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Den här uppsatsen handlar om Sydafrikas väg mot en sanningskommission och hur landet har tagit itu med sitt förflutna med hjälp av kommission. Till sin hjälp har man tagit sanningskommissioner i bl.a. Chile och El Salvador. Uppsatsen kan ses som en analys av det tillvägagångssätt som användes i Sydafrikas kommission. / This essay is about South Africa's way to a reconciliation and truthcommission and how the country has taken care of its past with help from this commission. South Africa took help from truthcommission´s in Chile and El Salvador. The essay is analysis of the course of action that was used in South Africa's commission.

This study deals with neo-shamanism, a set of notions and techniques that originated in the non-Western tribal societies and, within the framework of New Age spirituality, were adapted for the life of contemporary urban dwellers. Neo-shamanic practices are based on consciousness-altering techniques, when the Self is perceived to leave the body, to journey in other realities and to interact with the spiritual beings, enlisting their help for social, psychological, and physical healing. The study shows how a group of people appropriates a set of new meanings, grounded in unusual bodily experience, validated by interpersonal narrative, and embodied in dramatic performance in both the physical and the imaginal realms. Through the media of performance the abstract meanings become lived reality turned into a common resource for creating culture. The creation of culture is seen as an interplay between individual experience and orchestrated expressions, whereby the imported notions and cultural forms are filled with personal and shared meaning. The special character of thus created neo-shamanic culture lies in the fact that it emerges in the interstices betwixt and between the established social institutions, as a domain of imagination and play. Through performance and play the disembedded cultural systems, imported from distant times and places, get re-embedded in the local contexts and come to constitute community, locality, and tradition. Fieldwork was carried out in 1992 - 1996 in Sweden, Denmark, England, and France. The main methods used were participant observation, reading printed matter, and interviews.

Syftet med min uppsats är att försöka förmedla hur man ser på anime, ett så typiskt japanskt fenomen, här i väst? Vidare så har jag genom litteraturstudier försökt presentera för läsaren vad anime är för något. Detta görs genom en kort historisk presentation av anime för att sedan djupare visa strukturen i anime, karaktärer, innehåll och slutligen huruvida anime återspeglar nutida oro i det egna samhället. Även en viss diskussion förs gällande anime och dess legitimitet som japanskt kulturarv. Mina informanter får också berätta hur dom tycker att anime särskiljer sig från övriga animationer, då främst från väst samt hur den svenska marknaden och dess tittare ställer sig till anime.

Villages of coach behar West Bengal

This thesis deals with the micro-politics of farm workers’ evictions. It documents farm workers’ narratives of the processes of eviction and displacement from farms in the Western Cape of South Africa. It analyses farm relations and their relationship with law, through the eyes of farm workers and through the legal actors who assist them with representation and by lobbying on their behalf. In particular, it focuses on the Extension of Security of Tenure Act (62) of 1997, which was implemented to protect farm workers from the large scale evictions that were taking place on farms and as part of a broader land reform programme. Drawing particularly on the work of Andries Du Toit, who has written about paternalism on Western Cape Farms (eg. 1998) and more recently on the impact of policy (2002), and on Blair Rutherford’s arguments relating to farm workers’ organisation in Zimbabwe, I argue that (neo)paternalistic sociality on farms is constantly being renegotiated in spite of and because of new laws, and through involvement of other influences such as locally based paralegals. The core of my argument is that farm workers are ‘liminal’ in this moment, particularly in the negotiation of eviction and housing tenure, as they operate both within the limits of paternalism where they can, and increasingly through ‘access to justice’ and related concepts. The boundaries of these discourses and social spaces are constantly shifting back and forth as farm dwellers are influenced by worker organisation as espoused by NGOs, and by increased interaction and understanding with and of laws that protect them; at the same time as they are influenced by their relationships with farm owners and other farm workers, or by paternalism. The anthropological fieldwork upon which the thesis is based was multi-sited, conducted between February 2002 and September 2003. The thesis follows the work of NGOs and paralegals, and the life histories and recent legal experiences of farm workers. The importance of the interaction between farm workers with law and its interlocutors should not be underestimated even in a context where laws such as ESTA in fact offer limited protection to farm workers’ security of tenure. These interactions must be understood in the contexts of continuing but ever renegotiated forms of gendered and racialized paternalism, of a changing economic, legal and political landscape. The thesis is therefore concerned with these spheres of influences and the micro-dynamics of legal and political contestation in the rural Western Cape.

Ethnography of the state has long been focused on either a state’s reproduction of itself or on ‘the people’s’ resistance to it. In both cases, the state is cast as a unified, holistic identity that exists in diametric opposition to the people living within its borders. There have been some recent attempts to speak back to these assumptions (e.g. Navaro-Yashin 2002), but we are still left with a monolithic image of the state. This thesis is an attempt to break down the ‘obvious’ divides between the reified concepts of People and State, especially in regards to Arab Middle Eastern countries. My analysis is based on 13 months of fieldwork in Damascus, Syria, where I witnessed how politics are lived and described in the course of everyday life. This work focuses on popular stories about and interactions with what might be labeled global and state politics. Thus I read their stories to not be just narratives but narrative actions—a concept I suggest considering as a ‘narraction’ to encompass its seemingly dualistic, but practically singular nature. Political narractions in Syria often take the form of identity-work or conspiracy theory; this thesis approaches these as ethnographic objects and undertakes a more performative analysis of these narractions. I suggest that in narracting these stories, Syrians are doing a form of relations, making connections and disconnections between the various subjects within the narractions (and themselves) in a manner that is highly fluid and flexible and can seem somewhat ambiguous (if not in the conventional use of the term). That there can be simultaneous connections and disconnections is not as mutually exclusive a state as it would appear and is also one that Syrians experience in relation to kinship and friendship. In a comparative turn, I suggest that in both familial and political relations, the disconnections (challenges) are not a form of ‘resistance,’ but are a negative (Narotzky and Moreno 2002) aspect of relations that are just as essential to the overall construction and maintenance of a relationship as the positive ones we are more familiar with (e.g. familial affection or political activism). Finally, I argue that this process of ‘making connections’ via observing and narracting relationships can provide a broader model of knowledge production that applies to the work of anthropologists as much as to the conspiracy theorizing of Syrians.

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