Browsing by Subject "anthropology"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    The 3 faces of Mali
    (2012) Wain, Anthony
    A story of Mali in three (short) parts, its people and special places. This lecture was delivered by landscape architect Anthony Wain for the Friends of the South African Museum. This lecture will be of interest to landscape architects, social anthropologists and others interested in the social and natural history and present life of Mali.
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    ‘Let's build houses': the order of housing development shaping childhood topography in Mafuyana, Maphisa
    (2018) Ncube,Min'enhle; Ross, Fiona; Morreira, Shannon
    This thesis describes the physical, social and economic ordering of Mafuyana (Garikai), an urban township in Maphisa, a rural growth point in Matobo District in Matabeleland South province, Zimbabwe. It explores the ways in which this ordering informs the social construction of childhood. The township was constructed as part of Operation Garikai/Hlalani Kuhle, a housing program that served to rehouse victims of Operation Murambatsvina both of which occurred through Zimbabwe's tradition of restoring order from informal settlements for modernist planning strategies. The configuration of Operation Garikai/Hlalani Kuhle compares to the colonial framework of low-cost African housing that has historically been neglected by its municipal authorities. This neglect leads to infrastructure that is hazardous to infants. The evolutions of rural dwellings in southern Africa since the 19th Century and labour migration under colonialism – which characterised the scattering of peoples and the formation of new communities – were determined according to available resources, the physical nature of regions, the models of kinship and daily activities of rural life. Children in these contexts formed the basis of family construction, and also in Maphisa where parents or caregivers value them as a social investment during their ageing years. However, the introduction of urban infrastructure in rural Maphisa produces a framework that residents find challenging when performing their traditions of rural life in the process of raising children. The debilitating infrastructure in Mafuyana resulting from poor planning has caused residing families to face physical hardship in their dwelling. In order to habituate children into a harsh world, infant rituals associated to rural life ways in Matabeleland are performed by residents – some of which challenge modernist health discourses of cleanliness and orderliness. When makeshift endeavours on fragmented housing fail to meet their satisfaction, some residents resort to migrating – either within the township or beyond its boundaries in search for better dwelling. This scenario reflects that settling in such an ordered space lacks permanence, because locals struggle to ‘fit' into its makes, despite their efforts. The dissertation argues that the modernist developmental ordering of the growth point's township influences the developmental ordering concerned with the children that reside in it. Furthermore, examining this developmental ordering of children gives an indication on whether the housing in which they live enhances life for the growing human being.
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    The biopolitics of violence in the drama of the Niger Delta
    (2018) Ajumeze, Henry Obi; Garuba, Harry
    The representation of the Niger Delta insurgency in cultural texts is often registered from the viewpoint of human history, an approach that foregrounds the politics of resistance against the multinational oil corporations in ways that ignore the contribution of the non-human elements in the historical struggles in the region. In this study, I seek to understand the ways that the Niger Delta landscapes and environment are imagined in the works that I describe as the Niger Delta drama. Drawing on a number of plays to reflect on the different historicizations of spaces in the region, I examine and analyse the ways in which these spaces exercise social and political agencies in the unfolding events in the region. I tentatively delineate the region’s history into two analytic epochs: pre-oil and oil modernity Niger Delta. Though noting the centrality of the creeks and swamps in both temporal contexts, I argue that the drama of the pre-oil modernity textualized the "ontology of water" as a site of socioeconomic and ecological relations with the people who inhabit the Delta terrain. In the event of oil modernity, these spaces and relationships are reframed in the material transformations of the region’s landscape and environment from a site of decay and degradation to that of material recalcitrance and revolt that petro-violence provokes. In that vein, I treat the spaces represented by the creeks as "spaces of exception" - a phrase coined by Giorgio Agamben to explain how political democracies exclude certain zones to legitimise state terror - in which biopolitical securitisations are programmatically unleashed on trouble-prone geographies in ways that reduce the citizens to the status of bare-life. Although Agamben has identified the concentration camps as the paradigmatic basis of the modern state of exception, I propose that the creeks of the Delta offer an exemplary case that is consistent with bare life - a space as much excluded as included in the sense of Agamben’s paradoxical formulation of homo sacer, where life is violently exposed to the state apparatus of repression. Texts situated within the frame of exclusion and violent geographies deploy a poetics of waste and decay, what I term "environmental scatology" to capture the condition of bare life in the Delta, and reflect on the state of abandonment and invisibility that underwrites the exclusion. At other times, the texts illustrate how the ontology of water and the knowledge that it enables construct the people's mode of resistance, articulating ways in which the seaweeds and crocodiles that inhabit the swamps are entangled in the violent political ecology of the region. I read these texts as inaugurating a truly environmental drama in which the human-nonhuman nature is entangled in the performance of political resistances in the violent geography of the Delta.
