Browsing by Subject "Anthropology"

Now showing 1 - 11 of 11
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    Alternatives to the economic rationalisation of renewable energy transitions: The Tsitsikamma Community Renewable Wind Farm Story
    (2023) Pressend, Michelle; Matose, Frank; Sitas, Ari
    Within the climate mitigation discourse, renewable energy technology is understood as vital to reduce coal energy reliance. This discourse which is deeply anthropocentric in its approach understands 'green' energy transitions largely as reliant on reductionist techno-scientific 'solutions' and green economic growth rationalisation. If energy transitions are not engaged with critically, ongoing injustice and extractive relationships are likely to be perpetuated. The aim of this thesis is to show that alternative renewable energy transitions as responses to global warming need to be informed from a relational perspective. Values that are respectful, regenerative, and reciprocal to nature and each other constitute the concept of relationality. This study focused on the Tsitsikamma Community Wind Farm (TCWF) in the Eastern Cape (South Africa) as a site to explore the implementation of a renewable energy project. The site on which the wind farm is built has a colonial land dispossession narrative and the return of the Tsitsikamma Mfengu community to reclaimed land in 1994. The community was a willing partner in the investment of a wind energy public-private partnership. While the beneficiaries were promised improvements to their well-being, instead, the material well-being of this community remains unchanged and the commercial agricultural land degraded. The inequalities and the social-ecological relations of the past persist. The so-called 'win-win' rhetoric is an illusion in climate mitigation approaches and largely serves capital accumulation at the expense of community well-being and restoration of the soil. This study drew inspiration from Moore's (2003) world-ecology framing - history is part of rather than separate from the web of life - a non-dualist version of world history. In the research, a multisited ethnography was used and included tracing the relationships that recognised land history, memory (patterns of material nature of the land) and the entangled relationships between humans and non-humans. The conceptual framing and methodology illuminated erasures consistently overlooked in the anthropocentric climate discourses. As a consequence of those revelations openings for more relational and decolonial conceptualisation(s) based on the profound interrelatedness of life became evident. Relational energy transitions are needed in response to the climate crisis that consider the regenerative possibilities of nature-human interrelatedness. Through this argument, the study contributes an important insight for the uptake of methodology and analysis which transcends the 'resource' logic.
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    Alternatives to the economic rationalisation of renewable energy transitions: the Tsitsikamma community renewable wind farm story
    (University of Cape Town, 2023) Pressend, Michelle; Matose, Frank; Sitas Ari
    Within the climate mitigation discourse, renewable energy technology is understood as vital to reduce coal energy reliance. This discourse which is deeply anthropocentric in its approach understands 'green' energy transitions largely as reliant on reductionist techno-scientific 'solutions' and green economic growth rationalisation. If energy transitions are not engaged with critically, ongoing injustice and extractive relationships are likely to be perpetuated. The aim of this thesis is to show that alternative renewable energy transitions as responses to global warming need to be informed from a relational perspective. Values that are respectful, regenerative, and reciprocal to nature and each other constitute the concept of relationality. This study focused on the Tsitsikamma Community Wind Farm (TCWF) in the Eastern Cape (South Africa) as a site to explore the implementation of a renewable energy project. The site on which the wind farm is built has a colonial land dispossession narrative and the return of the Tsitsikamma Mfengu community to reclaimed land in 1994. The community was a willing partner in the investment of a wind energy public-private partnership. While the beneficiaries were promised improvements to their well-being, instead, the material well-being of this community remains unchanged and the commercial agricultural land degraded. The inequalities and the social-ecological relations of the past persist. The so-called 'win-win' rhetoric is an illusion in climate mitigation approaches and largely serves capital accumulation at the expense of community well-being and restoration of the soil. This study drew inspiration from Moore's (2003) world-ecology framing - history is part of rather than separate from the web of life - a non-dualist version of world history. In the research, a multi-sited ethnography was used and included tracing the relationships that recognised land history, memory (patterns of material nature of the land) and the entangled relationships between humans and non- humans. The conceptual framing and methodology illuminated erasures consistently overlooked in the anthropocentric climate discourses. As a consequence of those revelations openings for more relational and decolonial conceptualisation(s) based on the profound interrelatedness of life became evident. Relational energy transitions are needed in response to the climate crisis that consider the regenerative possibilities of nature-human interrelatedness. Through this argument, the study contributes an important insight for the uptake of methodology and analysis which transcends the 'resource' logic
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    Connecting at the intersection: Conversing identities on a street corner in Cape Town
    (University of Cape Town, 2020) Calleja, Remi; Swai, Marlon
    The research proposes to unpack the process of identity negotiation among a group of Cape Bush doctors, as well as to reflect on my own negotiation. During the time spent together, these claimants of a KhoeSan identity presented a permeating Rastafari sense of belonging and reconnected with their Indigenous identity through their work with herbs. The research participants challenged hegemonic perspectives on identity, culture, health, and respectability. They carried out their practices and beliefs within an urban environment represented by the space of the street corner. A central relational ontology emerged throughout the research, emphasizing the multiple underlying connections and interdependencies that structure their worldview and deeply influencing my personal development. The negotiation of their identity was shaped by constant processes of re-appropriation, adaptation, and re-composition and contributed to bridging historical, cultural, and social gaps imposed by years of colonisation, oppression, and marginalisation. I argue in this research that understanding the production of identity through a dynamic and fluid framework of knowledge participates to foster reinterpretations of agency, power, wealth, and marginality. To contend with the plurality of crisis we face in the contemporary moment, We must learn from these alternative worldviews.
