Fiona C. Ross

Model Communities and Respectable Residents? Home and Housing in a Low-income Residential Estate in the Western Cape, South Africa *

Recent work on the post-apartheid city has paid little attention to how people grapple with new opportunities for urban living. This article explores the ways in which housing provision precipitated complex moral reasoning and social reorganisation among impoverished residents of a Cape Town shantytown as they attempted to actualise their ideals of respectability. These ideals overlapped with those of the state and planners associated with the housing project, but also differed in significant respects. For residents, ordentlikheid (decency, respectability) is concerned with appearances and with cementing reciprocal relationships, while for bureaucrats, respectability is an individual characteristic, fostered and manifested via education, responsibility and appearances. Tracing out the relationship between material conditions and ideational constructs, this article argues that, at certain moments, ongoing processes crystallise discursive forms and material practices in ways that draw attention to the grounds of their making and simultaneously make clear their unfinished nature.

Dependents and Dependence: A Case Study of Housing and Heuristics in an Informal Settlement in the Western Cape

Abstract The paper is a close ethnographic case study of householding arrangements among residents of an impoverished informal settlement in the Western Cape. It explores the intersection of legal definitions of dependence with local conceptions of relationship and community as residents applied for state housing subsidies and moved from shacks into formal houses. It demonstrates the complexity of domestic arrangements and examines the ways in which residents sought to realign their social relationships in the light of the social possibilities that housing offered. In so doing, it demonstrates the creativity that is brought to bear, often with complex effects, on solving the problem of the gap between legal requirements and moral worlds.

Raw Life and Respectability

Through close ethnographic attention to modes of world making among people living in a very impoverished community in Cape Town, South Africa, in this paper I explore the histories of two key concepts—rouheid and ordentlikheid (Afrikaans; rawness and respectability)—and the social practices they enjoin. These distinctions and the modalities of living they generate produce relations between living and dying that complicate the prevailing theoretical picture of power over life and death, particularly that posited by Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) distinction between bare and qualified life. They also foreground the ways in which gender is implicated in practices of world making that James Holston (2008) describes as “insurgent” and “differentiated” citizenship. Exploring the ways that people seek to craft lives in contexts that undermine many possibilities, I demonstrate ethnographically both the forms of exposure that poverty produces and the ways that these are countered. I propose a genealogy of bareness that, contra Agamben’s emphasis on sovereign power, is deeply embedded in local ways of understanding persons, relationships, history’s effects, and life’s possibilities.

Sense-scapes: senses and emotion in the making of place

Drawing on material generated in research in an informal settlement in the Western Cape, and building on the ideas of Michel de Certeau (1988) and Shirley Ardener (1993), the paper explores how spaces are gendered. It shows that processes of objectification similar to those involved in map-making operate as punishment for those who violate gendered spatial conventions. The paper calls for an understanding of the contexts within which abstraction emerges, and a careful attention to local conventions. It demonstrates that representations generated using senses other than vision do not elide the temporal: smell- and sound-scapes illustrate the complex folding of time and routine into the everyday in ways that cartographic representations cannot. A phenomenological approach is beckoned.

Beyond the dyad: making DOHaD interventions more inclusive

Pregnant women, children under 2 and the first thousand days of life have been principal targets for Developmental Origins of Health and Disease interventions. This paradigm has been criticized for laying responsibility for health outcomes on pregnant women and mothers and through the thousand days focus inadvertently deflecting attention from other windows for intervention. Drawing on insights from the South African context, this commentary argues for integrated and inclusive interventions that encompass broader social framings. First, future interventions should include a wider range of actors. Second, broader action frameworks should encompass life-course approaches that identify multiple windows of opportunity for intervention. Using two examples - the inclusion of men, and engagement with adolescents - this commentary offers strategies for producing more inclusive interventions by using a broader social framework.

Mother of two children

The paper considers the place of the impersonal in the making of intimacies (in this case, the “mother-child dyad”), through examining examples of how temporality, grammar, measurement and knowledge are imbricated and naturalised in the events and processes of life-giving. Experimental in genre, the paper is expressive rather than rationalist, shifting between the personal voice and a more distanced analytic to unsettle taken-for-granted modes of scholarship and undo rigid distinctions between subjective and objective knowledge. Describing the interfaces and interleaving of embodied, intuitive and biomedical knowledge, I suggest that different modalities of knowledge, experience, intensity and duration weave together in the production of life, producing contradictions, contractions and expansions of the social world. Throughout, slightly tongue in cheek, I use the framing of “my culture” (a common South Africanism seldom used by English-speaking whites, who assume “culture” is elsewhere) to invite critical assessment and to reflect on the ways that individuals are uniquely positioned through socio-cultural practice. The refrain “I am the mother of two children” offers a heuristic through which to examine dyadic relations.

“On paper” and “having papers”: Zimbabwean migrant women’s experiences in accessing healthcare in Giyani, Limpopo province, South Africa

South Africa is signatory to international protocols that secure migrant rights to healthcare. Its national health policy prohibits discrimination. Pregnant women and children under six years ostensibly enjoy access to free healthcare, irrespective of migration status. What is clear “on paper,” however, becomes considerably more opaque when experienced by those who do not “have papers.” We explore this in Giyani, South Africa, an important migrant destination. Despite a progressive healthcare policy and immigrant rights regime, migrant women’s lack of proper documentation precludes them in practice from accessing state-provided reproductive healthcare. The result is twofold. Women who are entitled to public healthcare prefer to make use of private healthcare, despite the costs, and they make recourse to a range of extra-state relations for healthcare. We focus on one unexpected consequence: that the same healthcare providers who have formally refused access to state institutions may be available to migrants through personal networks, such as in churches. Here, medical care is seen as taking place in a religious register. The difference between what is “on paper” and “what papers migrants have” is critical but may be mediated by access to other realms of the social.

Thermal optimum: time, intimacy and the elemental in the first thousand days of life

“Thermal Optimum” is a collaboration between photographer Nicholas Eppel and anthropologist Fiona C. Ross. Focusing on pregnancy and early childhood, we sought a way to open questions about how the “hard facts” of biology are given force and presence through “soft” actions of care. Thermographic imaging, initially developed for military use, allows one to trace a subject’s “heat signature,” making visible aspects of the world that are ordinarily undetectable to the human eye. The resultant images disrupt visual expectations and accustomed modes of interpretation. An experiment in seeing, we are interested in thinking about what these kinds of images enable and unseat for us, an artist and an anthropologist.