Browsing by Author "Spiegel, Mugsy"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Art and the development of dialogic skills: an ethnography of art in Waldorf teacher training
    (2005) Van Alphen, Catherine; Spiegel, Mugsy; Millar, Clive
    Waldorf Schools emphasise the use of art in education. This interdisciplinary dissertation demonstrates how Waldorf teacher trainees are prepared to work with art in the school classroom. It does that by documenting the ways that three different art media are introduced to students in a Waldorf teacher training programme in Cape Town, and those students' responses and experiences in working with those media - relying quite heavily on students' oral and written comments about those experiences. The data presented come from the writer's own involvement as a teacher trainer cum researcher who has adopted an ethnographic-style approach to data collection and analysis. The data show that a primary goal of introducing Waldorf teacher trainees to art is to develop what is here described as a dialogic capacity - an ability to be able simultaneously to immerse oneself in the teaching process and to stand back and reflect on everything that that process involves so that, as teachers, they are able to be flexible and open to change. That this can be done through cultivating a teacher's feeling for art through requiring its practice, it is argued, helps to bridge an apparent paradox in Rudolf Steiner's work between his call for practising art for its own sake and his recognition that art should be practised in schools to facilitate the development of the individual.
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    Impotence and omnipotence : problematising the articulation of anthropological perspectives within the land restitution process
    (1997) Gordon, Jennifer; Spiegel, Mugsy
    This dissertation attempts to illustrate to what extent applied anthropologists operating within institutional contexts can effectively articulate their anthropological perspectives in order to contribute towards effecting positive social change. In order to explore the above thesis, I have reflected upon and analysed my role as an applied anthropologist in an effort to inform and advance an understanding of the strengths and limitations of this role. Accordingly, I have reflected upon my experiences during a three month research internship which I served at the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights (Western and Northern Cape), working on the Ndabeni Land Restitution Claim. Through reflecting upon my own inability to appropriately incorporate anthropological perspectives within the Ndabeni Land Restitution process, I was able to identify two constraints within the institutional context of the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights (Western and Northern Cape) which served to paralyse these perspectives. I concluded that applied anthropologists are simultaneously rendered impotent and omnipotent to articulate their perspectives. This can be attributed firstly to the role applied anthropologists play within the institutional context, and secondly, to the type of knowledge that the institutional context requires applied anthropologists to produce.
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    Music made visible in time and space : concepts of simultaneity in tone-eurythmy choreography
    (2009) Sponheuer, Silke; Spiegel, Mugsy
    Eurythmy is an art of movement that expresses music and speech. This dissertation explores eurythmy's musical field, called tone-eurythmy, in its multifaceted appearances, background and within its philosophical context. Tone-eurythmy, carried out by performers moving in space and time, makes music visible. It transforms music into a new movement-art form, that of audible-visible music, by expressing musical components as well as the artistic intentions within a composition and those held by the performing artists. The dissertation examines how musical concepts are seen by eurythmists to integrate ideas of wholeness and to understand music as both audible and inaudible. It draws on studies and findings from music psychology to show distinct effects of musical elements on the human being, and to indicate the similarities between those and the qualitative expressions of music through tone-eurythmy.
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    Nature and power : a critique of 'people-based conservation' at South Africa's Madikwe Game Reserve
    (2008) Bologna, Sarah; Spiegel, Mugsy
    Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 265-283).
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    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.
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    Rifling through 'nature' an ethnographic account of biltong hunting, late capitalist 'nature' and a politics of belonging in the South African wildlife ranching industry
    (2013) Goodrich, Andre; Green, Lesley; Spiegel, Mugsy
    Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references.
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    Towards a unity of ecology and ordinary ethics : on everyday life and aspirations to live sustainably in a permaculture community
    (2013) Roux, Tarien; Spiegel, Mugsy
    Conventional agriculture is a significant contributor to climate change, itself a socially driven ecological phenomenon. Until recently, however, social science has only just begun to engage intensely with the relationship between agriculture and global climate change and also on developing a viable sustainable response thereto. Following, this dissertation is premised on the understanding that sustainability requires an integration of human settlement patterns and sustainable agricultural practices. The dissertation uses ethnographic data about a permaculture community that practices such an integrated existence as a demonstration of permaculture's primary ethic to take responsibility for one's own existence. By asking what it means to say that the residents produce their own lives, the dissertation traces the theoretical and environmental context and structures that shape and are shaped by the intentional community that has formalised itself as a nonprofit organisation with an educational mandate. It explores how these two meet and provides a demonstration of the residents' community-based lifestyle as infused with aspirations to sustainability. This dissertation argues that the residents integrated human settlement patterns with sustainable agriculture through internalising design and building costs, and decentralising agricultural energetic inputs and outputs; and that these activities inserted an ethic of care at the core of the labour activities that constituted the everyday lives of residents. Further, that everyday life there exhibited an aspiration to living sustainably as the grassroots implementation of permaculture's pedagogical ethos of living an integrated existence as a positive response to climate change.