Includes bibliography. / I argue against an outright dismissal of so-called reality shows as unreal television set-ups by interrogating how so-colled realness is performed within the context of Big Brother 2, a reality-based game show. Research is conducted on the production set in Randburg, Johannesburg, over a period of seven weeks. A variety of research methods participant observation, semi-structured interviews, informal conversations-and informants-are employed.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 59-67). / According to the World Health Organization's (WHO) 2008 report on tuberculosis (TB), South Africa has the highest rate ofTB in the world after Swaziland. It is estimated that there are nearly half a million South Africans living with TB. This paper explores how people interact with embodied manifestations of TB within a specific macrocosm of existence, namely a South African grape-farming region. I argue that in addition to classic factors of biosocial significance the lives of those living with TB are by and large marked by the associated symptoms of insecurity, instability, and precariousness.

Zimbabwean history is rooted in ethnic and cultural identities, inequalities, and injustices which the post-colonial government has sought to address since its national independence in 1980. Marginalisation of some ethnic groups has been one of the persistent problems in post-colonial Zimbabwe. Of particular significance to this thesis has been the marginalisation of the BaTonga people of north-western Zimbabwe. The marginalisation of the BaTonga people is historical with its roots traceable from the colonial era through the early years of national independence. Post-colonial Zimbabwe's emphasis on cultural identity and confirmation has, however, prompted the establishment of community museums such as the BaTonga Community Museum (BCM), to promote cultures of the local people. The establishment of cultural heritage sites such as the BCM has, however, impacted on the lives of the local people in various ways. This study critically examines the effects and socio-economic contribution of the BCM to the local communities, which ranges from generation of revenue to education training, environmental conservation and creation of employment in several sectors of the economy. On examining this topic, I draw extensively on the work of Kopytoff, who wrote about biographies of things. In his work, Kopytoff argues that all things, including cultural objects relate in a way that allows the analysis of relationships between persons and things as a process of social transformation that involves a series of changes in status. As Kopytoff (1986) insists, cultural biographical approach is culturally informed given that things are culturally constructed and reconstructed in much the same way people are culturally (re-)constructed through time. I draw on the work of Kopytoff in a critically sympathetic manner to delve into the effects and socio-economic contribution of the BCM to the local communities. I, nevertheless, bring to the fore the argument that although Kopytoff does not explicitly argue that things have life, his cultural biographical approach implies this and that by tracing a biography of a thing we recognise its agency as 7 well. It is through the careful analysis of agency of these things that I examine the effects and socio-economic contribution of the BCM to communities surrounding the site.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-87). / This paper attempts to understand perceptions of fertility and sexuality in relation to HIV/Aids prevention in Mafalala barrio, Maputo, Mozambique. The work explores ways in which people create or re-create meanings for fertility in order to fulfil kinship expectations. The notion of individual choice highlighted in the condom campaigns is contrasted with people's ideas about 'protection'. This suggests that socio-cultural factors should be taken into account when developing HIV/Aids prevention programs. The study concludes with a discussion of some lessons for the HIV/Aids educational programs in Mafalala and other areas similar to the barrio.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 125-137). / This ethnographic study is concerned with the process of movement of Zimbabwean nationals to Cape Town, South Africa, that results in their categorisation by the South African state as "illegal immigrants." Based on fieldwork carried out in Harare and Cape Town in 2006 and 2007, it explores the effects of state-based categorisation of people within Zimbabwe on migration. The study argues that migrants had often been multiply displaced in Zimbabwe as a result of the political situation before crossing the border to South Africa. It explores the factors, both political and economic, that affected migrants’ decisions to move over great distances, and to move multiple times. Drawing on informants’ experiences both in Zimbabwe and South Africa, the study is further concerned with informants’ expectations of South Africa and the differing realities they encountered upon arrival. It considers informants’ experiences of crossing the border, exploring the anthropology of the borderlands to investigate the political economy of movement from Zimbabwe to South Africa. The study further argues that Zimbabwean migrants to South Africa draw upon localised discourses of human rights, based upon ideas of morality, in their expectations of welcome by the South African state. These expectations are found to be erroneous in that undocumented migrants’ notions of violation differ to those employed by the South African state. Whilst migrants assert that conditions of structural violence in Zimbabwe are serious enough to warrant asylum, the South African state considers these reasons to be less valid than those of physical political violence. Within the South African discourses around the Zimbabwean crisis, there are thus forms of suffering that are considered more valid than others.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 70-72). / Pregnancy can be an exciting experience for - but not limited to - women who have planned their pregnancies and have contemplated their futures as mothers. Similarly. education and the achievements of matriculation, bachelors', masters' and PhD degrees toward the pursuit of a lasting career can be an equally exciting experience for ambitious students who value education in its own right and for their potential futures. For female students who would prefer to finish their education and establish their careers before parenthood, inadvertently becoming pregnant during their studies may serve as a turning point requiring drastic re-evaluation for their lives as students and mothers. The female body and the physical changes that take place during pregnancy often make the pregnant body easily identifiable and ultimately a public object, subjecting pregnant women to attention and interpretation from everyone around them, particularly in places like university campuses where pregnancy is not commonplace. Consequently, pregnancy as an obvious implication of sexual activity can subject pregnant women to gossip around the assumed carelessness of their sexual behaviours. On university campuses, where such gossip around a pregnancy is certain to develop, some women seek refuge by hiding their pregnancies. This dissertation explores the experiences of currently pregnant students and student mothers on two university campuses. I consider their experiences of pregnancy as students, distinguishing between those who were single, dating, or married at the time of their pregnancies. I also consider those who planned their pregnancies vs. those who did not and those who had necessary support systems vs. those who did not, towards an understanding of how they managed the simultaneity of pregnancy and studying. This thesis explores the experiences of these women to understand the manner and extent to which their lives and aspirations as students have been impacted in light of their pregnancies and/or children. While highlighting the difference in values of education for the informants, it shows that becoming pregnant has profound implications on student's lives and that moral, emotional and material support are the critical factors that determine whether the pregnant student or student mother will complete her education.

