Villages of coach behar West Bengal

This thesis deals with the micro-politics of farm workers’ evictions. It documents farm workers’ narratives of the processes of eviction and displacement from farms in the Western Cape of South Africa. It analyses farm relations and their relationship with law, through the eyes of farm workers and through the legal actors who assist them with representation and by lobbying on their behalf. In particular, it focuses on the Extension of Security of Tenure Act (62) of 1997, which was implemented to protect farm workers from the large scale evictions that were taking place on farms and as part of a broader land reform programme. Drawing particularly on the work of Andries Du Toit, who has written about paternalism on Western Cape Farms (eg. 1998) and more recently on the impact of policy (2002), and on Blair Rutherford’s arguments relating to farm workers’ organisation in Zimbabwe, I argue that (neo)paternalistic sociality on farms is constantly being renegotiated in spite of and because of new laws, and through involvement of other influences such as locally based paralegals. The core of my argument is that farm workers are ‘liminal’ in this moment, particularly in the negotiation of eviction and housing tenure, as they operate both within the limits of paternalism where they can, and increasingly through ‘access to justice’ and related concepts. The boundaries of these discourses and social spaces are constantly shifting back and forth as farm dwellers are influenced by worker organisation as espoused by NGOs, and by increased interaction and understanding with and of laws that protect them; at the same time as they are influenced by their relationships with farm owners and other farm workers, or by paternalism. The anthropological fieldwork upon which the thesis is based was multi-sited, conducted between February 2002 and September 2003. The thesis follows the work of NGOs and paralegals, and the life histories and recent legal experiences of farm workers. The importance of the interaction between farm workers with law and its interlocutors should not be underestimated even in a context where laws such as ESTA in fact offer limited protection to farm workers’ security of tenure. These interactions must be understood in the contexts of continuing but ever renegotiated forms of gendered and racialized paternalism, of a changing economic, legal and political landscape. The thesis is therefore concerned with these spheres of influences and the micro-dynamics of legal and political contestation in the rural Western Cape.

Ethnography of the state has long been focused on either a state’s reproduction of itself or on ‘the people’s’ resistance to it. In both cases, the state is cast as a unified, holistic identity that exists in diametric opposition to the people living within its borders. There have been some recent attempts to speak back to these assumptions (e.g. Navaro-Yashin 2002), but we are still left with a monolithic image of the state. This thesis is an attempt to break down the ‘obvious’ divides between the reified concepts of People and State, especially in regards to Arab Middle Eastern countries. My analysis is based on 13 months of fieldwork in Damascus, Syria, where I witnessed how politics are lived and described in the course of everyday life. This work focuses on popular stories about and interactions with what might be labeled global and state politics. Thus I read their stories to not be just narratives but narrative actions—a concept I suggest considering as a ‘narraction’ to encompass its seemingly dualistic, but practically singular nature. Political narractions in Syria often take the form of identity-work or conspiracy theory; this thesis approaches these as ethnographic objects and undertakes a more performative analysis of these narractions. I suggest that in narracting these stories, Syrians are doing a form of relations, making connections and disconnections between the various subjects within the narractions (and themselves) in a manner that is highly fluid and flexible and can seem somewhat ambiguous (if not in the conventional use of the term). That there can be simultaneous connections and disconnections is not as mutually exclusive a state as it would appear and is also one that Syrians experience in relation to kinship and friendship. In a comparative turn, I suggest that in both familial and political relations, the disconnections (challenges) are not a form of ‘resistance,’ but are a negative (Narotzky and Moreno 2002) aspect of relations that are just as essential to the overall construction and maintenance of a relationship as the positive ones we are more familiar with (e.g. familial affection or political activism). Finally, I argue that this process of ‘making connections’ via observing and narracting relationships can provide a broader model of knowledge production that applies to the work of anthropologists as much as to the conspiracy theorizing of Syrians.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Pacific Graduate School of Psychology, 1997. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 59-04, Section: B, page: 1920. Adviser: Michael Acree.

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This thesis is an ethnographic study of fans of FC United of Manchester, a new football club set up by supporters of Manchester United in the wake of the Glazer family takeover at Old Trafford in 2005. It focuses particularly on the importance of ideas of ‘community’ and ‘politics’ to understanding the club. In doing so the thesis sets out supporters’ motivations for supporting FC United and how these have impacted on the form the club takes and supporters’ relationships to FC United. In this thesis I analyse FC United as both a significant development within English football and as an important form of contemporary collective action with wider social significance. I show how FC United was formed within a broader context of political and economic transformation, a ‘neo-liberal turn’, within football and more generally within England, and, indeed, across many parts of the world. My argument is that the formation and continuation of FC United has involved the thinking through, debating of and engagement with particular ideas and notions of ‘community’ and ‘place’ and of ‘politics’ and ‘political activism’ in the light of this shifting wider context. As such the thesis sheds light on contemporary articulations and manifestations of these phenomena and how they may become implicated in collective action within football fandom and beyond. In doing so, it also gives insight into the social implications of the wider political and economic changes in which FC United is enmeshed. Thus, the thesis makes an important contribution to social anthropological knowledge by showing how an ethnographic study of FC United can yield new understandings of how significant recent political and economic changes are both socially understood and contested through collective action. Furthermore, the thesis makes a significant contribution to social scientific understandings of English football fandom by giving a deep ethnographic insight into how some fans have understood and responded to recent changes in the political economy of the game and into the dynamics underpinning an important new form of protest and collective action amongst English supporters. The thesis is structured in three parts. Part One sets out the contextual background of the research, first by discussing the methodological approach adopted and then by analysing the long-term historical context in which FC United emerged. Part Two focuses on the importance of ‘community’ and ‘place’ to understanding FC United’s current form and supporters’ motivations for supporting the club. Here ‘community’ is shown as having multiple meanings and manifestations with the context of FC United, while the significance of ‘place’ to FC United is analysed as lying in supporters symbolic and imaginative understandings of Manchester and what it is to be a Mancunian. Part Three presents an understanding of what is politically at stake for FC United fans beyond the immediate sphere of football fandom before assessing the chance that the club may become part of a larger movement within football aiming to bring about supporter ownership at all clubs.

This thesis addresses the 19th century sequence of Kerkplaats, a farm in the central Karoo, Northern Cape, South Africa. Over this period different colonialisms of varying power and effect were introduced. The first was to local Khoe, San and Griqua communities in the form of one of the first London Missionary Society stations in the early 19th century. A second phase between 1830 and 1860 was to sheep farmers of German, Dutch and mixed descent, who absorbed and moulded the increasing impacts of British influence and materiality into older worlds of cultural resilience and practice. From 1860, a third phase saw a flood of mass produced British goods enter the region, similar to other colonial contexts around the world. Amount, availability and choice changed significantly and provided the material substrate in which rural stock farmers re-expressed themselves within the growing stature of Empire. It is suggested that for some rural farmers, expressive cultural practice worked to underpin increased affluence brought by merino sheep farming for global markets. Through this sequence different expressions of identity, domesticity, and economic scale are assessed through a close reading of documentary and archaeological evidence. While the material opportunities through the 19th century are the result of global processes, how this material is understood has to consider local context. It is suggested that material expression and identity change is most dramatic from the middle of the 19th century, when patterns of consumption reflect the globalisation of British production.