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In December 2003 the Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Act, 2003 (No 41 of 2003) was eventually promulgated. This was the culmination of an extended process of submissions, consultation, releasing of a draft White Paper, workshops, activities of a White Paper Task Team and its subcommittees, meetings with the responsible minister and between various ministries. Stemming from the experiences and perceptions of an anthropologist commissioned to become involved in a part of this process, this paper seeks to interrogate some of the issues which emerged in the course of proceedings. In arguing that policy development and implementation is about intentional human behaviour, and that some preceding ideas, conceptions or notions are always involved, it follows that many variables can play a role in the decision-making and strategies involved. Thus the information available, perceptions of such information, political (and other) agendas and power relations between individuals and groups, and between levels of authority, all come into play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines 'asset stripping' which is said to occur particularly in matrilineal societies when young widows are stripped of their late husband's possessions. Contrary to many scholars who see asset stripping as a recent phenomenon and who believe that recent moves by traditional Owambo leaders to protect widows is a product of enlightenment induced by contemporary human rights activism, this paper shows that 'asset stripping' has deep historical roots and was a subject of contention even in the earliest mission accounts of over a century ago. Moreover, the historical records show that leaders, both traditional and Church, have long tried to improve the situation for widows, but have not achieved the success they desired. The relative failure of these legal innovations to protect widows is described and analysed. The problem is a structural one exacerbated by recent State efforts at gender equity. Finally, given the historical structural nature of the issue, questions are raised about the current proclivity to use rapid assessment techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper scrutinises hope from an anthropological perspective and in a South African setting. While public, theological and other discourses have attended to hope, anthropologists in South Africa have not done so and the paper aims to highlight it as an area of interest for the social sciences. One exception to the general trend is Crapanzano's (2003) work on hope, which sees it as somewhat passive. By drawing on research among young men in Khayelitsha, the paper argues that they view hope as active and as part of making and realising their plans for the future. In this regard the production and reproduction of hope impacts positively on safe sexual practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on the utility of the concepts of trust and honour in understanding relations among Zimbabwean remittance couriers who are popularly known as "malayishas". Trust and honour are explored in relation to how they produce and sustain a culture of networking and cooperation on the one hand and competition and conflict on the other. The paper's arguments are largely informed by Bourdieu's ideas on social action, particularly his emphasis on the dynamism of social action and how in practice it is manifested through various forms of capital. The study reveals a dynamic picture when it comes to malayisha-malayisha relations on the one hand and malayisha-remitter relations on the other. In the various spheres of interaction among actors, relations are inherently informed by social, cultural and economic capital. In this case, elements of trust and honour are evident in processes surrounding the creation and strengthening of networks and ties manifest in the remittance transportation trail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores how the uniform of a group of female cleaners appears to be more than an abstract object framed by the practical exegetics of work. The uniform is seen as acting as a material exercise of discretionary and disciplinary power of inscription, and as the paper shows, emerges as a mode by which the cleaners are homogenously objectified and plastically turned into 'subjects' (Foucault 1982). The paper shows too that while the single layered cleaners' uniform can be seen as disciplining the body and stripping down the complex multi-layers of their personality and attempting to naturalise their status as cleaners, the women's narratives reveal their attempts to destabilise this conscription, if only outside the spatial and organisational domain of the work space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the light of developments in the southern African region over the last number of years, the paper argues for a reconsideration, and an extension, of the way in which the concept of `displacement' has conventionally been understood. It considers a range of different kinds of population movement, arguing that they are essentially interrelated, and that the more conventional distinction between voluntary and involuntary migration is becoming increasingly tenuous. In this regard, the paper shows how, in a number of different kinds of situations, people become 'disemplaced', ie for a range of socio-economic reasons, the ability of the area where people live, or with which they associate, to support or to sustain them progressively erodes under them. They are thus no longer able to remain socially or economically emplaced, and increasingly become unsettled, uprooted, 'disemplaced', having to keep moving around in order to survive. Such disemplacement gives rise to a situation where many people become permanently uprooted and thus, displaced - without having been forcibly moved in the first place. This two-stage process of disemplacement giving rise to displacement - which did not start out as displacement - has implications both for how we conceptuolise much of the displacement occurring in southern Africa, as well as for how we approach and deal with it in the policy arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a range of challenges to anthropology in post-apartheid South Africa in the hope of stimulating a much needed debate on 