Bibliography: 131-137. / Recent material culture theory points out how material possessions are woven into the fabric of lives, shaping social relations and texturing people's meanings and interpretation of their world. This study embarks on exploring aspects of this objected fabric, in the context of urban working black South Africans, living in three different township suburbs in Gauteng, in four differing housing circumstances, in the mid-1990s and in the midst of much uncertainty of what the future might hold for poor urban residents. Drawing on participant observation, ethnographic interviews, and household and appliance ownership surveys, the study explores the ways in which domestic objects- appliances specifically - function symbolically for a set of people living in Soweto formal houses, backyard shacks, an informal settlement and in Lusaka City site-and -service settlement on the West Rand, in Gauteng, South Africa. I examine symbolic constructions and creations in these people's homes, gleaning some of the meaning people attributed to particular modes of equipping their homes, and how aspects of their image of themselves and each other were presented, acted out, created, 'conversationed', contested and negotiated through material goods.

Bibliography: leaves 274-296.

Research in assisted conception technologies has examined how technologies open up potential trajectories, futures, and family arrangements, yet remain shaped and embedded within local histories and politics (Franklin, 1997, 2003; Inhorn, 2003; Thompson, 2005; Roberts, 2012). Embryos (Franklin, 2006a), sex cells such as eggs and sperm (Ariza, 2018), and IVF more generally (Inhorn, 2003; Simpson, 2013), offer particular potential futures but also threaten existing social orders. In this thesis, I present an ethnographic analysis of potentiality in IVF in South Africa through tracing sites and processes to apprehend, assess, and manage potential. Potentiality invokes desires and fears about the future while inviting attempts to render the future knowable and manageable (Taussig, Hoeyer, & Helmreich, 2013). Drawing on 14 months of multi-sited ethnographic research in fertility clinics and egg donor agencies in urban South Africa, I draw out the political, affective and temporal registers of potentiality as they materialise in concrete instances of reproductive medicine that is entangled within a context of capitalist biomedicine. Here, I argue that while biomedical knowledge systems frame certain objects, times, and futures as having potential, it simultaneously negates and neglects other kinds of futures, an attribute I describe as “scoping.” While ARTs and the social “facts” they reproduce are imaged as global and mobile objects, they are deeply entangled within the terrain — historical, political, economic — in which they become materialised. I argue that while IVF has the potential to disrupt “established” orders, intensive effort, which I theorize as “curature,” works to manage and domesticate IVF’s potential, reinforcing certain shapes of family, gender, morality, race and kinship arrangements. I argue that examining potentiality in IVF in South Africa reveals the politics — namely political-economic and racialised — and histories that shape reproductive technologies and potentialities.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / In this multi-sited ethnographic study, based upon anthropological fieldwork conducted in Harare, Zimbabwe and Musina and Cape Town, South Africa in 2010 and 2011, I use the contemporary political and economic context of Zimbabwe, and the resultant movement of Zimbabweans to South Africa, as a case study through which to explore the ways in which the global framework of human rights is locally interpreted, constituted and contested.