Includes bibliographical references. / Emerging from seven months of ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation conducted in the small-scale commercial handline fishery of Stilbaai, this dissertation examines and rethinks knowledges in a bid to open dialogue between experts (academic researchers, fisheries managers and fishers). The field research for this work was conducted in two intensive ethnographic fieldwork trips of four months and three months respectively between early 2010 and 2011. Stilbaai is home to a small-scale commercial handline fishing industry supporting roughly thirty-five permanent boat crews each comprising between three and eight fishers including the skipper. During my time in Stilbaai I worked with a group of fishers, conducting ethnographic interviews and participant observation (which involved fishing trips to sea and 'hanging out' with the fishers).

Bibliography: leaves 71-76.

This ethnography on loving, desiring and tindering offers insights into how the dating application (app) Tinder is adopted in establishing various kinds of intimacy in Cape Town. Given the scholarly neglect of intimacy's sensory aspects (especially when looking at Africa), the study, based on interviews and participant observation involving 25 participants, lends weight to phenomenological experiences unfolding in partially cybernated social processes. Considering the body to be a defining dimension of human social existence, it looks at how engagements with relative strangers unfold as virtual reality and realised virtuality. Tinder and other apps have shaped what it means to get to know another individual beyond conventional sensory perceptions. Technologies as means of self-extension in Michel Foucault's sense and practices of relating (and non-relating) reach far in sundry ways. They have a significant impact on social identities, politics, economies and demographic developments. They also hold the promise of different economies of bodies and pleasures, as Foucault presaged. This study's findings show that, although dating apps pervade everyday experiences and are embraced as extensions of the self, they are simultaneously disassociated from daily life and hypernormalised as less than ‘real'. Desires for more meaningful and complete experiences were continuously manoeuvred by study participants despite disappointments, uncertainties and hurt. What these approaches of stretching oneself beyond profiled essences entailed is at the heart of this ethnography. The resolute, adaptive usage of Tinder despite disillusionments owes to the app offering refuge into both fantasy and reality, which have long become hybrid in a digitally enhanced experience. The multitude of dating app experiences in what Stempfhuber and Liegl (2016) have referred to as a ‘rabbit hole' with skewed proportions may not be an absolute escape from reality. However, it does provide opportunities for re-encountering different facets of the self when stretching beyond them. What is, nonetheless, needed to embrace technologically facilitated dating as ‘real' encounters of equals is to understand oneself and others as non-unitary and incomplete. Thus, I argue, a broader view of relationships is needed than ideas and ideals of ‘modern' romance and dating app designs relying on binary categories currently promote.

Rat infestation torments people in poor communities. This is evident in the selling and circulation of agricultural pesticides that are repurposed as rodenticides in the informal settlements of Cape Town. The use of ‘street pesticides' has sparked debates about poor urban infrastructures that give rise to rodent infestations on one hand and concerns about animal welfare on the other. This research investigates the connection between the complex issue of rodent management and the inequalities faced by people living in Strand. Thinking about the ‘animal turn' in anthropology, this thesis considers the multifaceted issues around human-rat relations, poverty and race inequality in South Africa. The lack of service delivery and the subsequent proliferation of rats and other disease carrying pests negatively impacts the lives of people in poor communities. It is difficult to imagine that within this context the welfare of the rat emerges as a significant discourse in the Western Cape, especially in light of the ways in which political, cultural and socio-economic inequalities are reinscribed by colonial legacies that manifested themselves in the issue of rats and the many divides faced by poor people as highlighted in this research.

Shorthand phrases and meme culture have become rampant among university students when expressing their experiences in institutional spaces. This thesis explores the use of such phrases and memes among students as they navigate the various pressure and stressors of being undergraduate students during the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on the findings of this fieldwork I argue that the use of memes and phrases are central to students coping in this space as it allows for light humor and joking around the often tense and stressful circumstance. This use of humor offers up a release that while not changing the circumstance at hand allows for a suspension of tension just enough to allow students to keep going (pushing and working) through the semester. Aside from being useful as a release and breath through the tense time the use of memes and shorthand phrases has also allowed for the creating of space and community online during a time when many students have been isolated and physically distanced, unable to create new friendships. Overall, this research has found that among the nine participants use of memes and phrases such as ‘in the pits' allows for a distancing of the emotions and personal from the stressful circumstances phased, leaving enough room for light sharing that does not cost the user or listener further strain.

