OpenUCT :: Browsing by Author "West, Martin"

Browsing by Author "West, Martin"

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African independent churches in Soweto
(1972) West, Martin; Wilson, Monica
Of the estimated 6 000 African independent churches in Africa, approximately 3 000 are to be found in Southern Africa. Most of these are in the Republic of South Africa, where the history of the independent church movement goes back nearly a hundred years. The greatest concentration of independent churches in South Africa is to be found in the urban complexes round the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria in the Southern Transvaal. Soweto, the complex of townships to the south-west of Johannesburg which houses about one million people, has about 900 of these independent churches. This study deals with independent churches in Soweto, and their relationship to their urban environment.
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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
Assaulting childhood : an ethnographic study of children resident in a Western Cape migrant hostel complex
(1990) Jones, Sean Wilshire; West, Martin
This study documents the lives of children between the ages of 10 and 15 years who reside in migrant worker hostels in the Hottentots-Holland region of the Western Cape. It focuses on three particular aspects of the children's lives: their domestic circumstances and relationships prior to their residence in the hostels; their experiences of everyday life in the hostels; and the quality, extent, and determinants of their education over time. The children's domestic circumstances before moving to the hostels had been disrupted in the extreme. This disruption took various forms, but was caused primarily by the participation of parents and other significant adults in labour migration. Consequently, the children's histories are characterised by high levels of mobility, where children themselves have migrated, by frequent separation from parents, and by high incidences of foster-parenting. Testimony by the children indicates that they have felt this domestic disruption acutely. A further consequence of the children's residential and domestic mobility has been regular interruptions over time in their schooling. Factors such as the frequency of the children's own movement, separation from their parents, devaluative attitudes towards education by temporary foster parents, and vicissitudes in their economic circumstances have meant that most of them have progressed less than half as far at school as they should have done. This is compounded at Lwandle by the state's refusal to provide a school for hostel children, and by the inadequacy of the 'self-help' teaching which takes place there as a result. The children's everyday lives in the hostels are examined in relation to the severe limitations on space and privacy which exist there. Particular attention is granted to children's perceptions of the hostel milieu, to the difficulties which parents experience in rearing children in the hostels, to parent-child relations, and to the games and other play-activities in which the children engage. Perhaps the most prominent feature of life in the hostels which emerged during the research is the frequency with which children are exposed to acts of extreme violence. The study documents both the children's accounts of this violence, and their diagnoses of it. In conclusion, questions are raised about the future of these children and others like them. Attention is also directed towards the potential for further research into childhood by anthropology and other social sciences. The study grants primacy to children's viewpoints over and above those of their parents and other adults in the hostels, and one of its implicit objectives is to demonstrate the value to anthropology of children's insights into social life. It makes extensive use of the children's own testimony, both written and oral, and of life history material.
Open Access
Changing continuities : experiencing and interpreting history, population movement and material differentiation in Matatiele, Transkei
(1990) Spiegel, Andrew David; West, Martin
Cultural continuities through time and space have long concerned anthropologists. Recent work has increasingly concentrated on understanding these as social structural responses to both broad and local political-economic structures and processes. The aim of this thesis is to build on that approach. I argue that while some persistences of social form are best explained in functionalist and instrumentalist terms, to explain others one needs to look to the momentum of common practices that do not change without good cause. I thus attempt to wed a materialist analysis of political-economic determinants with one focused on social practice. I do this first by the application of a political-economic analysis and then by examining social practices for their apparent continuities of form and analysing why these occur. The approach taken thus reveals the influence of a paradigm shift in contemporary anthropology. The thesis focuses on the Matatiele District in South Africa's Transkei bantustan. The evidence I present was obtained primarily from ethnographic field-research conducted between 1982 and 1985 and concentrated in two settlements there. This is augmented by material both from further fieldwork undertaken elsewhere in the district, and from various documentary and archival sources. A primary concern is the nature of material and social differentation in the district and its relationship to both large- and small-scale population movement there since the mid-nineteenth century. By examining these through the prism of a political-economic approach, I indicate the extent to which they are functions of broad regional processes, including the development of capitalism in southern Africa. I thus show that local-level material differentiation is the product of population movements, themselves traceable to both capital's demand for labour and state interventions in rural land-use practices. In addition I show that local circumstance modifies the impact of these broader processes at the local level: there is great variety in the ways in which regional political-economic processes impact locally. Another primary concern is the appearance of cultural continuity in observed social behavioural forms, and people's claims that their present practices represent such continuities. A number of examples are identified. I examine these in order to establish the extent to which they are the functions of political-economic structures, the products of instrumental manipulation for local political purposes, or just the outcome of people pragmatically going on in ways with which they are familiar. While I acknowledge the merit of the first two types of explanation, I argue that there are many instances when the primary reason that people behave as they do is that they have no reason not to, and that their actions reflect a practical consciousness (or knowledgeability) that has its roots in experience. I conclude the thesis by discussing some of the methodological implications of a greater focus on practice and practical consciousness in southern African anthropology. I suggest that there is need for reinvestment in the method of intensive participant-observation, refined to accommodate concerns with the commonplace activities of everyday life in particular. This approach, I argue, is necessary in order to represent the diversity of cultural practice to be found in the region, but without recourse to structuralist analyses that have tended to reinforce notions of a mosaic of cultures in the region and given strength to pluralist perceptions of the region's population.
