The dissertation draws on ethnographic research conducted in 2012 and 2013 in a South African township called Zwelihle in the Western Cape coastal town of Hermanus. Leading up to this period, protests motivated by a long growing dissatisfaction with shared temporary sanitation facilities and services were rife within townships and informal settlements across the Western Cape, and the provision of toilets by municipalities that formed part of a national “Water is Life, Sanitation is Dignity” campaign became a highly politicised issue. Against this backdrop, and drawing on evidence gathered while doing ten weeks of ethnographic fieldwork in and around Zwelihle, the dissertation highlights the relationship between reproductive health and sanitation. Specifically, it focuses on the experiences, embodied practices and imaginings of adolescent girls in Zwelihle who use predominantly public toilet facilities; and it uses Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of “becoming-woman” as a lens through which to consider how girls experience their changing bodies. The dissertation shows that, within South Africa’s climate of extreme sexual violence, the experiences, embodied practices and imaginings of adolescent girls in Zwelihle reflect the presence of fear in the everyday and their perceptions of public toilets and other ‘dark’ spaces as unsafe. Finally, it shows the value of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept “becoming-woman” as a theoretical lens through which to view how girls inhabit spaces in Zwelihle and adjacent areas, and how they inhabit their bodies; and it provides a means for an analysis that recognises the potential for girls and women to overcome imposed expectations that may appear to be simple realities.

Bibliography: pages 201-214. / Environmental degradation is widely regarded as an integral part of South Africa's homeland areas. Conventional thinking often blames so-called traditional farming practices, attitudes and values for this situation. In other words, the blame is placed with the residents of the areas and environmental degradation is explained away as the result of a particular cultural make-up. Following this line of thought, education via agricultural extension is mooted as the primary solution to what is regarded as an inherent problem. The central concern of this dissertation is to examine the dynamics of natural resource management by residents of a rural area in KwaZulu known as oBivane. The thesis shows that the conditions leading to environmental degradation are best seen as the result of particular historical and political processes and not simply as the results of particular patterns of behaviour that are culturally driven. These processes, given primary impetus by massive population influx onto a restricted land base and combined with the peculiarities of differential access to resources and the need to preserve the interests of elite groups, have forced sectors of the South African population into situations where physical survival has necessarily had grave environmental cost. One of the consequences of apartheid policies has been to institutionalise environmental degradation in particular areas of the country.

Bibliography: pages 88-89. / In South Africa at present, one in 32 women develop breast cancer during their lives. Breast cancer is the second most common cancer among females. The biomedical prognosis for breast cancer patients is good provided that the cancer is detected early and that patients comply to biomedical treatments. However, over 80% of African breast cancer patients abscond from the Oncology and Radiotherapy Departments at Groote Schuur Hospital each year. These patients are usually only seen again in the terminal stages, when they seek pain control from the hospital. The biomedical literature refers to this phenomenon of absconding but does not explore the cultural and social factors that may determine African women's decision to abscond. This study looks at the variables effecting absconding, by focusing on the cultural, social and economic contexts, in which African breast cancer patients choose to abscond · from biomedical treatments. The research was conducted within the methodological framework of social anthropology.

Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (57-60). Also available online.

This paper details an intermittent six months of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews and participant observation carried out between September 2014 - March 2015, among members of the Treasure the Karoo Action Group and three other South Africans labeled "anti-frackers" and/or "environmentalists": a filmmaker, an entrepreneur, and an attorney. Drawing from analysis of literature, news and multimedia published outside the period of engaged research, the paper explores the contested process of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) from the perspective of those who work to ensure that this technique of shale gas extraction will not be allowed, or will be proven unnecessary, in South Africa. The dissertation details the author's attempts to understand how the binary of "pro"/"anti" is used in the ongoing fracking "debate", and contrasts this with the work of those who have sought to craft positions that stand outside of the prevailing polemic. Tracing the stakes and interests involved in the potential for the use and sale of shale gas through a series of expeditions into the Karoo, the thesis seeks to problematize the idea that there is a fracking "debate" at hand between two collective fronts: the so-called "pro-frackers" and their opponents the "anti-frackers". In the Latourian sense of the term the dissertation critiques the construction of these two 'phantom publics', presenting a series of nuanced personal profiles in a call for a new appreciation of the diverse human, financial and natural forces at play in this currently unfolding scenario.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 136-143).

Bibliography: leaves 173-185.

Includes bibliography. / This dissertation attempts to illustrate to what extent applied anthropologists operating within institutional contexts can effectively articulate their anthropological perspectives in order to contribute towards effecting positive social change. In order to explore the above thesis, I have reflected upon and analysed my role as an applied anthropologist in an effort to inform and advance an understanding of the strengths and limitations of this role. Accordingly, I have reflected upon my experiences during a three month research internship which I served at the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights (Western and Northern Cape), working on the Ndabeni Land Restitution Claim. Through reflecting upon my own inability to appropriately incorporate anthropological perspectives within the Ndabeni Land Restitution process, I was able to identify two constraints within the institutional context of the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights (Western and Northern Cape) which served to paralyse these perspectives. I concluded that applied anthropologists are simultaneously rendered impotent and omnipotent to articulate their perspectives. This can be attributed firstly to the role applied anthropologists play within the institutional context, and secondly, to the type of knowledge that the institutional context requires applied anthropologists to produce.

Includes bibliography. / The objective of the study is to look at the social impact of development in relation to the relocation of people from an informal settlement to a formal settlement. This is demonstrated by illustrating how the context and flexibility of space influences the social and economic life of people. I show how the spatial flexibility with in, and the context of, an informal settlement enabled people to strategise around their living environment for their survival and well being. This contrasts with the disruption and disturbance to social and economic life in the formal settlement to which they were relocated. Evidence for my argument emerges from fieldwork carried out in the Western Cape between March and June 1997, firstly in the Marconi Beam informal settlement and secondly amongst the same people in their new formal settlement, Joe Slovo Park.

Using Lesotho as a case study, this dissertation examines the changing forms of land tenure in a rural Southern African population. Land tenure in Lesotho is seen to have undergone many transformations over the last 200 years. These transformations are illustrated through an historical analysis of political and of social relationships in rural Lesotho. For example, the chieftainship in Lesotho is analysed to illustrate how changes in its structure have led to a strengthening of commoners' usufruct land rights. In turn, by examining how commoners' land rights have been expressed over time, this study demonstrates the contemporary significance of kinship ties in a rural Lesotho community. The significance of kinship is seen to lie in the flexibility which its principles allow, for members of the rural community, to accommodate the demographic, ecological and economic pressures of living in a peripheral part of Southern Africa. In effect, such flexibility is seen to have enabled the rural community to allocate, as optimally as possible, the scarce resources it has and can utilise. By examining how those resources have been utilised, this study demonstrates how relations of production in the rural community have become defined by communal control over rather than individual ownership of resources. As a result, this study illustrates how groups of agnatically related households have been formed into units of production in which the permanent rural residents, rather than the wage earning migrant workers, have control over resources, including the latter's' cash incomes. The development of such a unit of production is seen to be based on a sustained and vital interest by Basotho in land. That interest, which has been defined by principles of kinship, has prevented the alienation o Basotho from land. In effect, that interest has been a response by Basotho to the many and diffuse threats to their material existence brought about by their incorporation into a Capitalist politico-economic system. Consequently, this dissertation argues for a reconsideration of kinship in anthropological history, in view of the historical rather than synchronic anthropological perspective adopted in this study.