Forms of power on commercial farms and power relations between white farm owners and black farmworkers in Zimbabwe have been explored by scholars such as Clarke (1977), Loewenson (1992), Amanor-Wilks (1995), Tandon (2001) and especially Rutherford (2001a). While most focus on the capitalist exploitation of farmworkers and forms of structural violence, Rutherford has gone beyond political-economy to understand power relations on farms in terms of the histories and complex forms of identity formation among both white farmers and black workers in pre- and post-independence Zimbabwe. However, the subtle and often obscured role of the "farmer's wife" in farm power relations, determined by the dynamics of a system Rutherford (2001a) has called "domestic government", has not been examined much in the literature. In this thesis I address this omission through an examination of the role of welfare initiatives and related activities intimately linked to domesticity and white "farmer's wives" within Rhodesian/Zimbabwean white settler society. I show that this "maternalistic" role was not only important in the colonial civilising and modernising endeavours of white farmers as they "cultivated" African fields, African workers and their own identities, but also became an important foundation on which post-independence welfare endeavours (linked to a new kind of civilising mission: that of neoliberal "civil society") were built. I then trace the impacts of the radical agrarian shifts introduced in 2000 with the "Fast-track Land Reform Programme" (FTLRP) on such interventions and on their beneficiaries, black farmworkers, as well as on the emergent power relations which farmworkers and dwellers now negotiate. Based on nine months of fieldwork, and on archival and library research, this multi-sited study takes a historical-ethnographic approach which pays attention to the longue durée and the entanglement of political-economic and gendered socio-cultural factors shaping power regimes and relations in rural Zimbabwe. The dissertation weaves together several strands of argument relating to the changing dynamics of power, welfare, modernity and belonging and how these changes are affecting white farmers and their wives, NGOs and (former) farmworkers and dwellers in contemporary Zimbabwe. It contributes to a fuller, more nuanced and gendered understanding of the (dynamic) nature of labour relations and the role of welfare and "improvement" endeavours on (former) commercial farms over the course of more than a century.

This thesis was born out of the post-Mbeki era and the prevailing, tense relationship between 'traditional' healing and biomedical science in South Africa. Attempting to imagine this relationship differently, and as part of an interdisciplinary project, it is based on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork centring round villages in the Kamiesberg municipality, Namaqualand. Part of the project involved molecular biologists seeking bioactive compounds in locally growing plants. Many of these species were also used by local kruiedokters (herbdoctors), with two of whom, 'Koos' and 'John', the author spent a large proportion of his research time. The thesis addresses the following constructivist questions: what kinds of realities are being done as kruiedokters and molecular biologists work in their own ways with plants? How might these realities - and the similarities and differences between them - be researched, understood and described in ways that rely neither on absolute relativism, nor on one kind of reality trumping all others? Exploring the work of one of the molecular biologists, the thesis argues that the world cannot be entirely encompassed by the matter or pure physicality of modernist metaphysics. This raises the possibility of other modes of existence - modes that people have long considered imperative to human well-being: e.g. in the work of kruiedokters, who specialise in curing people of illnesses and ailments associated with toor (witchcraft/magic). In order not to unfairly reduce these phenomena to belief or superstition, three of the five chapters attempt to attune to the ways in which three vital concepts - krag (power/vitality/strength), toor, and wind (wind), which are central to the work of kruiedokters - exist in people's lives. Attuning meant following, in research and description, the living ecologies of relations through which krag, toor, and wind subsist. While belief can be understood to be part of the relational field, it is as much the constricting force of jealous, poisonous relations themselves that block people's lives. To free patients of these blockages, kruiedokters bring the force of their personality, the cleansing effects of plants, as well as their own ecologies of relations to bear on the therapeutic contexts in which they work. If this succeeds, patients are drawn into a new set of protecting relations that cultivate feelings of krag - enabling patients to move forward with their lives. This poses the challenge that these relations, this work of kruiedokters, this krag, can be understood as being of central importance to human life - and not just as colourful cultural additions to an objectively known world of pure physicality. Studying the interplay of different modes of existence in therapeutic contexts is suggested as a possible way to carry out future, non-reductive collaborations between biomedicine, plant science, and 'traditional' medicine.

The main argument in this study draws on ethnographic research conducted in Maramba, a rural community in north eastern Tanzania, with poor people living with HIV/AIDS who struggled to obtain food, care and support in spite of the availability of free treatment.

This study explores the effect on local livelihoods of the New Gato Wetland Development Project (NGWP) in a rural village in Zimbabwe, in light of a post development critique which has labelled most development as a failure.

