Includes bibliographical references (leaves 197-208). / Includes abstract. / The dissertation explores concepts of upward social mobility, proper personhood and processes of social change as a result of the rural-urban migration provoked by the war in post-colonial Angola between 1975 and 2002. The study focuses on the city of Benguela, which received large numbers of war-displaced people, most of whom settled in bairros, informal settlements surrounding the cidade, the formally structured area of the town. The experience of displacement and establishment in urban areas is not marked only by material struggles and recent experiences of violence, displacement, humanitarian aid and so on, but also by social and historical constructions of rural-urban relationships and of urban space. These frame actors' choices, decisions and actions. I show that 'war-displaced people' are individuals with a history and in history.

Bibliography: p. 159-177. / This study examines how historically disadvantaged artists shift self-identities through artmaking beyond previously racialised, hierarchised and essentialist constructs in a transforming New South Africa. Fieldwork research involved direct observation, working with artists on art projects, and interviews with visual artists and other arts practitioners in Cape Town, 1998-2001. Artworks are examined as events incorporating social change, and thus as a focal point between unconscious praxis and the cognitive coming-to-awareness of self within-the-world. Using a non-essentialist approach to identity construction, I argue for an understanding of, and approach to, studying individual identity that incorporates complexity, multiplicity, materiality and change as integral to identity formation. The reworking of memory materially within artworks is demonstrated through examining how artists re-presented autobiographical and historical referents of identity to affirm and re-present new narratives of self in South Africa's present. How artists respond to, and negotiate, tensions and contradiction between concepts of 'freedom' and externally-derived categories of value within socio-economic limitations in a transforming South African art world is also explored. I also show how artworks act as sites of transcultural encounter for artists, within their awareness of different gazes and contexts of interpretation, to position identities simultaneously both within the local and beyond the local, through different images, styles, techniques and technologies in their work. Finally, I demonstrate how different collaborative art projects, through artistic praxis, enable mutual processes of social and artistic collective identification between artists of different socio-cultural backgrounds, in relation to processes of nation-building and reconciliation for South Africa in the future. The study not only provides insight into art-making in South Africa and material processes of cognitive identity construction, but also how individuals act as agents in shifting self-identities within processes of collective socio-political transformation.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 237-273).

Includes bibliographical references. / The Western Cape fisheries are heavily contested. Primary concerns in the contestations are over access to marine resources, which have been regulated through the Marine Living Resources Act of 1998. At the centre of these conflicts, is the figure of the marine compliance inspector, whose task is to enforce the state’s version of nature onto the collective of resource users. This thesis, based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork alongside inspectors of the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries: Fisheries Branch in the Western Cape, explores the everyday human interactions on which the implementation of marine resource law depends. Exploring interactions between inspectors and resource users, the dissertation seeks to contribute to the task of reimagining fisheries governance. Drawing on ethnographic material deriving from participation in inspection duties; observations of fishing behaviour; conversations with inspectors, resource user and marine resource management officials; and analysis of texts such as relevant legislation and job descriptions, I argue that the issue of non-compliance in marine fisheries in the Western Cape can only be partially understood by the framework offered in extant South African compliance scholarship, which has focused largely on the motivations of resource extractors, or the formulation of law and policy. Given that compliance functions are part of the wider social spectrum of contestation and that the compliance inspectors are the interface between the government of South Africa and its fishing citizens, the study explores the real effects of state-citizen-nature contestations on environmental governance, and presents evidence in support of an argument that the design of the job of marine compliance inspector itself needs to be re-conceived. While compliance is a central feature of fisheries management, the performance of its personnel is taken for granted as the simple implementation of institutional policy, in a number of ways. Efforts to address conflicts will fall short of the goal of providing solutions if the assumptions about nature and humanity that current marine resource legislation embodies are not questioned, and this will exacerbate existing suffering in the ecology of relations between state, science, public and marine species.

This work is about how people develop strategies to make sense of and to deal with the challenges of situating themselves within the global push for 'sustainability.' Sustainability is a concept that I understand to be imagined, socially constructed, remade and ritualized as global actors tote the 'sustainable development' discourse globally and impose it upon local actors' practices. Such foisting typically promises to resolve socio-ecological problems by providing communities with certainties and stabilities such as redeeming issues linked to threatened eco-systems and local actors' precarious livelihoods therein. However, I argue that 'sustainability' indeed fails to fulfil its ideological aspirations. In this light, I take the stance that sustainability is performative, and therefore, enacted through sets of relationships which require critical interrogation. I use the example of artisanal fishermen in the Galápagos Islands to demonstrate how: (i) they deal with local managing authorities and the enterprise of sustainability that disturb their daily lives on land and at sea; (ii) they situate themselves within co-management processes; and (iii) their performativities allow them to make sense of and to deal with their precarious livelihoods by remaking, challenging, and subverting 'sustainability' in effort to remain relevant in Galápagos' evolving eco-political landscape. This occurs, I argue, as fishermen enact performativities that are situated in their material practices, collective, and authoritative. Notions of performativity thus contribute to conceptual understandings of how global actors' ambitions to remake local actors' practices 'sustainably' produces and distributes precarity – and therefore exposes how the latter deal with the precarity resulting from their attempts to remain relevant in Galápagos' eco-political landscape over time.