'doing anthropology' from the perspective of South African anthropologists who research and teach within their own complex society. It addresses questions about the continuities and discontinuities of 'doing anthropology' in South Africa, which pay special attention to the discipline's historically situated politics in the post-apartheid society. The title of the essay takes its cue from Dipesh Chakrabarty's effort to 'provincialise' Europe and builds upon the 'World Anthropologies' project, initiated by Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar. I highlight the legacy of the late apartheid era's exposé anthropology which critically included a reluctance to engage with cultural analysis due to apartheid's preoccupation with 'cultures' as its ideological basis. The paper argues, further, that post-apartheid anthropology needs to develop an approach to interpret the meanings and engage with the contemporary world in South Africa and beyond. It investigates three interrelated sets of critical issues: 'Doing anthropology at home': the anthropologist as investigator and citizen; the question of 'relevance', whither for a publicly engaged anthropology, and perspectives on anthropology, public culture and the postcolonial state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the recruitment of children and youths in colonial and post colonial South Africa. It explores the early legislation that transformed the nature of childhood in pre-colonial South Africa, and contributes to emerging scholarship on social constructions of childhood. The paper draws attention to historical shifts and continuities in the nature of child labour. and in relation to economic exploitation, racial oppression and childhood agency. Spanning the eras of pre-colonial relations of production, child slavery in the 1600s, and children's work under colonial rule in the mining, domestic service, and agricultural industries, this paper considers the differential configurations of the labour demands of children. Working against the tendency to regard child labour as a sentimental human rights issue, this paper provides a critical perspective against which to focus on contemporary debates about the rights of children in post-apartheid South Africa, and redress the participation of children in processes of total social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines how adults in Cape Town who were born deaf or who became deaf as children and whose first language is South African Sign, strategise to deal with being marginalised in a hearing world. The paper draws on a long-term study (September 1995 to December 2001). Using ethnographic evidence, it demonstrates sign-deaf spaces as community. ‘Community’ entails networks of social relationships that function to create spaces of shared sign language, familiarity, sociability and communality in an often hostile hearing world. The boundaries of the sign-deaf spaces are difficult to determine. In sociable contexts signed language facilitates interactions across spoken language barriers, locally and internationally. Sign language proves to be a marker of Deaf identity in certain hearing contexts but importantly it serves to disperse identity in the sign-deaf space. The paradoxical outcome is that in the sign-deaf space the Deaf are rarely ‘deaf’, certainly not in any socially handicapped or deficit way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with an anecdote concerning consent forms, the paper offers a critique of assumptions that legalistic protocols offer an adequate guarantee of ethical research. Drawing on research on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it explores some of the complexities that research on violence brings to the fore. In the light of testifiers' concerns about the proliferation of their testimonies in contexts beyond their control, the paper proposes that ethical research rests on responsibility for the voice of others and responsiveness to the other; becoming what Alphonso Lingis (1994) describes as ‘an other for the other’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an ethnographic account of fieldwork that began in 1999 when African squatter camps in the Greater Durban metropolitan area accommodated people almost equal in number to the settled tax-paying Indian residents in the vicinity. While their numbers were seen as an almost destabilising factor in the region, and prompted many to label them as `land invaders', others saw a window of opportunity opening up for them by virtue of their position as homeowners. The response was to provide a service along the lines of mainly grocery retailing. The closure of many licensed shops that were vulnerable to hold- ups and theft created space for a nascent shopkeeper class that capitalised on the opportunities that the squatters provided as a captive market. The paper demonstrates, through case studies of Indian informal traders, how the emergence of these home- based businesses, on the one hand, actually served as a catalyst for racial friction, and on the other hand, as a test case for racial integration in post-apartheid South Africa. It also intensively examines the time that the service providers put into their work, the inputs of labour from family members and the relationships they built with their African clientele. The contradictions brought about by the social tensions and the cordial relationships that emerged between Indians and Africans demonstrate the organic development of a new multi-racial environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The University of Pretoria's Human Economy project began at the end of 2010. To date it has involved eighteen post-doctoral fellows, drawn from around the world, and eight doctoral candidates, all from Africa. This paper reviews the project's progress, drawing attention to how its participants have come to construe the notion of a 'human economy' and the main social theorists on whom they have drawn in doing so. The development of our thinking regarding a human economy is explained by reference to the two edited volumes, comprising contributions from all the post-doctoral fellows, which will be published in the near future. Challenges for future research are considered in the final part of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper uses ethnographic data about the religious ethics