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    Discourse on civilization: postliberal postsecular histories of the ghetto
    (2024) Toffa, Mughammed Sadiq; Vawda, Mehmood
    This work is a psychoanalytic anthropology of the city in the postcolony. It is located in Europe's most fragile settler colony in the South of Africa, and set within Apartheid's most privileged multi–culture, the Oriental Ghetto of Bo– Kaap, Cape Town. The project introduces the theoretical formulation of ‘Apartheid Orientalism' as the aesthetic classicism of global settler coloniality. Apartheid is the rationalization, industrialization, and massification of colonial relations that condenses world centre and periphery within intimate matrixes of difference that uniquely reveal psychic interiorities (of Self and Other) and material exteriorities (of body and city) as the making of ‘the modern world'. Orientalism dislodges Apartheid from isolation within a normative South African methodological nationalism and peripheral location in the Western Anglo–sphere, toward relocations as avant-garde settler modernism within the global paradigm of settler colonialism and modern world–system analysis. The critical conjugation of ‘Apartheid Orientalism' destabilizes the geohistorical categories within the liberal–secular orthodoxy of both Apartheid historiography as “failed racial state” and Orientalism as “mid–east romance” and reveals the critical conjugation of racial terror and sacred alterity in the modern episteme. Apartheid Orientalism clarifies the order of ‘liberal-secular aesthetics' as the aesthetic idealism of Western Self– and World–making (from Descartes through Kant and Hegel) that gives to the modern the judgment of what is beautiful, right, and good. I confront aesthetic idealism with its Others, the ‘negative' aesthetic of Julia Kristeva and the ‘intransigent' aesthetic of Edward Said, that provide both the coherent figuration of a Master–Subject (‘the designed Self') and the fragmented disfigurations of an Abject–non/Subject (the Native, the Slave, the Oriental). The abject subjectifications of mastery figured in the non-being of ‘Native≠Slave≠Oriental' are ontologically fixed and structurally fragmented within the colonial spheres of the split–off worlds of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. A methodology of ‘boundary–work' and ‘counter–mapping' the city opens a radical phenomenology of colonial mastery: nature mastery binds the Native with the Bantustan complex; technology mastery binds the Slave with the Plantation complex; culture mastery binds the Oriental with the Multiculture complex. The industrial complexes of the modern–colonial episteme produce the National–Tribes (the Eurocentric nation-state) and the Modern–Tribes (the wards of liberal multiculturalism and postmodern identitarian politics). Liberal misrecognition as tribal governance and maintenance reveals the technology of liberal reconciliation. The project calls for the recognition of the sacred and the tragic in modern subjectivity, as the recognition of the postcolony as tragedy. The project offers that the constitution of the ‘immigrant' as Subject in modernity as the global historical conjugation of Native–Slave–Oriental and of postcolonial recognition as ‘immigrant ethics' will bring the postcolony to tragedy and to “a life worth living”.
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    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.
