Browsing by Department "Social Anthropology"
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- ItemOpen AccessA body in dissonance: young woemn naviagting mental health and living with depression in Cape Town(2021) Oosthuizen, Simone; Macdonald, HelenThis dissertation investigates the experiences of young womxn diagnosed and living with depression in Cape Town. The investigation focuses on the relationship between the young womxn and their bodies as they live with depression and move through depressive episodes. The ethnographic findings expand on the dissociative - depersonalization and derealizationsymptoms of depression. Secondly, the investigation focuses on problematizing the theoretical construct of the body. These young womxn experienced their bodies beyond subject/object, internal/external, body/mind dichotomies. The dissertation frames the ethnographic findings with a phenomenological lens. Additionally, the dissertation uses a sensory gaze to understand the young womxn's bodily experiences and experiences with depression.
- ItemOpen AccessA statistical comparison of the physical features of the Zulu–Xhosa and South Sotho–Tswana peoples of South Africa(1951) Strydom, Frederick Wilhelm; Keen, J A; Drennan, M R
- ItemOpen AccessAbove the surface, beneath the waves : contesting ecologies and generating knowledge conversations in Lamberts Bay(2011) Rogerson, Jennifer J M; Green, Lesley; Jarre, AstridBased on fieldwork conducted over two months in 2010 in Lamberts Bay on the west coast of South Africa where the cold Benguela Currrent asserts its presence in water and wind, this dissertation aims to describe the ways that people come to know fish and the sea differently.
- ItemOpen AccessAccepting "expecting"? : on being pregnant and studying(2009) Powell, CrystalPregnancy can be an exciting experience for - but not limited to - women who have planned their pregnancies and have contemplated their futures as mothers. Similarly. education and the achievements of matriculation, bachelors', masters' and PhD degrees toward the pursuit of a lasting career can be an equally exciting experience for ambitious students who value education in its own right and for their potential futures. For female students who would prefer to finish their education and establish their careers before parenthood, inadvertently becoming pregnant during their studies may serve as a turning point requiring drastic re-evaluation for their lives as students and mothers. The female body and the physical changes that take place during pregnancy often make the pregnant body easily identifiable and ultimately a public object, subjecting pregnant women to attention and interpretation from everyone around them, particularly in places like university campuses where pregnancy is not commonplace. Consequently, pregnancy as an obvious implication of sexual activity can subject pregnant women to gossip around the assumed carelessness of their sexual behaviours. On university campuses, where such gossip around a pregnancy is certain to develop, some women seek refuge by hiding their pregnancies. This dissertation explores the experiences of currently pregnant students and student mothers on two university campuses. I consider their experiences of pregnancy as students, distinguishing between those who were single, dating, or married at the time of their pregnancies. I also consider those who planned their pregnancies vs. those who did not and those who had necessary support systems vs. those who did not, towards an understanding of how they managed the simultaneity of pregnancy and studying. This thesis explores the experiences of these women to understand the manner and extent to which their lives and aspirations as students have been impacted in light of their pregnancies and/or children. While highlighting the difference in values of education for the informants, it shows that becoming pregnant has profound implications on student's lives and that moral, emotional and material support are the critical factors that determine whether the pregnant student or student mother will complete her education.
- ItemOpen AccessAfrican independent churches in Soweto(1972) West, Martin; Wilson, MonicaOf 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.
- ItemOpen AccessAfrikanerdoom? : negotiating Afrikaner identity in post-apartheid South Africa(2000) Vestergaard, Mads; Sichone, OwenThe apartheid regime monopolised Afrikanerdom and institutionalised a specific Christian-nationalist Afrikaner identity. In post-apartheid South Africa this identity is no longer sanctioned by the state, and central elements of the identity have become illegitimate - most importantly the racial aspect. It is now up to the individual Afrikaner to negotiate this new space of identifications opened up by the end of apartheid order. Through different kinds of post-structuralist theory this thesis investigates some of the ways in which white Afrikaans-speakers position themselves in this new context. For some the new South Africa means exciting new possibilities but others experience it as a loss of freedom. The analysis pivots around the separatist 'volkstaat town' of Orania, where we find some of the central problems facing Afrikaners in general in terms of identity formation. It is argued that although Orania is radical in its claims, it is nonetheless one of the actors in the discursive battles of redefining Afrikaner identity. However, in the context of radical change and indecision, it is but one among many other attempts of redefining Afrikanerdom, many competing voices are heard and boundaries of identity are constantly contested and redrawn.