undergirding the discourse and practices of development agents at Catholic Welfare and Development (CWD), a faith-based NGO in Cape Town, South Africa. It explores how the dynamic interrelation between faith and ethics permeated the development encounter and produced particular modalities for the ethical/moral development of the subjectivities of CWD's developers. Informed by their own experiences of development, developers attempted to 'develop' those they considered to be beneficiaries. The paper argues, and provides evidence to demonstrate that, through the shared experience of development as an interpersonal and intersubjective encounter, both developers and beneficiaries were developed, while they also developed each other. It goes on to suggest that this finding challenges the binary representation of development relationships (developer/beneficiary) and that - despite the asymmetry of the reciprocities involved - it is misleading to think in such dichotomous terms, precisely because doing that misrepresents the power and agency wielded by each subject position in every development encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages with public holidays in post-apartheid South Africa as lieux de mémoire, 'sites of memory' that preserve particular interpretations of historical events and selected heroes for inscription into the collective memory of the nation. It first traces the legislative process that resulted in the official rearrangement of the festive calendar after the 1994 first general elections, exploring the political and pragmatic considerations that influenced the selection of public holidays. Based on a survey conducted in the Durban area, the paper then engages with the public reception of the new festive calendar and the knowledge that people of different demographic backgrounds appear to have about the historical events commemorated. It is argued that the creation of the post-apartheid festive calendar reflects the spirit of the tense transition period with its concern for tolerance, reconciliation and national unity, but that these national holidays have largely failed as memory sites and instruments of nation-building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cancer is a potent example of a disease that grips and plays out on the body in ways that are both visceral and visual. This paper explores issues of disease and disorder, functioning and malfunctioning in bodies marked by cancer and a sense of nonbelonging. By working through the heuristic device of 'narrative', the paper argues for the humanistic value and currency of the personal (subjective) illness narrative in social science scholarship in being able to convey to audiences the emotional and existential complexities of cancer, beyond the merely medical. The paper, by drawing on ethnographic narratives of a small group of women with cancer and their inscriptive treatment practices, probes the shifting and constructed concepts of a socalled 'healthy' body and 'ill' body as experienced by the women, and attempts to show that a recognition of these experiences of the physical body is potentially able to contribute to shaping more compassionate, person-centred health care models of illness and healing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper emerges from an ethnographic study conducted in Kwazulu-Natal in 2010 that explored the practices of a humanitarian intervention providing psychosocial support for and strengthening of the bonds between orphans and children made vulnerable by HIV and their non-biological guardians. Examining the interface between the programme and its participants, this paper focuses on the social politics that emerged out of the organisation's bond strengthening vision. Providing a platform for the expression of a diversity of perspectives, I demonstrate the complex ways in which interventionist intention is reworked at ground level and how an essentially humanitarian goal was 'twisted' into a tool with which to 'measure' motherhood. This paper hopes to move both beyond the limitations of the polarised literature around the impact of the epidemic on African families, and by directly addressing the radical HIV-related reworking of motherhood, open up alternative avenues for the emergence of a 'new' and more nuanced anthropology of kinship in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The staff of Sport FUNdamentals Southern Africa (SFSA), a sport for development organisation, have labelled a range of deceitful behaviours `paraffining'. These behaviours range from improvising life skills lessons to lying in reports. It references paraffin, a common, yet potentially dangerous fuel used in South African townships. In this paper the striking similarities between `paraffin', the innovative verb, and paraffin, the familiar noun, are examined, highlighting their uses, reasons for usage, impacts and methods of control. As individuals encounter role conflicts between their job expectations and personal capabilities or available resources, between personal and professional roles or conflicting expectations from different managers, they often respond by `paraffining'. In these situations, `paraffining' can be seen as a creative coping mechanism used to maintain the appearance of professional proficiency. `Paraffining' also demonstrates individual power and agency within organisational structures since it provides a platform for individuals to confront deceitful situations with people at all levels of authority and pressures the organisation to implement measures to reduce their prevalence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following a visit to the South African Medical Research Council's Indigenous Knowledge Systems Laboratory at DeIft, Cape Town, this paper explores the possibilities for anthropological responses to South Africa's Indigenous Knowledge Systems Policy of 2004. While the Policy is admirable in that it focuses attention on the integration of science and traditional knowledge in South Africa, its dualisms of indigenous knowledge and science, and its assumptions about identity, power, and about acceptable epistemology call for critique. The question arises: on what theoretical grounds ought anthropological dialogue about knowledge diversity be based? This paper offers a critique of possibilities for engaging with the IKS Policy via