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
The implications of the abolition of influx control legislation in the Western Cape
(1992) Oliver-Evans, Ceridwen; West, Martin
Influx control legislation was formally abolished in South Africa in 1986. This thesis investigates the social processes set in motion with its abolition in the spheres of employment and urbanisation and argues that the way in which influx control has been defined is central to any analysis concerned with its abolition. In this regard, influx control has been viewed in two senses: a narrow one in which it has been equated with formal influx control legislation, 'the pass laws'; and, secondly and more broadly, through definitions which embrace all methods of control over African urbanisation and associated labour mobility. This thesis argues that, in the macro domain, while influx control in its narrow sense has been abolished, it has been replaced with far more complex and subtle forms of control. These ostensibly racially neutral measures, an 'orderly urbanisation' policy and a wide variety of laws existing on South African statute books continue to circumscribe African rights. The research focuses on a specific region, the Western Cape, an area where influx control has been more harshly implemented than elsewhere through the implementation of the Coloured Labour Preference Policy. This thesis investigates on a micro-level, via the medium of a company compound, how people at both an individual and institutional level have interpreted the legislative changes and acted upon them. The particular range of actors include government officials, employers and employer organisations, union representatives, and migrant workers and their families living in the company compound. The evidence I present was obtained primarily through interviews and ethnographic field-research conducted in 1988. A particular concern of the thesis has been to examine the disjunction between policy and practice as pursued by government officials and the effects and implications arising from this among the actors mentioned above. The main themes which have emerged from this research are those of confusion and a lack of knowledge among many of the informants. It was found that high-ranking government officials lack consensus on vital issues of citizenship and employment which affect the lives of thousands of Transkeian and Ciskeian citizens. Employers, confused by the confusion in government departments, and confronted by a new situation and new sets of rules have either ignored these or succumbed to government policy. Equally, unions have been slow to respond or systematically adopt a policy on the 1986 legislative changes. Finally, it was found that migrant workers and their families are availing themselves of opportunities presented by the abolition of influx control legislation in terms of freedom of movement, although as I argue, this takes the form of a complex range of fluid and dynamic movement patterns between the compound, the rural areas and urban townships. This complexity, as the thesis demonstrates, is reflected both in the attitudes and in the practical daily living arrangements of the workers as they respond to and interpret the macro-level forces which affect them.
Open Access
Invisible villages: changing residential patterns and relationships in a rural village
(1986) Robinson,Helen; West, Martin
This study centres on the village of Greyton, near Caledon in the Western Cape. It investigates the contemporary and historic changes in its population, residence patterns, relationships and economic activity. It focusses particularly on the effects of the implementation of the Group Areas Act in the village in 1969 and the change from an apparently integrated agricultural settlement to a highly differentiated holiday and retirement resort. This thesis questions the validity of the term "community" within the constraints and contradictions imposed by the establishment of Group Areas. It examines the idea of visible and invisible villagers in the context of separate development and, in the light of the changes which have taken place, it considers the relative importance of a progressive attitude in social and economic planning as opposed to a policy of preservation of the original character of a rural village.
Open Access
Social and spatial mobility along the Kuiseb River in the Namib Desert, Namibia
(1983) Dentlinger, Ursula; West, Martin
This study seeks to explain the unusually high rate of circulation of individuals between local domestic units of the rural settlements along the Kuiseb River as well as between these and domestic units in the closest urban centre. It is argued that these movements form part of a general state of flexibility of personal relationships, which subsequently affects household composition. An explanation for this flexibility is suggested in terms of one strategy of survival pursued by relatively poor individuals, which involves the sporadic attachment by poorer individuals to relatively more economically stable relatives. As these attachments, whether residential or not, are of short duration, they produce rapid and unpredictable changes to the composition of existing households. Material is presented of three areas of social life illustrating these sporadically shifting alignments. These areas are subsistence relations, conjugal relations and parent-child relations. These examples of sporadic shifts of domestic alignments are contrasted with a few examples where households were seen to show facets of cyclical changes in their social composition. Evidence suggests that these few households were headed by economically secure individuals, who also reflect a considerable stability in their residence. The question is raised whether a cyclical development of domestic groups can be recorded in situations as flexible and variable as those along the Kuiseb River. This in turn raises the issue of the usefulness of a framework postulating such a development.
Open Access
Stratification in Port Nolloth
(1969) West, Martin; Wilson, Monica
The problem set in this project was to study stratification in Port Nolloth society. It was clear from the start that Port Nolloth society was highly stratified, and that the major strata were formed by the White, Coloured and African people in the town. As the study progressed, divisions within the major strata became apparent, and at once a terminological problem was raised: could the major strata be regarded as castes, with their sub-divisions as classes, or were the divisions of the same order, making the stratification system one of class and sub-class? It became apparent, however, that the major strata and their sub-divisions were not of the same order, the main difference being that the former were endogamous groups of a rigid nature, whereas the latter allowed considerable social mobility. This suggested a system of stratification similar to that posited by van den Berghe tor another South African town, where he considered that "the stratification system can be described as a dual hierarchy of closed castes sub-divided into open classes".
Open Access
A study into the evolution of bank capital in South Africa (1994-2010)
(2011) West, Martin
The period 1994 to 2010 has seen marked changes in both the capital and reporting requirements for banks globally. In South Africa, Basle I was in effect in 1994, whilst Basle II came into being in 2008, both of which placed new requirements on banks in terms of the calculation of their capital positions. During 1999 the South African Reserve Bank ("SARB") moved from a policy of direct controls to inflation targeting.

Browsing by Author "West, Martin"

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