This study provides an examination of landscape perceptions, specifically geopiety or sacred landscape perceptions, at Mounds State Park. Through archival analysis I traced 2000 years of landscape perceptions at the park and found that geopiety has been an underlying influence in shaping perceptions. I further examine contemporary perceptions at Mounds state Park through participant observation and ethnographic interviewing and have determined that geopiety continues at the park in the form of nature-centered, historical/cultural and recreational perceptions. Finally, I examined the influence of modernity on geopiety and have determined that the level of geopiety is determined by the degree an individual is influenced by modernity. Modernity exists in varying degrees from traditional to progressive with the majority of individuals couched within the “inbetweeness” of modernity. / Department of Geography

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2016 / Since the latter part of the 20th century to the present, we have seen growing concerns about the potential collapse of socio-ecological systems due to climate change. On the other hand, palaeoenvironmentalists, archaeologists and anthropologists consistently point to evidence of how Homo-sapiens have survived within climate variability underpinned by an embodied/embedded relationship to their environments. Archaeological data shows how indigenous groups such as the Bushman have inhabited landscape features such as caves for longer than 10 000 years and thus survived through periods of climate variability. Another well researched element of Bushman life is their ritual practices. Given the low supply of livelihood resources within the contexts where such communities have survived, this study hypothesised a possible relationship between Bushman ritual practices and their long-term resilience when faced with variability. Using the Holocene habitation of the Wonderwerk Cave as the main case study, this study explored the relationship between people, place and ritual. Furthermore, the study applied phenomenology as the primary data collection method. The resultant first-person experience guided the researcher in engaging with secondary data from archaeology and ethnography. The study found that Bushman ritual practices such as trance constituted a critical adaptation tool in response to perpetually variable environments. Through such practices and their related tools such as art, space and myth, such communities managed to sustain a synchronised dialogue with place thus facilitating for ongoing dissolution of maladaptive behaviour. Another key finding is that our inability to change constitutes a key characteristic of our species today as we have been seduced into the trap of our deep psychic longing for existential continuity. The study argues for an architecture for resilience whose primary role would be to facilitate higher fluidity in our embeddedness to place and allowing for faster and trauma-free transitioning in synchronicity to our changing environments. In conclusion, the study finds that our own contemporary climate change has implications far beyond the techno-scientific understanding which has prevailed so far and is instead calling to be understood as an existential phenomenon to be primarily resolved through relevant/responsive ritual practices to facilitate our own transitioning and continued resilience. / MT2017

A dissertation submitted to the School of Language, Literature and Media, Faculty of Humanities for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, March 2017 / Although the burgeoning fields of linguistic and semiotic landscapes (LL and SL) studies provide extensive coverage of urban settings around the globe, it lacks a focus on urban development and the associated phenomenons such as gentrification, with the notable exception of Lou (2016). This dissertation looks at the neighbourhood of Marshalltown, located in the inner city of Johannesburg. Marshalltown is known as the mining district because of its proximity to the original goldmines that sparked the growth of the city. The neighbourhood’s SL has radically shifted from a place of urban decay to a trendy neighbourhood since the late 1990s, after urban development efforts financed by the private sector made the area stand out from the rest of the inner city. The developers working in Marshalltown have purposefully filled it with signs indexing the mining heritage its businesses which tend to cater to the middle-to-upper-classes, thus excluding poorer residents which make up most of the inner city’s population. Against this backdrop, the dissertation aims to answer the following three research questions: 1) How is Marshalltown constructed as a space of heritage, both in its materiality and in its representation in a corpus of media texts? 2) Considering that heritage entails a selection process from a more general historic field, which sections of history are curated in Marshalltown’s SL, which are silenced, and what are the implications for the narratives displayed in the context of post-apartheid South Africa? 3) How is Marshalltown’s urban environment experienced by social actors in a context of globalized trends in urban design which rely on heritage and authenticity to market formerly ignored city centres? The data for this study consists of a corpus of 25 media articles from various outlets, 255 photographs of Marshalltown and its vicinity, ethnographic field notes written between 2012 and 2016, as well as interviews with developers, heritage architect, a deputy director of immovable heritage at the City of Johannesburg, shop owners and people who work in the area. This dissertation aims to contribute to the young field of SL studies, while bringing forth Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) methodological toolkit of geosemiotic which allows for an analysis of signs in place and how people interact with them to draw a pertinent analysis of the construction of place. Geosemiotics is coupled with specific themes for each analytical chapter which brings forth a new way of analysing a SL. Those themes are 1) the language of urban development which drawing on Markus and Cameron (2002) helps analyse the representation of city neighbourhoods; 2) heritage, which brings a temporal perspective to SL studies that I call a chronoscape; 3) authenticity, which brings a visual analysis addition to the recent debate on the topic within sociolinguistics scholarship (Coupland 2003, Bucholtz 2003 and Eckert 2003) and its focus on the discursive construction of what counts as authentic. This study argues that Marshalltown’s post-apartheid SL is carefully designed by a majority of (white) developers wanting to give the area a heritage feel, borrowing from the mining history of the city; thus anchoring a European influenced heritage within their own interpretation of what an African city should look like. The heritage feel of Marshalltown is part of a broader plan to reclaim the city, which means changing the image it acquired previously during an era of urban decay as a dangerous no-go area, into an attractive tourism-friendly urban space. Those changes are achieved by inserting development efforts into the market for authentic urban lifestyle which Marshalltown can provide thanks to its preserved history. The neighbourhood stands out from the rest of the inner city by being privately controlled and maintained thus distancing itself from the popular discourse of inner city Johannesburg and instead developers redesign it as an ideal space for consumption. / XL2018