three different approaches in contemporary social anthropology: social constructionism, phenomenological anthropology, and research on Amerindian perspectivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines shifting perspectives in Paul Farmer's work with regard to cultural difference and human rights. It describes Farmer's critique of medical anthropology's focus on culture to the detriment of economic factors, and his critique of cultural relativism being used as an alibi for different standards of medical care. The paper uses Farmer's work to discuss the relevance of cultural analysis in medical anthropology and argues for an approach that allows for complexity, for focusing on both economic and structural factors as well as cultural. It finally argues that Farmer's suggestion of reconceptualising health as a human right, while important, could become another way of managing deepening inequalities if it is not seen in conjunction with a quest for social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, prompted by an Anthropology Southern Africa conference around the theme 'Public Anthropology', argues that any post-apartheid anthropology that abandons criticality as a core disciplinary principle risks dispelling any radical content that anthropology may have to offer South African society. Anthropological practice that, in the name of activism or application, misrecognises the necessary and complicated relationship between thought and action by privileging action, threatens to slip into a positivist position that silences broader political questions and becomes fundamentally repetitive (in Freudian terms). The authors call, on the other hand, for anthropology as 'negative work', as an intellectual practice that constantly queries the terms of its own social claims. They argue that this kind of intellectual engagement is itself a form of political action, and that without it post-apartheid anthropology could become, yet again, an uncritical handmaiden of the state or the market and their normative forms of political action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper reflects on a course entitled 'Power and Wealth' that I developed and have been teaching since 2004. I consider the course in light of my own understanding of critical pedagogy as informed by Paulo Freire and Ira Shor. I discuss the importance of student-centred learning and the possibility of teaching through a single ethnographic encounter—what I refer to as the township walk. The paper does not pretend to stimulate educational theory at this point. Rather I attempt to raise a number of discussion points pertinent to the teaching of the discipline within southern Africa and to initiate a critical consideration of our relevance as a discipline in the southern African and African contexts. In this way. limply that a conscious and nuanced teaching of the discipline, could inform the manner in which we re-create it in a rapidly changing global political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores domestic violence the rural location of Griquatown, South Africa. Although academics have long recognised that structural and cultural factors influence people's experience of domestic violence, not much has been written about the manner in which this happens. This paper explores how personal relationships intersect with broader cultural and structural forces and, in so doing, shape people's experience of domestic violence. This paper focuses on the life of one individual in order to demonstrate the multi-faceted context in which domestic violence takes shape. By bringing together individual choices. self-representation. personal relations, ethnic identity and societal demands, this paper illustrates how domestic violence is contingent upon, or mitigated by, broader societal processes that impinge on or moderate the behaviour of individuals and their spouses. It argues that domestic violence is an on-going process which results at the intersection between men's and women's personal quests to establish autonomy and collective processes that encourage conformity to ‘ideal’ ethnic categories and gendered social roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Epistemological commitments shape notions of what constitutes an ethical presence in the field. The article examines the assumption of secularism, linked to objectivity, implicit in codes of ethics, It argues that in fieldwork, the secular position neither guarantees ethical behaviour nor improves data collection. Reflecting on research encounters among Palikur-speakers in Brazil. the article examines the ways in which objectivity unexpectedly forecloses some avenues of research. Drawing on the Palikur idiom of ‘minahwa’ (to draw one's canoe alongside), the paper posits a change in the relationship between the anthropologist and the subject of research to an I-Thou relationship of mutual presence in which the anthropological self is hospitable to the other. An ethics of facing is posited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the reach for ethics among young people engaged in opposition to the apartheid state in the 1980s. Structured around the Xhosa concept imfobe, variously translated as morality, virtue, goodness, grace, the paper seeks to locate young peoples' ethical development in the context of every day life. It examines the critical self-consciousness to which young people subject their experiences and decisions and offers a record of some young peoples' actions and thoughts in Zwelethemba, South Africa. It reflects on Foucault 's notion of the work of the norm as potentially transformative and demonstrates the ways in which young people stood against the apartheid state's ‘un-norms’ for children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In South Africa there has been limited systematic investigation of shipwreck survivor camps as an archaeological phenomenon. In most cases these sites are investigated purely as an adjunct to work on the associated wreck. The aim of this paper is to explore a basic approach to research on shipwreck survivor camps. Recent work on the location of the São João survivor camp using historical archaeological investigations proved to be successful. During the development of the methodology for this project, it became apparent that a vast amount of knowledge may be gained by studying