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    Generation After: Kinship in the aftermath of genocidal sexual violence in Rwanda
    (2024) Loning, Sara Marloes; Ross, Fiona
    Thousands of women and girls experienced sexual violence during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, with many becoming pregnant as a result of genocidal rape. Based on two years of ethnographic research in Rwanda, this dissertation explores the dynamics of kinship in the aftermath of sexual violence by focusing on the lived experiences of young people conceived in genocidal rape. While working with organisations supporting genocide survivors, I traced how young people learned about the circumstances of their conception and how they interpreted their place within kinship relations given these circumstances. This dissertation examines the subtle work that goes into containing genocide memories in the everyday, revealing the affective efforts, ‘attunement', and vigilance of young people and their mothers as they grapple with the past intruding into their present. Reflecting on subtle moments observed during fieldwork created an understanding of the delicate work that goes into young people's day-to-day control and creativity in managing their social worlds. The dissertation then delves into the shadowed ways that knowledge of violence appears in young people's worlds and how mothers purposefully shield their children from what Veena Das (2000) calls “poisonous knowledge”. Exploring how young people live with fragmented knowledge about ‘who they are', I analyse how they learn about their conception both formally, through the work of civil society organisations, and informally, through modes of exclusion in communities. I examine what this knowledge does to their relationships and sense of self, as well as its practical implications, such as rights to land. The dissertation then zooms out to the post-genocide landscape, investigating how the national commemoration slogan “kwibuka twiyubaka” (remembering and rebuilding ourselves) takes shape in the lives of young people as they engage in kwiyubaka (building oneself). It explores the public and the private spheres of remembering and rebuilding, including the role of NGOs. I also show the dangers of knowledge that had previously been carefully shielded as it enters the public space. Through kwiyubaka as well as parenthood, young people's apparent fixed connections to the past and their conception can be transformed by becoming a ‘person of value' (umuntu w'ingirakamaro) or ‘the parent of someone' rather than ‘a child of rape'. Overall, I suggest that Veena Das' argument that violence is absorbed in everyday life rather than transcended helps us understand how the past sets the stage for kinship. My work shows how the ‘generation after' absorbs memories of collective violence, including the knowledge of being ‘of rape'. In the aftermath of genocidal sexual violence in Rwanda, violence is absorbed in everyday life and managed through affect and care, as well as possibly transcended by ‘the generation after'.
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    Living with the Zeekoevlei: an ethnography on historicizing relationships with/to plastic, wastewater and solid waste pollution
    (2023) Abrahams, Naailah; Solomon, Nikiwe
    This thesis explores the complexities of plastic and solid waste pollution within and surrounding the Zeekoevlei, located in Cape Town, South Africa. This research focuses on waste pollution being a remnant of an unjust past that still manifests in the present and will seep into the future. The current practices of dealing with waste by the City of Cape Town's waste management and natural resource managers as well as many residents in the city, is to see plastic and other forms of pollution as a 'now' problem, leading to reactive rather than proactive responses. When waste management logics are limited to the 'now', they fail to acknowledge how the current waste crisis in Cape Town is deeply intertwined with unequal settlement histories where indigenous and people of colour were settled in what Lerner (2010) refers to as 'sacrifice zones' and the implications of waste seeping into deep futures. It argues that a paradigm shift in all spheres of society is crucial in changing how we engage, manage, think about, and interact with wastes. The aim of this research is to show that the waste crisis is not new but rather located within histories of injustice, displacement, oppression, inequality, and violence. While a discussion of the futures of waste is also important the objective of this thesis is to trace how these geographies of waste and geographies of violence came to be in the Zeekoevlei. Based on roughly five months of fieldwork in the Zeekoevlei area with The Friends of Zeekoevlei and Rondevlei, what became increasingly significant was the ways in which history had manifested itself in this landscape and how notions of care are emerging in civil societies as a response to the waste crisis. Fieldwork primarily took form through clean- ups of the Zeekoevlei and surrounding areas. Working with FOZR provided a greater sense of the socio-economic issues that are contributing to the waste pollution in the area. Specific research questions include: What relationships and meanings are embedded within plastic and solid wastes? What does this 'say' about our histories with solid wastes? How are people relating to solid wastes in the Zeekoevlei and surrounding landscapes? And what notions of care, kindness and reciprocity are emerging in civil societies? I respond to these questions by drawing from past and current debates in the environmental humanities, urban studies, law, geographical and historical sciences, environmental, cultural, and social anthropology. The evidence basis for this study includes experiences and relationships related by Zeekoevlei residents, archival and anthropological data, contributing to environmental humanities scholarship at the intersection of social and environmental anthropology
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    Reclaiming Table Mountain: Perspectives from Cape Town's Black Township Residents
    Mjenxane, Lindela; Green, Lesley
    The aim of this study was to investigate how the landless township residents of Cape Town could reclaim the iconic Table Mountain, for it to be fully inclusive in a manner that is meaningful and useful in their traditional and cultural practices. This study explored the request made by traditional surgeons and traditional leaders to have a portion of an un-serviced land on Table Mountain rezoned for Ulwalukho (Male Circumcision). This study calls for the management of Table Mountain to recognise the rights of the township residents of Cape Town to participate in the policy decisions, conservation management and heritage strategies of Table Mountain in order to ensure its inclusive use. This qualitative study made use of ethnography, auto-ethnography and mobile methods. Individual in-depth interviews were also conducted, with the 10 purposely sampled youth and adults. This study found that Table Mountain could play a pivotal role in the transitional process of young people who interact with the ecological world, providing them a form of nature therapy that has improved their well-being. This study also found that it is feasible to have a piece of Table Mountain rezoned for Ulwaluko (Male Circumcision). This study further found that black township residents of Cape Town must be integrated into the conservation agenda, policy decisions and strategic decisions pertaining to the management of Table Mountain. The conservation of the Cape Floral Kingdom on Table Mountain should be pursued in ways that are not to the detriment of, or threatening to the cultural practices of black township residents of Cape Town. This mountain must fully be inclusive in its practical sense not merely in theory, but in a manner that also appeases local people of Cape Town.