This dissertation examines the implementation of the anti-tuberculosis treatment, the Directly Observed Treatment Short Course, of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in poor South African communities. Research for this dissertation was carried out over a two-year period in one poor community, a tuberculosis (TB) quarantine hospital and several primary care clinics. This dissertation argues that the DOTS programme is culturally inappropriate and consequently unsuccessful in meeting the WHO's TB treatment targets. It will show that the design of the DOTS programme assumes access to basic resources such as food and shelter and focuses its attE11tion on ensuring regular access to anti-TB medication. However, TB patients in many poor South African communities do not have access to basic resources and thus experience the DOTS programme and the treatment protocol as a burden. Although TB patients face these challenges to meeting their treatment goals, many of them view the DOTS programme in their communities as a source of resources from which they can access jobs, food, money and general social services. The thesis will demonstrate that there is a wide gap between what the DOTS programme offers and what the TB patients and community members expect. It will also show that this gap limits the ability of TB patients to adhere to the treatment and thus renders the DOTS programme culturally inappropriate and unsuccessful in these South African communities.

Waldorf Schools emphasise the use of art in education. This interdisciplinary dissertation demonstrates how Waldorf teacher trainees are prepared to work with art in the school classroom. It does that by documenting the ways that three different art media are introduced to students in a Waldorf teacher training programme in Cape Town, and those students' responses and experiences in working with those media - relying quite heavily on students' oral and written comments about those experiences. The data presented come from the writer's own involvement as a teacher trainer cum researcher who has adopted an ethnographic-style approach to data collection and analysis. The data show that a primary goal of introducing Waldorf teacher trainees to art is to develop what is here described as a dialogic capacity - an ability to be able simultaneously to immerse oneself in the teaching process and to stand back and reflect on everything that that process involves so that, as teachers, they are able to be flexible and open to change. That this can be done through cultivating a teacher's feeling for art through requiring its practice, it is argued, helps to bridge an apparent paradox in Rudolf Steiner's work between his call for practising art for its own sake and his recognition that art should be practised in schools to facilitate the development of the individual.

This study analyses the perceptions and practices of sexuality among young people in post-colonial and post socialist Maputo city. Using a combination of various methods, it compares sexuality in two different generations and deeply describes two diverse kinds of relationships: occasional and steady relationships. Occasional relationships tend to show a new pattern of condom use that corroborates with the discourse advocated in prevention HIV/AIDS campaigns. The study shows that young women are redefining the gender roles of the wider society through their sexual practices and identities. Namoro (steady) relationships where sex takes the form of unprotected sex are reciprocated by the exchange of the gift of love and the proposition of commitment on the part of the young men. Here, there are major possibilities for HN/AIDS infection. In both kinds of relationships, sex, described by informants in terms of a model of heterosexual penetration, is perceived as a factor that permits transition from childhood to adulthood, bypassing parental and other senior kins peoples' control.

This dissertation is part of an applied anthropology project based on contract research done for the Rape Crisis organisation in Cape Town on the treatment received by rape survivors from police and district surgeons. It discusses the process of doing the applied research, as well as the problems experienced while in the field. Of particular importance is the process whereby the researcher's sense of self was transformed, and the dialectical nature of the relationship between this transformation and the way in which the study was conducted. The dissertation is structured around this issue, which is of major importance to anthropological research. Self-reflexivity is important because the way in which we interpret what we see is shaped by who we are. Being self reflexive is recognising that we are instruments of observation (Bell, 1993:8). By making our biases explicit, we present as full a picture as possible of· those we study and the study process itself. This dissertation strives to do this and thereby also to provide information on the process of the fieldwork which resulted in a report for Rape Crisis (Cape Town).

This is a thesis about popular perceptions of "race" - the way in which ordinary people in South Africa conceptualise and understand the term. Traditional academic literature on the topic has emphasised the need to differentiate clearly between "popular" and "scientific" conceptions of "race". The scientific conception, it is constantly emphasised, refers to a category based exclusively on physical, genetic, biologically inherited criteria. The popular conception, on the other hand, does not adhere to this strict formulation (Boonzaier,1988:61).