the behavioural patterns of the survivors themselves, knowledge otherwise not represented in the archaeological record. This paper will not supply the reader with the latest step-by-step methodology in finding shipwreck survivor camps. It simply explores and introduces a new way of linking that has developed world-wide in the field of maritime archaeology, thinking that is not only more anthropologically orientated, but presents the collaboration of archaeology, history and even psychology with one goal in mind: creating predictive models of shipwreck survivor behaviour Maritime archaeologist Martin Gibbs has introduced this direction of thinking to his field in Australia, where his research has delivered some very interesting results. The question posed by this paper is: whether this particular approach will be accepted and explored by maritime archaeologists in South Africa. In addition, this paper also aims to encourage maritime archaeologists in South Africa to broaden their research to go beyond simply locating shipwreck survivor camps and concentrating on comparing the artefacts found there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnographic research for this paper was undertaken in the Okhahlamba District in the Drakensberg of South Africa and formed part of an on-going five-year project focussing on people's everyday experience of living with HIV/AIDS in rural communities. The paper explores metamorphoses of the body in relation to HIV/AIDS, showing how the experience of bodily disintegration is expressed, but also how the falling away of the body is linked to social fault-lines. From an in-depth story of one young man - a narrative seeking to confront individual suffering - the paper moves to theoretical concerns. As Mary Douglas and others have argued, those aspects of the body that threaten its coherence - the body's permeability and its fluids - are often linked with pollution. The fluidity and erosion of the individual's body in experiencing AIDS is thus inextricably intertwined with the idea of both bodily and social pollution and their attendant fears and prejudices. In bringing the biological into relation with sociality, the dividing line between the two is blurred. Space, often conceptualised as external to a 'bounded' individual, traduces both internal and external landscapes where experience of the body's disintegration interweaves with social relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on material generated in research in an informal settlement in the Western Cape, and building on the ideas of Michel de Certeau (1988) and Shirley Ardener (1993), the paper explores how spaces are gendered. it shows that processes of objectification similar to those involved in map-making operate as punishment for those who violate gendered spatial conventions. The paper calls for an understanding of the contexts within which abstraction emerges, and a careful attention to local conventions. It demonstrates that representations generated using senses other than vision do not elide the temporal: smell- and sound-scapes illustrate the complex folding of time and routine into the everyday in ways that cartographic representations cannot. A phenomenological approach is beckoned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on the San have taken the ethnicity issue as a given, without problematising it in the quest to understand the reason for deep seated prejudice surrounding the San. In this paper, an attempt is made to interrogate the ethnicity issue as a way of trying to explain the persistent contempt with which the San are held by the mainstream black communities. The focus is on Botswana, where most of my work has been done. The paper recognises that the negative attitude towards the San is a complex issue, and that many issues are at play, yet it locates the ethnicity factor at the core of these complexities. For example, the way the Botswana government is dealing with the San has been interpreted by some as a reactionary move. This paper demonstrates how this paradox epitomises the complexity of the concept of social development in the contemporary developing world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the interconnected processes of tourism, power, and identity in Zanzibar. The paper argues that tourism is Zanzibar is not only characterised by neo-colonialism but also accompanied and justified by cultural imperialism. The research focused on the tourist industry's underclass, locally known as ‘beach boys’ and younger, poorer tourists known as ‘backpackers’. The paper examines the social taxonomies used by both tourists and beach boys to define and distance the ‘Other.’ While beach boys classify tourists by gender and social class, the Zanzibari hosts are in turn classified by tourists in terms of how well they fit the colonial ideal of a rural ‘tribesman’. Contrary to the belief that tourism creates cross-cultural understanding, a far more common occurrence is that is that tourism reinforces and solidifies stereotypes, which are used to justify the dramatic imbalances in wealth between the hosts and the guests. As well as being a tool of oppression, the language of cultural imperialism is reformed by beachboys to create a vocabulary of resistance. Beachboys are a class of disenfranchised entrepreneurs striving for the success stressed by capitalism. This success is difficult to achieve in a stagnant economic climate where foreigners and local elites dominate Zanzibar's chief industry, tourism. This leaves Zanzibar in a precarious situation as local expectations are raised with the promise of the new economy, but these expectations are rarely met. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

