Includes bibliographical references. / Variations in people's notions of sustainability, eco-tourism, and the intersections between the two, calls fora critical assessment of sustainable eco-tourism practices. This is particularly the case in Galápagos, Ecuador, where there has been a recent upsurge in the numbers of eco-tourist visitors and in demand to develop sustainable eco-tourism as also to deal with the social consequences its practices have on people living in the archipelago. My dissertation fieldwork was conducted aboard one of the many catamarans in Galápagos providing eco-tourism opportunities and among terrestrial and marine entry points to the archipelago it visited. My data support an argument that Galapagueños' (Galápagos residents') dependency on eco-tourism has produced both social divides amongst them and changes in their ideas about nature and how to relate to it.

This thesis represents a typically boundary-crossing ethnographic experience and an unconventional anthropological study, its fieldwork grounded in the author's personal experience of ukuthwasa - initiation, training and graduation - to become a sangoma, a practitioner of traditional African medicine, in contemporary South Africa. The study is contextualized within the contemporary health dispensation in South Africa in which two major paradigms, traditional African healing, considered within the spiritual environment of sangoma, and biomedicine, operate at best in parallel, but more often at odds with one another. Given the unprecedented challenge of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the country, the thesis suggests that this situation is unhelpful and proposes first, that a more collaborative relationship between medical sectors is vital. Secondly, the thesis suggests that anthropologists can play an important role in achieving an improved dialogue, by producing research grounded in the spiritual aetiology of sangoma but comprehensible to academic science and applicable within collaborative medical interventions. The thesis introduces 'sacred pragmatics' to embody the disarmingly matter-of-fact quality of sangoma healing which is nevertheless always underpinned by the authority of ancestral spirit solicited in terms that are reverent. Ancestral authority in sangoma is advanced as a credible near equivalent to Jung's 'collective unconscious', and the contemporary phenomenon of white sangoma is proposed as a potential source of social and political healing. In the light of the spiritual foundation of sangoma, the absence of spirituality in biomedicine is discussed and its effect on relationships between medical sectors analysed. The umbilical and ambiguous connection of sangoma and witchcraft is acknowledged, a relationship theorised as having transformative potential within kin and community. The theoretical arguments are set against the evidence of fieldwork which is characterised as experiential and described reflexively. The thesis constitutes a start in what the author hopes will develop into an ongoing conversation between traditional African healing, academe and biomedicine in South Africa.

This dissertation is based on research conducted at a small state-managed conservancy called the Edith Stephens Nature Reserve (ESNR) situated in the low-lying flatlands of the Cape Town metropolis. By tracing some of the complex and varied ways in which different ways of knowing and valuing urban "natures" and practices of conservation co-constitute each other, this dissertation critically engages with the social power relations at work in the continual making and unmaking of Cape Town's "natural" heritages. In doing so, I argue for recognizing the ways in which Cape Town's urban "natures" remain entangled with the epistemological, ecological and spatial legacies of colonialism and apartheid. Moreover, by focusing on the ESNR, I explore the current material and discursive practices by the state in relation to urban "nature" conservation. In recent years, the discursive framework of biodiversity conservation was mapped onto ESNR through the state apparatus. At the same time, ESNR was identified as pilot site for an experimental partnership project that was called Cape Flats Nature (CFN), a project that ran from 2002 till 2010 which explored what biodiversity conservation would mean within marginalized, poverty-stricken and highly unequal urban landscapes. By engaging with ESNR's historically constituted material- discursivity, this dissertation argues that, during this time, a particular relational knowledge emerged which, in turn, co-crafted and configured the emerging poetics, politics and practices at ESNR. In doing so, I foreground my main argument - that urban "nature"conservation, far from only being about conserving and caring for nonhuman life worlds, is rather simultaneously about conserving a particular relation to the world, to others and to oneself.