Living with Fragility, traces the lives of sixteen African children between 1992 and 1995. It explores the intimate spaces of children's social relationships and charts discontinuities they experienced. The eight girls and eight boys, aged between and sixteen years, resided in New Crossroads, Cape Town, a suburb marked by poverty, inadequate schooling, and a history of violent intervention by the apartheid state and other power holders. The thesis shows that institutions of childhood are fragile, that children's social relationships are fragmented, as are their senses of self. Fragility is traced within and the social domains the children inhabited and created. The thesis argues that children's senses of self are subject to flux and interruption. Narrative ethnographies about the children demonstrate their individuality. Nuanced descriptions of children and the changes in their lives over time challenge bald categorisations of, for example, the African child, or, youth at risk. The descriptions demonstrate the agency, dexterity and responsibilities of children in fluid circumstances and lead to a critical appraisal of predominant notions of childhood. The work also outlines processes of social and relational reconstitution to which children and care-givers had recourse. Methods used in gathering data included a series of formal interviews conducted in Xhosa (the children's first language) in which economic descriptions of households, life histories, social networks, and ritual and religious affiliations of children and care-givers were sought. The formal interviews complemented by repeated visits to each child's home to record changes time. The sixteen children were brought together in workshops where discussion directed towards themes to do with mobility between care-givers, violence, sexuality and senses of self the data were enriched by use of dramatic improvisations and drawings. Improvisations yielded insight into children's bodily style and their critical appraisal of trends in social relationships in New Crossroads. The ethnography describes the social circumstances of children in urban South Africa. It is analysed through use of an eclectic set of theoretical fragments because they resonate with the study's ethnographic material. The eclecticism impelled by the data raises questions.

Includes bibliographical references. / This study critically examines the possibilities for the mutual, symbiotic coexistence of human beings, biological organisms (a unique species of insects), and natural forests in a specific environment, Norumedzo, in the south-eastern region of rural Zimbabwe. Based on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in the aforementioned region between December 2011 and December 2012, the study interrogates the enlightenment modernist paradigmatic oppositions such as science versus indigenous knowledge and nature versus culture and as such forms part of a major epistemological shift in Anthropology towards rethinking the binaries created by enlightenment modern thought which have for so long served to confine anthropological attention to the social. The study advances the argument that modernist divides/binaries are artificial and impede understanding of environmentalities, especially of relationships between social ‘actors’ in any given space, given that mutual relationships and interactions between humans and other beings as well as between diverse epistemologies are an effective proxy of nurturing ‘sustainable’ conservation. The study demonstrates how some aspects of the emerging body of literature in the post-humanities and relational ontologies can work to grasp the collaborative interactional space for different social “actors” in the environment through which knowledge communities can be extended. Given that the post-humanities approach advanced in this work focuses attention on relationships among people, animals, ancestors, and things, it rethinks the enlightenment modernist division of the world into subjects and objects, that is, into humans and things. Rethinking those divisions enables fresh conversations between the [Western] sciences and other knowledge forms especially indigenous epistemologies. In this study, the rethinking of those divides is facilitated by an anthropological exploration of the social interconnectedness and mutual interdependence of rural Zimbabweans, forest insects known as edible stinkbugs (harurwa in vernacular) and the natural forests which, in fact, are critical to understanding the eco-systemic knowledges upon which livelihoods of many rural Zimbabweans are hinged.

Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references.

Includes bibliographic references. / Narrative, Conflict and Change: Journalism in the New South Africa investigates the idea that narrative and reality do not have a mimetic relationship but that news texts take their shape and structure from prior cultural forms. Developing this point, the study argues that news gathering practices are embedded in a common sense of the moment that is radically shaped by prevailing currents of power. Opening with the observation that current disputes about the media and democracy in South Africa have been constrained by a narrow economism, the work sets out to broaden the scope of the debate by identifying news texts as more than informational artefacts but as narratives that reproduce and generate processes of making meaning and claiming identity in society. The study holds that polemic about the media's objectivity (or lack of it) and intentionality (to support white capital or black development) have taken on an exaggerated importance. News texts, it is argued, are cultural products that are formed in established practices and take their significance from meta-narratives that have a long prior history; moreover, subjects of news stories easily communicate this dominant discursive consciousness to journalists. Narrative is not, however, of necessity the province of dominant consciousness; indeed, the need to make sense of the contradictions between practical consciousness and dominant narratives constitutes a major source of creativity and agency for journalists and news audiences alike. The work comprises six theme-driven studies that develop an understanding of the relationship between narrative products and established journalistic practices. Throughout, attention is paid to journalistic agency, in the belief that news media are not homogeneous. Innovative practices highlight areas in which media is beginning to transform, and the pitfalls that attend such efforts. Grounded in ethnographic research and textual analysis, the chapters incorporate ethnographic material from a four-month period of research at the Natal Witness, in the city of Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, as well as material from other newspapers in South Africa and material provided by the writer's experience as a freelance journalist.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis focuses on six children’s experiences from various backgrounds who lived in temporary relocation areas in Cape Town, South Africa. The research was conducted over a three-year period from February 2010 to February 2013, with a one-year field-research period from October 2010 to October 2011. Themes identified examined the effects of forced removals, displacement, marginality and the prevalence of violence in Bluewaters Refugee Camp Site C and Symphony Way Temporary Relocation Area. Exploring pathways and patterns of identity, embodiment and experiences of health and illness, and the expressive, revealing quality of theatre, delivered rich data that produced an ethnographic account of children’s experiences in these sites.