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Illness and health is more often than not, embedded in a matrix of cultural beliefs and is often more than about simply 'being ill' or 'being healthy'. The cause of the 'ill health' may also be located in social and spiritual realms, so that ethnomedical aetiology may include witchcraft and sorcery, and 'attack' by familiars or malevolent spirits. In many communities, constructed understandings of the body and health, for oneself, as well as that of the unborn child, extend back inter-generationally, and point to wider understandings of the (cosmological) world and how the individual is 'located' within this world. Likewise, with many categories of peri-urban and rural African communities, there is an entrenched belief that a pregnant woman and her unborn foetus can be protected from harm, and reproductive health can be promoted by turning to traditional health practices. This paper examines one particular traditional practice; that of offering a decoction known generically as isihlambezo in isiZulu, meant to aid in the delivery of a healthy baby. The paper works through qualitative data gathered from a sample group of pregnant women and traditional healers (sangomas), and probes the popularly constructed meaning of the decoction or isihlambezo. The narratives of the isiZulu participants around isihlambezo, in turn reveal that a complex web of beliefs cohere around understandings of reproductive health and the well-being of the unborn child. These narratives additionally problematise what appears as the hegemonic positioning of the western biomedical discourse which appears to 'push' the faith and reliance on indigenous herbal remedies underground, thus rendering its use somewhat invisible against the more visibly championed western reproductive health care and prenatal medicines.

There has been for the last decade, in the tenor of general scholarship, much enthusiastic talk about the 'mobilities turn' in the social sciences, and of borders made porous by mass communication and the various patterns of migration and circuits of mobility. International foreign 'students' form one vector amongst the multiple trajectories of migratory movement, and represent foreign 'bodies', who (choose to) become mobile in search of educational opportunities. Such movement renders them 'international', and in some instances cosmopolitan. Many remain however, rooted to their home spaces through their use and choice of communication through their home languages; and further use their home language to satisfy a sense of belonging in a foreign host space. Language (and communication) is thus considered key in unpacking notions of belonging. This exploratory paper employs an interpretivist lens and works through a sample of narratives of a small group of foreign African students and unpacks how language(s) and communication are used by the students in a way that 'speaks' to a sense of self and belonging.

Despite what many would construe as massive political and legislative transformation, many South Africans still inhabit what can be best described as a fragmented and discontinuous geographical and ideological landscape. A case in point is the 'township' of Wentworth as a spatial and temporally situated example of a community dispossessed. Wentworth is home to a historically disenfranchised Coloured community that holds to an identity that is rich, in as much as it is complex and fraught. This paper works through excavating memory of 'place' and 'people' as shared through the narratives of residents of Wentworth, a so called 'Coloured' suburb in Durban. It works through a social constructionist and interpretivist approach and proceeds through the narratives of a sample group of thirty one participants. It excavates, through narrative inquiry, a sense of self as articulated by the participants, through their experiences of living in Wentworth. Their narratives reveal that many of them still squat within fuzzily marked spaces delineated by a racial classificatory system framed by 'White' and 'Black' at either ends.

Memories, as emotional artefacts of what has transpired, are vital as they allow migrants to connect to their past. Anthropological perspectives on memory explain memory through constructionist and...

The biblical narratives are inspired texts to the Pentecostals, as they are to many other Christians. Most Pentecostals accept that these biblical narratives offer the guiding templates through whi...