- ItemOpen AccessAging and residence in an urban environment : an anthropological perspective(1979) Frankental, Sally; West, Martin; Whisson, M GThis 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.
- ItemOpen Access'Airing dirty linen': the problems of establishing a women's rights organisation in contemporary Swaziland(2002) Wolf, Zanine Nadia; Spiegel, AndrewThis 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.
- ItemOpen AccessAllPay and no work: spheres of belonging under duress(2012) Versfeld, Anna; Ross, Fiona CAllPay 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.
- ItemOpen AccessAmbitions of cidade : war-displacement and concepts of the urban among bairro residents in Benguela, Angola(2009) Roque, Sandra; Ross, Fiona CThe 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.
- ItemOpen AccessAmbitions of Cidade: War-Displacement and concepts of the urban among bairro residents in Benguela, Angola(2009) Rogue, Sandra; Ross, Fiona CThe 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 Calombotão, 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)', 'avanço (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 avançados (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.
- ItemOpen AccessAn examination of the implementation of the World Health Organisation's anti-tuberculosis treatment, the Directly Observed Treatment Short Course (DOTS), in poor South African communities(2004) Jacobs, Nasolo Monifa; Levine, SusanThis dissertation examines the implementation of the anti-tuberculosis treatment, the Directly Observed Treatment Short Course, of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in poor South African communities. Research for this dissertation was carried out over a two-year period in one poor community, a tuberculosis (TB) quarantine hospital and several primary care clinics. This dissertation argues that the DOTS programme is culturally inappropriate and consequently unsuccessful in meeting the WHO's TB treatment targets. It will show that the design of the DOTS programme assumes access to basic resources such as food and shelter and focuses its attE11tion on ensuring regular access to anti-TB medication. However, TB patients in many poor South African communities do not have access to basic resources and thus experience the DOTS programme and the treatment protocol as a burden. Although TB patients face these challenges to meeting their treatment goals, many of them view the DOTS programme in their communities as a source of resources from which they can access jobs, food, money and general social services. The thesis will demonstrate that there is a wide gap between what the DOTS programme offers and what the TB patients and community members expect. It will also show that this gap limits the ability of TB patients to adhere to the treatment and thus renders the DOTS programme culturally inappropriate and unsuccessful in these South African communities.
- ItemOpen AccessThe anti-frackers: an ethnographic account of the South African fracking debate(2015) Van der Merwe, Lawrence; Green, LesleyThis paper details an intermittent six months of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews and participant observation carried out between September 2014 - March 2015, among members of the Treasure the Karoo Action Group and three other South Africans labeled "anti-frackers" and/or "environmentalists": a filmmaker, an entrepreneur, and an attorney. Drawing from analysis of literature, news and multimedia published outside the period of engaged research, the paper explores the contested process of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) from the perspective of those who work to ensure that this technique of shale gas extraction will not be allowed, or will be proven unnecessary, in South Africa. The dissertation details the author's attempts to understand how the binary of "pro"/"anti" is used in the ongoing fracking "debate", and contrasts this with the work of those who have sought to craft positions that stand outside of the prevailing polemic. Tracing the stakes and interests involved in the potential for the use and sale of shale gas through a series of expeditions into the Karoo, the thesis seeks to problematize the idea that there is a fracking "debate" at hand between two collective fronts: the so-called "pro-frackers" and their opponents the "anti-frackers". In the Latourian sense of the term the dissertation critiques the construction of these two 'phantom publics', presenting a series of nuanced personal profiles in a call for a new appreciation of the diverse human, financial and natural forces at play in this currently unfolding scenario.
- ItemOpen AccessArt and the development of dialogic skills: an ethnography of art in Waldorf teacher training(2005) Van Alphen, Catherine; Spiegel, Mugsy; Millar, CliveWaldorf 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.
- ItemOpen AccessAs long as they don't bury me here : social relations of poverty in a Southern African shantytown(2008) Tvedten, Inge; Spiegel, Andrew; Ross, Fiona CFocusing 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.
- ItemOpen AccessAssaulting childhood : an ethnographic study of children resident in a Western Cape migrant hostel complex(1990) Jones, Sean Wilshire; West, MartinThis 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.
