contend that the concept of "inculturation" is vital to an understanding of oppositional responses to globalization, as these are expressed in cultural and ethnic terms at local level through a politics of similarity as a form of everyday resistance to the coercive and hegemonic forces of globalization. The thesis is thus a contribution to a wider debate in anthropology on role of ethnicity in cultural transformation and continuity in the context of the gathering crisis of the nation-state and the ongoing revolutionary reconstruction of the contemporary world order.
Open Access
The power of meaning : people and the utilization and management of coastal resources in Saadani village, Tanzania
(2001) Mwaipopo-Ako, Rosemarie Nyigulila R; Spiegel, Andrew; Maghimbi, Samwe; Brokensha, David
This study examines the natural resource utilisation and management patterns of people in the coastal village of Saadani in Tanzania, in light of the individuals' social and economic power. The study was conducted between August 1997 and March1999. It focuses on people's access to and control of natural resources both within and beyond the household. It was prompted by the need to examine how pressures arising from external factors such as shifts in macro-economic orientation and environmental management policies which initiated new utilisation practices have impinged on coastal people's livelihoods and on their ways of using natural resources. At the same time, internal dynamics of the local society have created new interpretations on claims to and use of those resources. Applying contemporary understandings on power, the study explores the different ways in which individuals as social actors, construct their lives in ways that empower them and employ strategies to achieve goals that they define within their particular historical and social contexts to overcome the limitations that are generated by these various processes. Gender is also recognised as an important analytical category because it makes it possible to engage in the diversities in local power that go beyond the state versus local opposition.