This paper has a transdisciplinary orientation and is located in both anthropology and tourism studies. It draws on the seminal theoretical work of the post structural anthropologist Victor Turner and brings to the study of tourism, the concepts of performance, memory and 'experience'. The paper focuses on what the world has come to know as the place of incarceration for Nelson Mandela, and now declared a World Heritage Site and museum, established as the blurb goes, 'as a poignant reminder to the newly democratic South Afr ica of the price paid for freedom'. The paper looks at the construction of the site of Robben Island Prison Museum, in Cape Town South Africa as a performance space for the reliving and experiencing of a collective shared past and history and probes how visitors to the site, experience the space. Methodologically the paper uses narrative analysis of tourists' sharing stories of their visits in small focus type groups and in one-on-one interviews. It also draws on a thematic analysis of the visitor entries in a Visitors Book spanning a six month period of visits. T he paper attempts to show that the site and constructed heritage product (or tour), emerges as a 'liminal spa ce' where different racial categories of visitors, who have had differently shaped life histories, might be made to 'experience' a shared past of denial and oppression. Liminality speaks to a dislocation of structure and hierarchies, and by drawing on the ethnographic interviews of a randomised sample group of local and international visitors to the site, the paper shows that the visitor is placed into a liminal space by the manner in which the tour space is constructed and experienced.

Feminist anthropologists have shown how women's bodies have been appropriated and rendered ‘docile’ by so called cultural or traditional practices, as well as by discourse. The compelled docility of African women (as that of other women in the global south), is perhaps especially visible within subtly coerced performances within a context of ‘traditional’ masculinised practices, such as unprotected sex, that leave many African women vulnerable and forced to negotiate a host of health concerns around sexually transmitted diseases and of course HIV/AIDS. This is to be seen as a form of violence perpetrated by men against their female partners. However, in probing condom use through a qualitative study with a small group of women, we notice that it is not simply a case of discerning patterns of hegemonic masculinities in relation to condom use or non-use, and that masculinities are also propped up and held together by the relational configurations of practice formed by (mutual) gender relations.

Globalisation and post-colonialism have created new religio-cultural geographies and articulations in many countries. Many aspects of Hindu religion have been transnationally stretched and (re)enacted within new migrant and diasporic spaces, in turn reshaping and somewhat changing how ritual and religious enactments come to be enunciated. This article focuses on the yajna as a plastic and symbolic resource that is enacted in a transnational context and within new idioms and vocabularies of religious expression. The article engages with Lubin’s (2001) thesis that the ‘public’ and visible aspect of yajna functions as a civic ‘spectacle’ and probes the performance element of this so-called ‘spectacle’, and looks at how it becomes re-ritualised and re-enacted to fit the contemporary needs of transnational and diasporic Hindu communities.

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.

The paper approaches cultural heritage tourism as an artefact of (cultural) globalisation and global "flows" (Urry 2007). The premise is that markets of (constructed) cultural 'heritage' and 'cultural bodies' rooted in specific 'localness', can be seen as being increasingly catered for within global cultural flows and transnational movements of tourists, with cultural commodities such as the 'Zulu dance' narratives and 'Zulu' bodies positioned to meet tourist expectations. Methodologically, the paper draws on ethnographic data generated from unstructured interviews and focus groups, and probes the production of locality and people through an analysis of the perceptions of a sample group of Black Africans towards the Zulu dance narrative that contrives to make African, in this case Zulu-ness as the emphatic "specificity" or condition "for intercultural participation" in tourism encounters (van Binsbergen 2003: 400). The paper examines local perception of the Zulu dance and the female dancers, probing how this category of local 'audience' perceives the positioning of dance and dancers, as items of local heritage and indigeneity for consumption within global(ized) tourism. The paper shows that an analysis of the data from the sample group reveals that local Zulu-speaking individuals believe that a strong marketing matrix contrives to sell a product of Zulu, that is more about meeting a global demand, than about showcasing what and who the 'Zulu' is.

Violence against women is a worldwide problem that transcends all boundaries – cultural, geographic, religious, social and economic. However, it is maintained that there are also added particular cultural ‘dynamics’ or constraints inherent in specific cultural groups. This focus attempts to sketch out the features of a category of Indian women who are assumed as being compelled by particular systemic cultural constraints or familial pressures to ‘play the dutiful wife’ at the expense of enduring sustained emotional and physical trauma. While there is extensive, even sensational reporting of violence within Indian families and against Indian wives in (predominantly Indian) tabloids, there is conversely less scholarly attention on this category of women and the dynamics and conflicts within Indian households. This piece focuses a narrow scrutiny on the Indian wife within abusive marriages. It looks at what is referred to as ‘culturally systemic’ violence and a certain commonality of marital discord...