Since 1994, there have been significant shifts in official systems of record-keeping in South Africa. Notions of tradition and custom have been reconfigured within a legislative environment and in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, what was previously held separately as the domain of the 'tribal subject' (tradition and custom) now intersects with the domain of the democratic citizen (legislation, government records and archives). The intersection of these domains has opened up new cultural and political spaces in which the past in various forms is being actively managed. Through a study of contemporary Umbumbulu in southern KwaZulu-Natal, this thesis explores a host of custodial and record-keeping forms and practices, often in settings not conventionally associated with custodianship and archives. The study takes as its point of departure the Ulwazi Programme, a web initiative of the eThekwini Municipality that its advocates term a collaborative, online, indigenous knowledge resource. It then considers various other locations in Umbumbulu in which the past is being dealt with by certain traditional leaders and local historians such as Desmond Makhanya and Siyabonga Mkhize. The thesis argues that the activities of the subjects of the study reveal a blurred distinction between practices of custodianship and the production of versions of history and posits that they might be best described as practices of curation. Their activities show that the past, in a range of forms, is being mobilised in efforts to gain access to land and government resources, and to enter into the record marginalised historical claims and materials. Moreover, the types of knowledge that flow from their activities at a local level serve to unsettle dominant modes of knowing, including those related to custodianship, archives and identity, and they shape socio-political relations, with amongst others, the Zulu royal family and the Premier of KwaZulu-Natal. The thesis advances the argument that in contemporary KwaZulu-Natal the terms, and the act, of consignation of depositing materials in a repository, out of public circulation and with limited access an action that enables both remembering and, once preserved, the possibility of forgetting, far from being a defined, archival procedure, is a tenuous, volatile, indeed actively negotiated and navigated, process.

Bibliography : pages 314-348. / Cultural continuities through time and space have long concerned anthropologists. Recent work has increasingly concentrated on understanding these as social structural responses to both broad and local political-economic structures and processes. The aim of this thesis is to build on that approach. I argue that while some persistences of social form are best explained in functionalist and instrumentalist terms, to explain others one needs to look to the momentum of common practices that do not change without good cause. I thus attempt to wed a materialist analysis of political-economic determinants with one focused on social practice. I do this first by the application of a political-economic analysis and then by examining social practices for their apparent continuities of form and analysing why these occur. The approach taken thus reveals the influence of a paradigm shift in contemporary anthropology. The thesis focuses on the Matatiele District in South Africa's Transkei bantustan. The evidence I present was obtained primarily from ethnographic field-research conducted between 1982 and 1985 and concentrated in two settlements there. This is augmented by material both from further fieldwork undertaken elsewhere in the district, and from various documentary and archival sources. A primary concern is the nature of material and social differentation in the district and its relationship to both large- and small-scale population movement there since the mid-nineteenth century. By examining these through the prism of a political-economic approach, I indicate the extent to which they are functions of broad regional processes, including the development of capitalism in southern Africa. I thus show that local-level material differentiation is the product of population movements, themselves traceable to both capital's demand for labour and state interventions in rural land-use practices. In addition I show that local circumstance modifies the impact of these broader processes at the local level: there is great variety in the ways in which regional political-economic processes impact locally. Another primary concern is the appearance of cultural continuity in observed social behavioural forms, and people's claims that their present practices represent such continuities. A number of examples are identified. I examine these in order to establish the extent to which they are the functions of political-economic structures, the products of instrumental manipulation for local political purposes, or just the outcome of people pragmatically going on in ways with which they are familiar. While I acknowledge the merit of the first two types of explanation, I argue that there are many instances when the primary reason that people behave as they do is that they have no reason not to, and that their actions reflect a practical consciousness (or knowledgeability) that has its roots in experience. I conclude the thesis by discussing some of the methodological implications of a greater focus on practice and practical consciousness in southern African anthropology. I suggest that there is need for reinvestment in the method of intensive participant-observation, refined to accommodate concerns with the commonplace activities of everyday life in particular. This approach, I argue, is necessary in order to represent the diversity of cultural practice to be found in the region, but without recourse to structuralist analyses that have tended to reinforce notions of a mosaic of cultures in the region and given strength to pluralist perceptions of the region's population.

Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation explored how villagers in a district of Manicaland province of Zimbabwe deeply affected by violence and want survived the violence that has characterised Zimbabwe’s most recent politics (from the year 2000). Marked by invasions of white owned farms, by interparty violence, interpersonal violence as well as witchcraft related violence, the period posed immense challenges to life and limb. Yet institutions of welfare, security and law enforcement were not equal to the task of ensuring survival necessitating questions about the sufficiency of “modern” institutions of law enforcement, media, politics, economy and health in guaranteeing survival in moments of want. How villagers survived the contexts of immense want, acute shortages of cash, basic commodities, formal unemployment levels of over ninety percent, hyperinflation (which in 2008 reached over 231 million percent) and direct physical violence is cause for wonder for scholarship of everyday life. Based on ethnographic data gathered over a period of fifteen months, the dissertation interrogates how villagers survived these challenges. Unlike much scholarship on Zimbabwe’s ‘crisis’, it takes seriously matters of knowing and ontology with respect to chivanhu (erroneously understood as “tradition” of the Shona people).

My thesis examines how young, marginalised men in Gugulethu, a poor township in Cape Town, formulate their conceptions of fatherhood and fathering, and understand their roles and involvement with their children. Far from being a simple biological function, the nature of fatherhood among these young men is shaped by social, economic, political and historical conditions and by the moral standards that surround their daily existence. The men who are the focus of this study were selected on the basis of findings from an earlier study of infants born to HIV+ women. That study demonstrated the erratic nature of fatherhood in the picture of infant life. I traced some of the fathers of those infants, and developed a snowball sample. The young men in this study live a life of social displacement and alienation. They do not have access to gainful employment; many have been imprisoned; all use drugs; few are in stable relationships; few have independent households despite having fathered children. I show in the thesis that while the relationships I describe are unique in many ways, core cultural tropes, such as the significance of children, the role of marriage, the social place of initiation, among others, play through them, albeit in ways that undermine their potential. Despite a rhetoric which exhorts men to 'be responsible', most of the challenges that confront young African men today can be traced to legacies of colonialism, urbanisation, and apartheid which destroyed clans and families' ability to retain both the specific practices and the meaning and function of traditional practices and the material means by which families could be maintained. I note in particular the absence of father figures in these young men's lives. These findings lead me to explore the role of men in attachment. While many men have been able to create positive self-identities and roles, those with whom I worked have struggled to attain socially sanctioned ideals of masculinity, work, parenting and partnering. They inhabit forms of masculinity that rest on danger, even as they desire social approval. Drawing from Raewyn Connell's idea of hegemonic masculinity, I show how these masculinities are not predetermined but constructed within a specific social and historical context.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 214-224). / The broad theoretical concern of the thesis is to examine an ambivalent dimension in the formation of social identities in which similarities in attributes and symbolic representations can become the source of conflict when they appear to have been appropriated and alienated. In studies of the role of ethnicity in the creation and reinforcement of social identity there is very often the assumption that social cohesion arises from similarity and that actual or perceived differences lead people to identify one another as members of opposing ethnic groups. I have suggested, however, that differentiation arises from the claims that are made to this distinctiveness, and that disputes over cultural commonalities or shared ethnic symbolism actually serve to sustain ethnic boundaries in situations where powerful external forces are at work in promoting integration. I have used Tambiah's theoretical model for the investigation of ethnic identity to structure a series of case studies drawn from a community study of Pella, a communal area with a Roman Catholic mission station, and studies of other former Coloured and Nama Reserves associated with Christian missions in the Lower Orange River Basin of Namaqualand. A distinctive historical feature of this region is a general trend towards social integration as opposed to the separation found in other parts of southern Africa. In the case studies that make up the body of the thesis I have presented the sociality of the community at Pella from three perspectives, socio- political, religious and material cultural, to show the complex ways in which ethnicity has operated over time in the formation of social identities. Setting the colonial and post-colonial encounters in Gramsci's notion of hegemony as involving asymmetrical class relations and cultural imperialism, I argue that the ongoing role of the universalist Christian churches in shaping patterns of identity has to be understood in terms of their commitment to what has come to be called "inculturation" as a way of indigenizing their versions of Christianity in Africa and throughout the world. In addressing the questions of coercion and resistance, hegemony and accommodation, localization and revitalization, and the role of missions in identity politics, I contend that the concept of "inculturation" is vital to an understanding of oppositional responses to globalization, as these are expressed in cultural and ethnic terms at local level through a politics of similarity as a form of everyday resistance to the coercive and hegemonic forces of globalization. The thesis is thus a contribution to a wider debate in anthropology on role of ethnicity in cultural transformation and continuity in the context of the gathering crisis of the nation-state and the ongoing revolutionary reconstruction of the contemporary world order.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 244-258).