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No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This small-scale study explores the concept of medical pluralism by looking at the health-seeking strategies of a selected group of residents in Stellenbosch's Kayamandi township. The study addresses the following three primary research questions: What are the health-seeking strategies of the target group? What factors significantly influence their health-seeking behaviour; and why are the respondents using more than one health-seeking strategy? We have used theoretical formulations derived from literature together with data we collected by questionnaires and interviews to respond to these questions. Our target group consisted of a mix of isiXhosa-speaking Christians, which fall into one of the following three groupings: Ecumenical, African Independent Zionists, and African Independent Non-Zionists. We applied a variety of methods to collect our data namely: survey questionnaire, in depth interviews and a focus group interview. Basic statistical and qualitative analysis techniques were used to analyze the data. We tested various potential variables before we concluded that Christian affiliation and gender are two major variables in this study that seem to influence our respondents' choices of strategy. The resulting data indicated that almost all of our respondents are mixing health seeking strategies. They are mixing in two ways: either in a complex way (multiple health seeking strategies for a single ailment), or a simple way (different strategies for different ailments). Even though Western Medicine is a dominant and the only legalized health-seeking strategy in South Africa this research suggests that there is a growing use of other health-seeking strategies, either alternatively or complementarily to Western Medicine. Reasons for this are discussed in this research report, and include firstly, conviction of experience and knowledge of health and illness among others. Secondly, we have established that these determinants transcend accessibility and availability of, particularly, Western medicine facilities. Respondents utilize three different health-seeking strategies selectively through 'border crossing' with minimal conflict.

This dissertation seeks to further develop the existing appreciation of the role of women around Jesus, by analysing selected texts within the canonical passion and empty tomb narratives. One of the issues that will be explored concerns the historicity and significance of the canonical empty tomb tradition, in which women are portrayed as the primary witnesses to the empty tomb and the resurrection. By tracing the history and the development of five selected texts within the canonical passion and empty tomb narratives, this dissertation will explore the role and function of women around Jesus. In addition, I will endeavour to motivate the inclusion and portrayal of women in these canonical texts based on a comparison of the treatment of these women by the canonical gospel writers. In order to re-evaluate the significance of the illustrated behaviour of women in the canonical passion and empty tomb narratives, five texts will be examined, beginning with the tradition of the woman anointing Jesus. The actions described in these texts will be situated within the socio-cultural context of first-century Palestine and compared to the funerary customs prevalent in Ancient Judaism. Furthermore the historicity and transmission history of these texts will be examined by applying both redaction criticism and tradition history to the texts. This dissertation will demonstrate that the tradition of the woman anointing Jesus and the tradition at the empty tomb depict behaviour, which is contrary to the culturally expected conduct of women regarding funerary customs within Ancient Judaism. However. the texts containing women's activities before. during and immediately after the passion narratives illustrate conduct. that corresponds to the customary mourning practices. Redactional analyses of the texts further indicate the awkwardness of portraying women as credible witnesses within the androcentric character of the patriarchal culture in first-century Palestine. This dissertation argues that. in terms of the criterion of cultural dissimilarity. the anointing tradition and the empty tomb tradition are most likely based on early forms of the traditions emerging during the oral period. This suggests strongly that women were the first witnesses to the empty tomb.

Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis examines Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "turning from the phraseological to the real" during his early journeys abroad as recorded in his diary notes and letters. Our interest in the maps and stories of travels operative in Bonhoeffer's life coincides with a prevalence of metaphors of travel and displacement in contemporary literary and cultural criticism and acknowledges the movements of "powerful" travellers across boundaries and continents in the context of imperialism and colonialism.

Includes bibliographical references. / The aim of this thesis is to propose a multi-layered and interdisciplinary understanding of space by focussing on the courtyard gardens of the Alhambra. By presenting a theoretical conversation on the Sufi notion of the barzakh (an intermediary and relational space) between the premodern Muslim mystic Ibn al-Arabi and contemporary western theorists concerned with space, movement and aesthetics, such as Louis Marin, Henri Lefebvre, Tim Ingold and Martin Seel, this thesis offers an original contribution to the spatial analysis of religion as embodied in the architecture, gardens, and imagination of the Alhambra. Emphasising the barzakh’s role in the interplay between presence and meaning this thesis also draws attention to the dialogue between self as spectator and the garden as spectacle. Through this dialogue, Ibn al-Arabi‘s concept of the barzakh , which he developed in terms of ontology, epistemology and hermeneutics, is investigated and analysed in order to identify a theory of knowledge that relies on the synthesis between experience and imagination. The union of meaning and presence afforded by the intermediary quality of the barzakh is further demonstrated in the physical, imaginative and virtual worlds of the courtyard gardens of the Alhambra. Viewing the Alhambra palaces and gardens in terms of Ibn al-Arabi‘s barzakh, they produce their own language, a showing ‖ of their outer and inner movements, which prompts and provokes the spectator to participate in a poetical and creative encounter. Seen as a barzakh, these gardens put space into movement.

With the use of SRI as an interpretive analytics combined with a gender-critical hermeneutical optic I have traced out some of the ways in which gender is constituted and performed in the discourse of 1 Corinthians. I demonstrate that normative and normalising engendering is operative in the text and that the discourse replicates hegemonic gendered structurings and machinations from the broader social and cultural environment of that milieu. As a result Christian bodies are scripted to perform according to the dominant cultural protocols and engendering praxes. Because Paul is structured by and functions within the larger discourses of the ancient Mediterranean sex and gender system(s), one cannot comprehend the gendered rhetoric of 1 Corinthians without recourse to its interconnections with ancient gender discourses in general. Furthermore, when Paul is engaged in persuasion through the discourse of 1 Corinthians, gender construction(s) and representation(s), because of the nature of gender in the ancient world, is precisely what is at stake. It seems evident that the discourse of 1 Corinthians tendentiously served to maintain and sustain hierarchical gendered relationships between men and women in the church at Corinth that mimicked the normative, androcentric, and kyriarchal power relations from the dominant Graeco-Roman culture. These power dynamics continue to have an effect on many churches today because they understand Scripture to be regulative for Christian practice in our contemporary society in spite of the temporal and cultural separation of our world from that of the world of the New Testament. As a result contemporary churches reproduce gendered power relations that have been established in habitus which in turn enables replicated gendered structurings in society. In this regard the rhetoric of 1 Corinthians may be viewed as a text that functions as discourse in the making and sustaining of gendered and ideological normativities that continue to structure gendered bodies and bodiliness. It should be kept in mind that the structuredness of habitus came into being as the product of reiteration and sedimenting, and its dismantling similarly will come about as a result of reiteration.