About ten million people are displaced annually as a result of development projects. They usually suffer overwhelmingly negative consequences, enduring social and psychological disruption, and long-term economic impoverishment. Policy initiatives seeking to reverse this situation have met with limited success. Are we able to turn things around, and to manage resettlement in such a way that those affected become beneficiaries of the project, so that everybody, as opposed to the favoured few, can win? This paper considers two ways of approaching this question. The more optimistic view holds that everybody can win if we can get our inputs right, such as proper policy, planning, participation, financing and implementation. The more pessimistic view sees problems inherent in the nature of the resettlement process itself, which cannot be resolved simply by getting the inputs right. The paper considers these two approaches and their policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about the Anthropology Southern Africa Annual Conference held at the University of Johannesburg in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2009 is presented. The conference aimed to relay the significance of anthropological research. Recipient of the Monica Wilson Memorial Prize for the Best Student Paper was revealed in the name of Nina Botha of University of Pretoria. Election of the new council and office bearers of the association was also done.

The author presents a comment on the article "A Reply to the Responses by Becker, Owen and Van der Waal," by David Bogopa and Theodore Petrus. She clarifies that the journal "Anthropology Southern Africa" has the precise meaning of the comment which is not clear. She emphasizes that an editor indeed has the discretion to decide whether or not a paper should be published.

This article looks at poor white stigma in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on my ethnographic engagement with my informants, I developed this article as a part of my broader argument that explores the complex nature of white poverty in South Africa. In the context of East London, where my study was based, I explore poor white stigma within the context of 'coastal whiteness', an ideological perception of white lives in the coastal environment. This paper is particularly interested in understanding the marginal spaces which are occupied by poor whites and how these spaces are imagined within dominant white communities. I argue that poor whites represent 'abnormality' within white communities. As such they are often perceived as contradicting the progressive value systems of 'normal' whites, who are beyond poverty and are said to be committed to hard work and self-improvement. Furthermore, poor whites are seen to represent a threat to the ideals of white culture that is perceived as immune to poverty. Because of this perception of poverty as some form of exceptionally negative condition, fear and shame are attached to it. The extent of stigma attached to the condition of white poverty actually alienates those trapped in this position. Because of the rejection that poor whites are subjected to, they are constantly made to endure social pain and social death. Their existence becomes null and void to many. They are made to feel like some form of reject product that carries little value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographic data gleaned from nine months of research conducted among elderly, middle-class, Afrikaans-speaking members of a voluntary woman's organisation that aims at providing adult education to women, pertaining to womanhood, wifehood and motherhood, this paper shows how the context provides a space in which members construct a model of proper womanhood that is based on the valuation of modesty, thrift, the valorisation of talents, and industriousness -'Positive Protestantism'. This model hinges upon domestic work as an institution, and on the transformation of reproductive labour into symbolic labour. This transformation is the reason why Huisvlyt1 members experience the distribution of inalienable wealth as a dilemma of transmission, since their female kin do not value Positive Protestantism as a model of proper womanhood, resulting in Huisvlyt members realising Kopytoff's insight that objects have social lives, and that their prized possessions are running the risk of becoming garbage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the current social science literature on the clinical trials industry focuses on the profit-seeking practices adopted by pharmaceutical companies and the contract research organisations they employ to enable the mass production and distribution of their products. However, what the current literature demands is further ethnographic engagement with the particularities of the diseases being investigated, the local contexts and histories in which they are entwined, and how these impact the affective relationships between clinical research organisations and their participants. On the basis of ethnographic research with a nonprofit clinical research organisation specialising in TB vaccinations in South Africa, I argue that the complexities of 78 mean that research into it necessitates frequent and often intimate interactions with research participants. These were perceived by researchers to yield opportunities to take an interest in the physical and psychosocial wellbeing of research participants which went beyond and sometimes ran into conflict with the requirements of protocol. The aim of this paper is to advocate more finely tuned attention to the challenges posed by the clinical trials industry today, an attention sensitive to the particularities of the contexts of clinical trials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores themes of social space and mobility significant to tourism within the townships near Cape Town, South Africa. Research on the emergence of 'township tourism' has produced contrasting interpretations. Some authors describe essentialised notions of' Africanness', 'culture', and poverty displayed for the consumption of European tourists as voyeurism. Others emphasize township tourism's grassroots potential for local development, and portray it as a form of reconciliation through the political and personal narratives shared between resident-guides and tourists. By focusing primarily on one family of township tourism 'hosts,' the findings presented here describe how those involved with township tourism utilized new avenues of social and physical mobility across socio-spatial boundaries that persist as legacies of apartheid. Flexible understandings of space and 'multiple mobilities' are considered here, and host agency is emphasized. Finally, by tracing public discourses of criminality and 'common sense' directed at international visitors to townships in 2010, this paper demonstrates how such narratives undermined efforts to reconfigure perceptions of township spaces. I conclude by arguing that township tourism carries