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    The Middlestage: State-Sponsored Overseas Chinese Academics and China's Managed Cultural Globalisation
    (2021) Chen, Tian; Macdonald, Helen
    This in-depth ethnographic study focuses on state-sponsored Overseas Chinese Academics (OCAs) and China's managed cultural globalisation based on two years of multi-sited fieldwork in South Africa, Australia, and China. Extending Goffman's (1956) theoretical frameworks of everyday dramatism such as the frontstage and the backstage, I adopt the middlestage as the primary conceptual lens of my investigation. The middlestage of China's managed cultural globalisation is examined as a fluid and embodied space where state-sponsored OCAs and Chinese state institutions negotiate power in the process of producing performances. I argue that for state-sponsored OCAs, the middlestage of China's managed cultural globalisation is simultaneously a space of curation, negotiation, and re-imagination. The research also incorporates an ethnographic fiction titled The Islanders and provides a thick description of my state-sponsored OCA participants' life trajectories. The Islanders reveals how individual OCAs curate their performances and self-presentations, negotiate their social mobility and identities; and reimagine their realities whilst seeking conviviality on the middlestage. The thesis discusses and demonstrates how ethnographic fiction can be used as an essential tool for anthropological research.
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    Torn wheels and rough pavements: an ethnography of navigation towards informal and indigenous urban futures amidst crisis in Warwick Junction, Durban
    (2023) Robbins, Matthew; Ross, Fiona
    This dissertation explores the context(s) in which ‘mobile informality' is practiced by traders and associated workers in Durban's Warwick Junction, theorising the conceptual affordances that arise from it. Using an ethnographic approach, the study explores the navigatory responses of barrow operators and recyclers to the ‘friction' and ‘roughness' which make up the fabric of life-making projects in a city in crisis, and investigates the State and Municipal logics of governing informality. I show that eThekwini Municipality's attempts to achieve a ‘caring and liveable City' in line with its Modernist ideals, through such approaches as the formalised, restrictive and aggressively policed permit system for informal workers, negatively impacts many informal workers. Additional ‘frictions' in the path of informal work – which emerge daily as issues of safety, of dignity, of rights, and of access to opportunities – are rooted in the Municipality's problematisation of informality as a survivalist response to moments of crisis, and thus as something counter to ‘a modern Durban', and therefore which ought to be discouraged. This account is challenged by informal workers and NGOs in Warwick, who understand informality as a set of indigenous urban forms and practices which are entirely appropriate to the time and place in which they exist, and which should be protected and accounted for in the policy and planning of a truly ‘caring and liveable' city. By pushing up against the Durban's ‘margins of refusal', these actors practice informality as a prefigurative politics of urban life, an approach which offers much to the theorisation of city futures.
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    Traversing racial boundaries: thoughts on a rainbow nation
    (2014) Forrest, Tana Nolethu; Ross, Fiona C
    This research begins to reflect on how multiracial families navigate racialised difference in everyday life in South Africa. It utilises qualitative data collected in both Mahikeng and Cape Town, to throw light on various people’s lived experience of race in South Africa, whilst concurrently drawing from the large discourse on race in South Africa and elsewhere. The findings suggest that multiracial families are interacting with the remnants of Apartheid still evident in South Africa - most notably in discourses of racially homogenous kinship and racial categorisation – whilst concurrently thinking about new ways to engage with and envision possibilities beyond the dominant discourses of race evident in South Africa at present. These possibilities take the forms of recognising kinship which crosses racial and biological boundaries, engaging with the limitations of Apartheid racial categorisation in a space where Apartheid and all legislation pertaining to interracial relationships has been dismantled, and formulating new language with which to accommodate racial diversity. This implies that whilst South Africa remains haunted by its past, possibilities for alternative ways of engaging with race are emerging. The research contributes to on-going debates about how racialized difference is accommodated within post-apartheid South Africa. It allows for critical reflection on (a) the state of the family in South Africa; (b) formations of difference and similarity and(c) the ways in which historically racialised discourse and practice remain embedded in everyday social interactions.