This dissertation focuses on performance, moral practice, and self-respect in an urban South African setting. Taking as its point of departure the emergence and rapid expansion, in the 1990s and 2000s, of an outreach organization I call Jesus People Pretoria (JPP), it discusses this NGO’s attempt to create a ‘moral community’ in the post-apartheid city from the diverse vantage points of its Afrikaner leaders, its clients, and—most emphatically—its lay workers, the majority of whom are black women. Gradually moving from the everyday stage of outreach labour towards women’s gendered performances within and beyond the work environment, it proposes that at stake in the making of the JPP moral community is the negotiation of self-respect, which hinges upon the degree to which interactions imply the fostering or refutation of mutual respect, or the measure of the ‘equality’ of the exchange. As an urban entity deeply entwined in and illuminative of South Africa’s broader post-apartheid ironies, including ongoing race-based differentiation and the pervasiveness of HIV/AIDS and death, predominantly moral practice here remains but ambivalently constituted. Yet this does not denote the absence of the moral but temporarily rests it in the region of the indistinct, the unresolved, in the moment of its apparent impossibility or unachievability.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OTU.1807/32201 |
| Date | 20 March 2012 |
| Creators | deGelder, Mettje Christine |
| Contributors | Lambek, Michael, Sanders, Todd |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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