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.

Feminist movements had as their imperative, the redress of the political, economic and social asymmetries experienced by women. Within the literature in the West, a wave model has been popularly used to describe both the kinetic chronology as well as the gestation of the earlier movement from those of the latter.

Effective and engaged teaching practices are those that recognise the importance of making real world connections between the subject material taught, and the students' experiences, through 'engaged' teaching and working to encourage the student to become reflexive and critical thinking societal participants. It is argued that meaningful teaching praxis or engaged pedagogy emanates from a teaching philosophy that is driven by the belief that both teaching and learning are collaborative processes between the teacher and the student group. By drawing on experiences of teaching a large first year university Anthropology class (>550) and a smaller third year Anthropology class (

(2014). Indigenous Mothers: An Ethnographic Study of Using the Environment during Pregnancy. Studies on Ethno-Medicine: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 101-101.

This article uses the notion of ‘gaze’ as a tool in attempting to probe how the Muslim female is discursively constructed through the act of a particular gaze on her veiled body. The hijab (headscarf) and purdah (face covering) as forms of veiling are not publicly contested symbols in South Africa. However, local Muslim women who practice veiling are seen by other non-veiling females as embodying a practice that is a visible signifier of a particular religious ‘worldview on body’. This signification lends itself to be ‘seen’ within particular gazes which are in turn embedded in their own sets of observational exigencies and gaze politics. The paper reveals that in the South African context, the gaze of the ‘non wearer’ sees veiling as performatively oppressing women and rendering them unapproachable. The women who practise veiling, however, possess alternative understandings, as the interviews reveal. The paper uses ethnographic interviews and conversations, and illustrates through the narratives of both local Muslim women who practice veiling, as well as the non-Muslim female ‘gazers’, that the polyvalent material object of the veil is rendered visible through a particular way of gazing. Finally the paper suggests a possible alternative and de-contextualised way of a potentially transformative gaze that may allow for a degree of mutual ‘seeing’, and greater complicit rapprochement of seer and seen.

The paper seeks to work through the heuristic device of marriage and female sexual bodily fluids, as they are constructed within particular strands of Hinduism. The paper applies the analytic lens of feminist Anthropology and proceeds through the contested site of female body and probes how the discursive body comes to be embedded within a discourse of matrimony and reproduction. By looking at an archetypal female or Goddess within a particular stream of Hinduism and the matrix of mythology within which she is installed, the paper unpacks how “female” has come to be strategically inscribed, constrained and performed upon through various religio-cultural devices in Hinduism. As much of the performance of female gender scripts appear to be drawn from the regulatory power of certain (male) canonized religious texts, the paper suggests re-installing the goddess within the liminal and interstitial space of fuzzy gender that might well allow for an alternate, more plastic reading of marriage and motherhood, and of female.

In their recent article, Sharma and Jain (2013) make the point that leadership and management are twinned, complementary and inextricably linked, or as they put it, “Go hand in hand”. They go a step further though and draw from Warren Bennis' list of the differences between 'the leader' and 'the manager' and state that while the manager administers, the leader innovates, and where the manager is a copy, the leader is an original (Sharma and Jain 2013). One completely agrees with this, for as Sharma and Jain assert, the leader's task is to inspire and to motivate. This essay will use the theoretical prism of intertextuality and work through the leadership framework above, as put forward by Sharma and Jain. The essay will attempt to show how this understanding of a leader and leadership is a potentially valuable lens to appreciate the spiritual leadership of the Hindu saint popularly known globally as Amma (Mother). The paper will show that Amma as a Hindu 'guru', is a particular kind of leader who fits many of the contexts that Sharma and Jain describe within their leadership model. The paper will attempt to further show that the saint known as Amma, typifies a unique and particular kind of charismatic feminine power and female leadership that both inspires and motivates millions of Hindu followers the world over.Key Words: mother, feminine, leader, spiritual, female leadership