- ItemOpen AccessAt the foot of Table Mountain: paediatric tuberculosis patient experiences in a centralised treatment facility in Cape Town, South Africa(2014) Abney, Kate Christine; Levine, SusanThe following thesis traces one year of ethnographic research within a contemporary Tuberculosis (TB) treatment facility in Cape Town, South Africa. Brooklyn Chest Hospital (BCH) is considered to be a provincial TB centre of excellence in the Western Cape (Parsons et al 2010) and as such, caters to both adult and paediatric TB patients. While there are other similar facilities in South Africa, BCH specializes in paediatric TB and is the only facility of its kind in the Western Cape Province. Many (but not all) paediatric patients at BCH came from troubled social circumstances. Poverty, violence, substance abuse, and illness featured prominently in their lives. The thesis documents the many entanglements TB presents to patients, their physicians, teachers, and nursing staff in the context of Cape Town. Throughout the thesis, my argument is multi-faceted. Children are configured and classified in different ways: via Biomedicine, children rights and ethics discourse, volunteers working at the hospital, the hospital school space, and through the metaphorical and real burden of time and tedium one experiences within an institutional setting. While focused on children and their experiences, this thesis does not claim to be solely 'childcentred'. Rather, I bring together different perspectives from nurses, doctors, volunteers, family members, and children themselves to re-create the social and material life of a hospital. In doing so, I focus on the category of the child. Configurations- how people make sense of children and their experiences- underlie the process of paediatric patient making. The child is formulated into different categories which are unstable and unsettled. The 'child' appears here in many forms: the child as a biomedical object, a student patient, the child 'in need', and one who is burdened by time.
- ItemOpen AccessAt the interface : marine compliance inspectors at work in the Western Cape(2014) Norton, Marieke; Green, Lesley; Jarre, AstridThe Western Cape fisheries are heavily contested. Primary concerns in the contestations are over access to marine resources, which have been regulated through the Marine Living Resources Act of 1998. At the centre of these conflicts, is the figure of the marine compliance inspector, whose task is to enforce the state’s version of nature onto the collective of resource users. This thesis, based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork alongside inspectors of the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries: Fisheries Branch in the Western Cape, explores the everyday human interactions on which the implementation of marine resource law depends. Exploring interactions between inspectors and resource users, the dissertation seeks to contribute to the task of reimagining fisheries governance. Drawing on ethnographic material deriving from participation in inspection duties; observations of fishing behaviour; conversations with inspectors, resource user and marine resource management officials; and analysis of texts such as relevant legislation and job descriptions, I argue that the issue of non-compliance in marine fisheries in the Western Cape can only be partially understood by the framework offered in extant South African compliance scholarship, which has focused largely on the motivations of resource extractors, or the formulation of law and policy. Given that compliance functions are part of the wider social spectrum of contestation and that the compliance inspectors are the interface between the government of South Africa and its fishing citizens, the study explores the real effects of state-citizen-nature contestations on environmental governance, and presents evidence in support of an argument that the design of the job of marine compliance inspector itself needs to be re-conceived. While compliance is a central feature of fisheries management, the performance of its personnel is taken for granted as the simple implementation of institutional policy, in a number of ways. Efforts to address conflicts will fall short of the goal of providing solutions if the assumptions about nature and humanity that current marine resource legislation embodies are not questioned, and this will exacerbate existing suffering in the ecology of relations between state, science, public and marine species.
- ItemOpen AccessAttractions and artillerymen, curiosities and commandos : an ethnographic study of elites and the politics of cultural distinction(1996) Douglas, Stuart Sholto; Sharp, John
- ItemOpen AccessBantu pottery of Southern Africa(1965) Lawton, A C; Shaw, MargaretThe Bantu people of Southern Africa entered this region from the North in successive migratory waves and advanced to the regions which they, now inhabit. The first of the immigrants crossed the Zambezi at about the beginning of the Christian era. Pottery of a type belonging to the earliest Iron Age traditions, and found north of the Zambezi (Clark 1959), has been found at Zimbabwe where it has, been dated 330 A.D. by radio carbon tests (Robinson 1961b). Contact with different people and new environments resulted in changes in the way of life and material culture of the migrants. These changes became more pronounced and permanent with the settlement of the European in South Africa and are very evident in regard to pottery. We know from the observations of early travellers and anthropologists that pottery used to be made in large quantities throughout Southern Africa.