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    Transforming migrancy: Basotho experience and participation in the South African labour system
    (1996) Mosai, Sello B
    The question investigated in this study is the migrant labour system with special reference to Basotho workers. South Africa has some of the poorest labour relations in the world, and the migrant labour crisis is an important component of this problem. Questions outstanding include the approach that should be taken in restructuring the labour economy, and what workers voices may contribute to that process. Who in fact are these workers, from where do they come, where do they reside, and what do they wish from the new dispensation? Understanding what migrancy means to working men and women from Lesotho is the objective of this study. Little has been done to analyse the consequences of rapid changes in the structure of employment in the mining industry for migrants and their kith and kin. As the study points out, these changes in the system have implications for everyone, not only Lesotho migrants. Their effects are considered in the context of documented background on the historical evolution of the system. Constructions of labour migrancy have been tied up with notions of identity. Even magical practices play a role in formulating defensive self-identifications in relation to the uncertainties of the system. The study investigates the rules and provisions attached to the employment conditions of citizens and foreigners, revealing the ambiguity of the 'migrant ' label. Such ambiguity is significant not only for the social dilemma workers find themselves in, but also for the restructuring of South Africa's economy. Another perspective expressed in Basotho testimonies is the necessity of taking charge of one's own life. It is clear that change in the migrant labour system has not been shaped by the agency of management alone. Migrants identified problems, and worked out intuitively their potential solutions. Further, they identified and formulated mechanisms to implement their own versions of these solutions. Migrants realize that an exploitative system will perpetuate itself by assuming a different shape while its essence stays the same. Workers want to help in the process of restructuring the problematic aspects of industrial institutions. They can do this more effectively if they are empowered, not only by unionism but through a 'culture of awareness' or mutual consciousness. In sum, the study focuses on the contributions of workers toward restructuring the political economy of migrancy. It is through recognising this aspect that workers voices may ask to be heard. The migrant labour system has long been part of South Africa's economy, and it cannot be ignored in the present crisis. Before we can talk about effective ways of addressing the problems of the system, its workings must be understood. It is necessary to understand the dynamics within this system so as to provide stakeholders with the capacity to manage structural and legal interventions. The thesis uses the testimony of migrants from Lesotho to reveal the dynamics of the system, with its informal knowledge, attitudes, practices, and so on. Migrants tell stories that show not only how unjustly the system is treating them, but how they have survived and even made the most of its limited opportunities. The answers to our economic problems do not lie in xenophobia or blame shifting, but in the active participation of all towards bettering both productivity and working conditions.
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    Uterine time and subjectivities: an ethnographic account of the uterus in online body-talk and other articulations of reproductive justice in South African feminist publics
    (2023) De Ruiters, Elthéa; Ross, Fiona C
    The uterus is a largely underrepresented and underknown entity in everyday discourses of bodyhood and is usually only spoken of in specialised and/or intimate contexts. This is, however, changing in contemporary popular feminist culture and spaces, especially across networked publics and social media. In South African public life, there is an emerging intimate public where feminists convene and engage in discussion around various issues of concern, in and across various media spaces, in particular social media platforms like Twitter. In the context of increased public focus on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) in public health and social justice conversations, this research asks how young people's personal experiences and feelings about the uterus are affected by and mediated through public discourses about reproductive health and justice, intergenerational cultural expectations of the uterine body, and vernacular expressions of body-talk that are amplified and circulated in intimate publics like South African Feminist Twitter. Drawing on a multimodal ‘patchwork' ethnographic enquiry (Gökçe and Watanabe, 2022) that aimed to trace the uterus as an entity that comes to matter in various different, but underrecognized ways, research was conducted between December 2019 and January 2021, during covid-related lockdowns. Methods included virtual ethnography on/via Twitter, an online qualitative survey that was disseminated across my broader Twitter network, an arts-informed feminist workshop engaging with depictions of the uterus in society and popular culture and discussions of personal narratives. The feminist vernaculars and body-talk that circulate and are amplified online emphasise negative affects and the “ugly feelings” that people in this public associate with the uterus. Menarche, the first menstrual period, stood out in personal narratives as the beginning of ‘uterine time', that is, the beginning of one's subjective awareness of and interaction with the societal expectations attached to the uterus. The messaging that young menstruators received from elders about their bodies predominantly positioned the physiological change as triggering a social change in which one's personhood is imbricated with risk and danger. What people say about the uterus, both publicly online and privately, suggests the emergence and propagation of a generational feminist vernacular of body-talk that takes on a ‘radical' character through descriptions of organs exerting violence and affective injury. In this generational vernacular, feminist youth describe the organ mainly as a conduit of cisheteropatriarchal violence and as an embodiment of what Gqola (2021) terms the Female Fear Factory, and purposefully emphasise antagonistic relations of the uterus. I show how common vernacular expressions and epithets contribute to the production of collective orientations to the uterus through affective contagion. For many young people with uteruses, the organ is experienced as invoking a sense of personal responsibility for a (gestational) reproductive future which may or may not materialise but is nevertheless inscribed with a host of intergenerational sociocultural expectations. The thesis examines the key themes of expectation, speculation and anticipation that emerged in the research as as dominant modes of feeling that characterise uterine subjectivities, or what it means to have a uterus. Together these modes form a particular subset of affective-temporal orientations to the future (as opposed to hope, destiny and potentiality). I argue that this is an indicator of the marked sense of anxiety that accompanies contemporary life and, for many feminists on Twitter, seems to be embodied in their subjective experiences of the uterus.