Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology

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https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/63

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Browsing Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology by browse.metadata.advisor "Cousins, Thomas"

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    Naming the witch, housing the witch and living with witchcraft: an ethnography of ordinary lives in Northern Ghana's witch camps
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2019-12) Mutaru, Saibu; Van Wyk, Ilana; Cousins, Thomas; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Sociology & Social Anthropology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In Dagbambaland, northern Ghana, people who were accused and proven to be witches and who risked being harmed were banished by village chiefs and local elders (or fled on their own) to special settlements popularly known to locals as accused women’s (or old women’s) settlements, and to the media and NGO world as “witch camps”. Here, an earth priest and anti-witchcraft specialist, the tindana, ritually removed the dark powers of the morally compromised witch and committed him or her to the protection and necessary sanctions of the ancestral shrine. Post-1990 so-called “witch camps” have attracted much attention from churches, state agencies and NGOs interested in the human rights abuses that supposedly took place in these “camps”. This ethnography is an attempt to explore the “afterlife” of witchcraft accusations, when convicted witches settle in new villages after breaking trust with kinsmen and villagers in their original communities. And unlike many studies of witchcraft in Africa that focus on suspicions and rumours of witchcraft, this thesis critically analyses the ordinary lives of known, confessing witches. I look at their insertion in the social world of host communities where they lived as morally compromised strangers, and where access to community resources and networks was largely made possible through a local moral economy. Of paramount importance to ordinary life here was the question of trust. How did local host communities come to trust and accept these “moral criminals” into their midst when their own kinsmen and village friends had rejected them as untrustworthy because of the danger they posed to social order? What role did churches, NGOs and state agencies play in the social configuration of witch villages? My findings suggest that although stomach cleansing rituals played a vital role in villagers’ decision to accept the accused into their communities, such rituals were, by themselves, not sufficient to establish any meaningful social co-existence between locals and the accused. Co-existence and everyday survival were made possible through the enormous generosity shown by both the accused (in terms of the provision of their labour) and locals (who allowed dangerous Others into their midst); a mutually beneficial exchange relationship described by both as songsim. However, songsim was not neutral. In situations where witchcraft had been proven and accepted as a reality, its moral stain defined exchange relations between the accused and locals. Returns on songsim were often skewed in favour of locals who accepted to take on the risks of living with a witch.
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    New Jerusalem is my home: Christian restoration and the discipleship programme
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2019-12) Passetti, Michael; Cousins, Thomas; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Sociology & Social Anthropology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: I describe the structure of an addiction treatment programme called the discipleship programme and the logic of Christian restoration which informed the programme. The Ark: City of refuge is a homeless shelter located between Mfuleni and the N2, but also houses New Jerusalem which runs the discipleship programme. I conducted participant observation and semi-structured interviews at New Jerusalem between April 2016 and February 2017. I argue that the logic of Christian restoration was characterised by a belief in the possibility of a broken person being restored to the person who they were before they became a broken person. This was achieved through the discipleship programme which provided the student with discipline so that he/she may become a disciplined follower of Jesus Christ, in order to not become a broken person again. I also highlight how Christian restoration was informed not only by Christian discourse, but by a discourse concerned with who the student was as a person coming from a particular social context.
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    Nursing the stigma : conflicting realities of abortion
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2018-11-27) Raad, Rene; Cousins, Thomas; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Sociology and Social Anthropology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In 1996, South African women gained the right to exercise “control over their bodies” through the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act (CTOPA). This was a crucial advance for women, as it represented the recognition of reproductive rights by South Africa’s first democratically elected government. In 2018, despite having this public service available, many South African women still seek out informal abortion services or pay to have their pregnancy terminated at private healthcare facilities. With the legal framework of the CTOPA supporting a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy, there should be little need for additional services outside of the public healthcare sector, yet the large number of advertisements for unaccredited abortion services plastered on the walls of public transport and lamp posts suggest otherwise. Various explanations are offered for why women do not make use of state-sanctioned, formal abortion services, including social stigmatization, religious dissuasion, and lack of knowledge of available services. Another possible reason that deters South African women seeking to safely terminate their pregnancies is that public healthcare providers leave women feeling degraded and ashamed. In this thesis, however, I examine the experiences and perspectives of those who are involved in providing safe and legal abortion services and explore how these providers navigate the moral ambiguities of a woman’s right to choose. By spending time in three non-governmental organization healthcare facilities, I reflect on the experiences of Termination of Pregnancy providers in their everyday life – experiences that are constituted and mediated by the various collectives with whom they identify and in which they form their individual moral codes. I do this to understand better how ethical and moral dilemmas are negotiated and how this shapes the understanding of what it means to access the right to safe and legal termination of pregnancy.
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    Zimbabwean migrants and the dynamics of religion and informal support associations in mediating everyday life in Cape Town
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-12) Dube, Charles; Robins, Steven; Cousins, Thomas; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Social Anthropology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This ethnographic study is about Pentecostal spirituality and everyday social life among migrant members of Forward in Faith in Cape Town, South Africa. My focus is on the capacity of the church to reach into and shape individual congregants’ daily lives, through its various doctrines, moral instructions and forms of ‘social surveillance’. The study explores the extent to which individual believers conform to these injunctions in their daily social life both inside and outside the associational and formal context of the church. While much has been written about the effort made by Pentecostals to make a break with relations they had before conversion, and the challenges attendant to those attempts, this literature has not addressed the everyday social relations of believers in multiple and layered public and private spaces. I aim to critically engage contemporary scholarship on religion which assumes that born again Christians enact these church messages and injunctions into their daily lives in ways that influence their definitions and daily practices of social life. Is it possible that individual congregants may find ways to be convivial with non-congregants simply in order to get along with them? What does the church bring to the daily lives of its members? Is there a split or disjuncture between the spaces of the church and everyday life? What do other experiences outside of the church bring to the everyday lives of individual congregants? My findings indicate that in everyday life, people are pragmatic. Since congregants in my study lived in a socially diverse world, how their relations were built outside the church were informed by this diversity. For example, despite the existence of various social media platforms (WhatsApp and Facebook) to share information regarding accommodation, and job opportunities, most church members preferred to share apartments with non-church members. The desire to escape ‘social surveillance’ from fellow church members and leadership was one of the reasons for this preference. While they were aware of the church’s message about the ‘polluting’ world and the dangers of sharing social spaces with non-believers, in daily existence individual congregants arranged their lives and made decisions by themselves. In spaces outside the church, believers and non-believers sat together, ate together, travelled together in public transport and met in other public spaces. Through these mundane daily experiences, they arrived at an everyday ethics of conviviality. This study therefore concludes that, due to the complex social, cultural, economic and political environment Stellenbosch University within which the church operated in South Africa, it was limited in its capacity to influence church members’ daily lives