This study provides insight into the experiences of mobility and migration in contemporary South Africa, contributing to a field of literature about multiculturalism and urban public space in globalizing cities. It is a study of how the mystique of conviviality configures amongst a diverse migrant and mobile population that frequents Bellville's central business district surrounding the train station - an area located approximately 25 kilometres from Cape Town, and a prominent destination for informal trading, shop keeping, and other ad hoc livelihoods. Understanding the emergence of conviviality and the forms it takes in this particular locality lies at the heart of this thesis. I argue that conviviality emerges out of shared understandings of Bellville as a zone of mobility, of safety and of livelihood opportunities; and of negotiated meanderings within particular spaces of the Bellville central business district. Bellville's migrant networks become convivial when individuals innovatively sidestep away from tensions broiled in rhetoric of the "outsider" and instead negotiate space - both physical and social - to derive relations that often result in mutual benefits. This study also takes into consideration the greater international political and local socio- economic factors that drive migration, relationships and conviviality, and how they are intertwined in the everyday narrative of "insiders" and "outsiders" in Bellville. The Bellville central business district demonstrates the realities of interconnected local and global hierarchies of citizenship and belonging and how they emerge in a world of accelerated mobility. Ethnographic research in Bellville further demonstrates how the emergence of conviviality in everyday public life represents a critical field for contemplating contemporary notions of human rights, citizenship and belonging.

This paper focuses on how white, middle class South African mothers, living within a 60-kilometre radius of Cape Town's Central Business District, juggle their childcare and work responsibilities. Through use of multi-sited ethnography, I was able to enter the lives of ten white, middle-class South African mothers aged between early forties to early fifties. The data collected was obtained through participant observation, casual conversations and formal, semi-structured, one-on-one interviews. This minor thesis draws on a body of literature that focuses on the multiple paradoxes mothers' face, such as, the traditional gendered notions of what it means to be a "good" mother, the challenges of time, and coping strategies. This paper explores how the research participants reconstituted their lives after having children. Through an analysis of conversations and field observations this minor thesis demonstrates the everyday circumstances of living through and negotiating daily life as a middle class, white mother in Cape Town, South Africa. In this minor thesis, I aim to demonstrate how parenthood is filled with fears and numerous challenges. The findings make strong case for researching the lives of such women who often suffer in silence.

There has been a substantial increase in the amount of biomedical research being conducted in resource-poor regions of the world since the 1980s, particularly clinical trials involving human subjects. With a particular focus on public-sector clinical trials, a number of anthropologists have recently conducted important ethnographic research into the ground-level operations of clinical research organisations and the relationships between doctors, co-ordinators, participants and non- participants. It has been argued that formal ethics and the scientific practices they govern obscure a relational and affective dimension of clinical trials, which is both necessary for, and transcends, the requirements of trial protocols. On the basis of ethnographic research with a clinical research organisation in South Africa specialising in trialling tuberculosis (TB) vaccines, I contend the explanatory value of tracing the diseases 'under the microscope' from global public health agendas to ground-level research practices when exploring the relationships between the 'ordered separations' of medical research structures and the relational-affective dimension they obscure. Through a close examination of TB at different levels of scale, I aim to open up more avenues of enquiry into the multifarious factors that shape the important relations that develop between clinical research organisations and those on whom research is conducted.

This dissertation uses ethnography as a means to examine how multiple-scale patterns of interaction between social and ecological systems as they manifest locally in St Helena Bay. The growing integration of the West Coast has brought rapid change in the form of industrial production, urban development and in-migration. The pressure placed on local resources by these processes has been exacerbated by the rationalisation of the local fisheries - there are fewer jobs in the formal industry and small-scale fishing rights have become circumscribed. In the neighbourhood of Laingville, historically-contingent racial categories have become reinvigorated in a context resource scarcity. An autochthonous cultural heritage related to the West Coast has become transposed onto the category of 'real' or 'bona fide' fishers. For those who claim this identity, it serves as a means to legitimate claims to resources while simultaneously excluding the claims of others. A pattern of recurring dichotomies emerges as a defining motif capturing the sense among local people that threatening elements from 'outside' are imposing themselves on the local socio-ecology. For small-scale fishers, the lack of recognition by the state of what they believe is their autochthonous right to access to the marine commons feeds an intense sense of frustration. The act of breaking 'the rules' of the state is perceived by many as an assertion of their rights and thus, of their dignity. In the case of poaching, it is seen by fishers as a means to become an active agent in one's own life, while at the same time making more money than could be made if fishing rules were adhered to. Because of these powerful symbolic and material motivations for breaking the rules, it is something that many people take pride in doing. In contradistinction to this, following the rules of the state is seen as collaborating with the state in undermining one's own socio-economic conditions, and, significantly, in negating one's birthright. For many fishers in Laingville, adhering to the rules is infused stigma