the potential to map new cartographies of belonging, while also creating new exclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outbreak of anti-immigrant violence in May 2008 in South Africa has prompted a set of theoretical questions and a reappraisal of theoretical suppositions. While the attacks have in the main pervasively been presented as xenophobia, I argue in this paper that what is termed xenophobia is in fact racism - New Racism - practised by people of the same population group, which has characterised post-apartheid South African black social relations. These are implications of decolonisation and difficulties of assimilating and integrating black African immigrants into the new South Africa. On the other hand there is increased culture contact and intermixing as a result of the accelerated presence of people of other identities. There are of course conceptual and definitional limitations of the term xenophobia in describing the complex social realities occurring in South African black communities. I therefore call for the deconstruction of the term xenophobia and propose that we begin to see it as culturally-based racism. The article explains that this kind of racism is heavily entrenched in cultural differences enunciated by dissimilarities in nationality, ethnicity, language, dress, customs, social and territorial origins, speech patterns and accents. These differences are deepened by social and economic inequalities, and frustrations among local people are expressed thorough economic grievances, which however mask the preceding cultural contempt and disdain. In addition, some current black on black practices are reminiscent of apartheid white anti-black racism. Drawing on my fieldwork in Alexandra, I then discuss a wide range of labels which are used to refer to African immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following a discursive approach, this paper introduces a school intended for sick learners: one that is regarded as on institution that promotes good mothering, and where the attending girls ore cured of being `sick' with child. The paper aims to open a window on the socio-economic circumstances, religious ideals and norms amongst some Afrikaans-speaking people. This takes place within a wider framework of shedding light on broader issues in contemporary South Africa. Based on information generated through ethnographic methods, the paper shows how the school in question attempts to perpetuate ideas of a `good white' and a `good mother' as part of a discourse of ordentlikheid. The paper concludes speculative remarks on the appearance of this ordentlikheid discourse in political statements about teenage pregnancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The First World rationale for nature conservation is usually the aesthetic and recreational experiences and opportunities that nature provides and its scientific importance, but rural populations in Africa tend to focus on the utilisation of natural resources. This paper argues that management decisions regarding the conservation and utilisation of natural resources are inseparable from a people's world view and value system, because values inform people's ideas about useful or valuable resources, appropriate behaviour and their priorities regarding issues such as grazing, hunting versus poaching, job creation, tourism, and access to sacred sites and natural resources. The objective of this study was to gain insight into the perceptions of wildlife conservation among the North Ndebele in Limpopo Province to create a climate in which the community can become involved in issues regarding policy matters and the management of the Masebe Nature Reserve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 2000 onwards, Zimbabwe's often violent land invasions displaced at least 500 000 farm workers from white-owned commercial farms across the country. While studies subsequently conducted on the land invasions tended to focus on their impact on farm workers who remained on the farms, very little ethnographic research was conducted on the impact of displacement on those who were evicted from the farms. The lack of research on the post-displacement lives of the latter group can be attributed to the great practical, political and ethical difficulties faced by researchers in conducting such research in post-2000 Zimbabwe. And yet, in spite of these challenges, there remained a huge need for in-depth, ethnographic research on the post-displacement situations of evicted farm workers: an exposé ethnography that would ensure that the complexities of their experiences, the injustices they faced, and their responses were recorded and broadcast to those unfamiliar with their situation. However, for vulnerable populations of displaced people. particularly those living with the continued threat of persecution, such attentions and attempts to expose both what happened to them and the ways in which they now cope may not be entirely welcome. This brings into question the value of exposé ethnography and raises many ethical questions for anthropologists working in difficult research environments. This paper explores the practical, political and ethical challenges associated with conducting ethnographic research with one group of displaced farm workers in Zimbabwe. Ultimately, it explores the thin line between the need for exposé ethnography in unjust societies and the need to ensure that displaced populations are not brought into further danger by the unwanted attention such research might bring them. In so doing it raises wider questions relating to research with all types of mobile populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2005 the municipal council that oversees Pretoria (South Africa's administrative capital) voted to officially change the name of the city to Tshwane. This was met with sustained resistance from various interest groups within the city. This is emblematic of the extent to which place names are vested with historical, political, economic and symbolic value. In addition to protests lodged through official channels, such as the South African Geographical Names Council and parliament, dissent about the name change has largely taken the form of attempts to prevent the use of the new name in public spaces and fora (such as advertising, television, and road signs). This paper explores this