Browsing by Subject "Social Antropology"

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    Corporeal routes: climbing towards culture
    (2004) Goodrich, Andre; Green, Lesley
    Traditionally, spatial knowledge has been conceptualized and explained through the use of the cognitive map hypothesis, in which the metaphor of the topographic map is used to construct an explanation of the way in which knowledge about space is stored and used. I argue that the topographical metaphor confuses the map with the territory and is therefore inadequate for approaching the study of peoples' spatial knowledge, as the necessary logical reduction that accompanies the practice of transforming the territory into the map is fundamentally alienating of contextual dynamics and particularities. Furthermore, the topographical metaphor requires and thereby reinforces the Cartesian split, and its implicit privileging of the mind over the body, which disqualifies spatial knowledge from the realm of practical consciousness. Drawing on conversations with, and participant observation of rock climbers throughout 2003, I propose a model of spatial knowledge anchored in corporeal simulation rather than mental representation, and demonstrate the necessity of this conceptual shift by arguing that one's perception of the environment proceeds from the culturally inscribed and extended body, just as the body is imaginatively extended and inscribed in order to meet the requirements of effective and acceptable functioning in the context of a particular located activity.
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    Reluctant Germans: performing identity abroad
    (2004) Gaude, Thomas Frank Daniel; Frankental, Sally
    This thesis deals with members of a particular age cohort of German migrants in Cape Town. The informants all belong to Germany's 'post-boomer' generation, which has been the subject of much recent popular media coverage in Germany. Similar situations have been portrayed in writings from the USA. Being members of the middle-class, the respondents are equipped with both financial and cultural capital, which facilitates their connectedness to both home country and receiving society while abroad. This form of multiple connectedness implies a transnational identity as described by various authors. The particularity of these respondents' performance of national identity in Cape Town is based on both their perception of, and attitudes towards, Germany as well as the impact of their new surrounding. The perception of their home country is informed through a combination of the informants' upbringing in an era of financial wealth, being part of a particular generation in Germany, and existing stereotypical images of 'Germanness'. In Cape Town these respondents avoid creating an ethnic enclave and distance themselves from the established German community in the city. Instead they seek contact with citizens of other nation-states and engage in behavior that has been deemed 'cosmopolitan'. This cosmopolitanism surfaces in their everyday life in South Africa, in relationship to, for example, their social networks, areas of residence and material culture. Loss of national identity, in this case, is not felt as a painful process as described in most other studies on diasporas, but rather as a willful action.