material dissent with reference to the landscape of place name changes in South Africa and argues that the resistance has taken the form that it has because of a concerted attempt to prevent the 'performance' of the new name, since this would give the new name validity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What forms of knowledge have legitimacy in the contemporary university? By using Actor-Network Theory to unravel the strands in a recent dispute about access to skeletons from a burial ground in Cape Town. this paper shows how circulating systems of references connect institutions, historical trajectories and differing sets of interests to form competing knowledge systems. Rather than falling back on a defence of established disciplines and academic authority, it is argued that there are considerable benefits in recognising the importance and validity of knowledge generated 'in community', and in the course of political discourse. Rather than undermining truth, such an approach will result in both better science and more in formed community action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the manner in which different parties engage with the issue of fishing rights on the inter-personal and public levels over the issue of fishing rights allocation in South Africa. Taking the historic fishing village of Kassiesbaai on the Cape's south coast as the case-site, this article outlines the profound effect that implementation of the Marine Living Resources Act of 1998 (MLRA) has had on the residents and how the debate over who has the right to fish is structured around different understandings of the core concepts of 'ocean', time', and 'value'. A general lack of trust between involved parties is both exacerbated by and serves to perpetuate the miscommunication that hampers the conversation between the residents of Kassiesbaai and role-players in government and the marine fisheries research community. This paper identifies particular nodes of discrepancy and argues that they constitute significant obstacles to communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In academic literature and the media, knowledge of the Ju/'hoansi San of Namibia is often either valorised or problematised. In this case study of tuberculosis in a small village in Tsumkwe district, which we call Dune and Low Dune, all the people identify themselves as Ju/'hoansi. It is shown how, why and when they utilise various knowledge traditions to address ill health in the face of scarcity and lack of power. This study traces how broad, yet intersecting 'categories' of tibi and related treatments were distinguished in relation to symptomology and embodied experiences of illness. but were also linked to medical diagnostics and treatment. Some local knowledge of local medicinal plants has been published, identified as Ju/'hoan, or San, and utilised for a growing interest in 'natural' remedies. Yet, while there is a veritable industry in studies and interventions related to the San, they have largely remained poor and marginalised. The paper concludes with an examination of the ways in which the Namibian state approaches the protection of knowledge it identifies as indigenous, arguing that in contrast to South Africa, biopiracy is not a predominant concern, and that existing state regulations focus more on the conservation of particular plants as an economic resource for the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the rural Western Cape local municipality of Kannaland, the word 'bossiesmedisyne' (lit, bushes medicine), refers to plant and sometimes animal material used to treat and alleviate a wide range of health problems, ranging from colds to cancer. Based on three months of ethnographic fieldwork, the paper advances the argument that the different kinds of healing these medicines provide are inseparable from the sociocultural and environmental contexts in which they are enveloped. It goes on to argue for a balanced interpretation of the meanings ascribed to bossies, based on a dialectical relation between claims to power, and phenomenological experiences of medicines and the landscapes in which they grow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the sexuality and contemporary sensual behaviour among Zanzibari women and their use of scent in these domains. It is argued that scent forms an integral part of different life-cycle rituals which are embedded in gendered everyday relations. Scents are useful in courting, marriage, birth and sexual attraction. While fragrance is an essential part of the discussion it is the nature of sexuality and the use of pleasure in Zanzibar that are principally discussed. Despite the prevalence of patriarchy in Zanzibar, women prioritise sensual pleasure, furthering their power and control in society. One main reason for the prioritisation of pleasure is that in Islamic Zanzibar the use and deployment of pleasure is associated with achieving a feminine gendered identity. Research on sexuality has methodological implications and these, as well as the changing context for women's sexuality in Zanzibar, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contextuolised in terms of the phenomenal growth in purchasing power in the so-called 'emerging market' in South Africa, this paper considers possibilities for anthropological involvement in market research, and looks at ways in which trust influences buying behaviour in the financial market. Drawing on research in two financial institutions, and taking into account current trends in anthropological endeavour, this presentation considers what role anthropologists might play in market research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers socio-political examples of the universal cultural phenomenon of symbolic inversion (mundus inversus), the earliest instances of which can be traced back to the cultures of the ancient Near East. Symbolic inversion refers to manifestations of expressive behaviour where everything is inverted in relation to the normal state of affairs. Two spheres in the ancient Near Eastern world where this cultural theme is especially prominent are in the conception of the ‘other’ (other ethnic groups) and in the sphere of social criticism, where a given status quo is attacked and alternative structures are propagated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]