Maheshvari Naidu

Enacting masculinities: Pleasure to men and violence to women

abstract Feminist anthropologists have shown how womens bodies have been appropriated and rendered ‘docile’ by so called cultural or traditional practices, as well as by discourse. The compelled docility of African women (as that of other women in the global south), is perhaps especially visible within subtly coerced performances within a context of ‘traditional’ masculinised practices, such as unprotected sex, that leave many African women vulnerable and forced to negotiate a host of health concerns around sexually transmitted diseases and of course HIV/AIDS. This is to be seen as a form of violence perpetrated by men against their female partners. However, in probing condom use through a qualitative study with a small group of women, we notice that it is not simply a case of discerning patterns of hegemonic masculinities in relation to condom use or non-use, and that masculinities are also propped up and held together by the relational configurations of practice formed by (mutual) gender relations.

Indigenous Cultural Bodies in Tourism: An Analysis of Local 'Audience' Perception of Global Tourist Consumers

Abstract The paper approaches cultural heritage tourism as an artefact of (cultural) globalisation and global “flows” (Urry 2007). The premise is that markets of (constructed) cultural ‘heritage’ and ‘cultural bodies’ rooted in specific ‘localness’, can be seen as being increasingly catered for within global cultural flows and transnational movements of tourists, with cultural commodities such as the ‘Zulu dance’ narratives and ‘Zulu’ bodies positioned to meet tourist expectations. Methodologically, the paper draws on ethnographic data generated from unstructured interviews and focus groups, and probes the production of locality and people through an analysis ofthe perceptions of a sample group of Black Africans towards the Zulu dance narrative that contrives to make African, in this case Zulu-ness as the emphatic “specificity” or condition “for intercultural participation” in tourism encounters (van Binsbergen 2003: 400). The paper examines local perception of the Zulu dance and the female dancers, probing how this category of local ‘audience’ perceives the positioning of dance and dancers, as items of local heritage and indigeneity for consumption within global(ized) tourism. The paper shows that an analysis of the data from the sample group reveals that local Zulu-speaking individuals believe that a strong marketing matrix contrives to sell a product of Zulu, that is more about meeting a global demand, than about showcasing what and who the ‘Zulu’ is.

Transnationalised Memories among Migrants: How 'Indigenous' Food can Bring Home Closer

Abstract Memories, as emotional artefacts of what has transpired, are vital as they allow migrants to connect to their past. Anthropological perspectives on memory explain memory through constructionist and interpretivist lenses, and point out that there is an inextricable link between ‘memory’ and ‘place’. In this context, ‘place’ is the home space of the migrant. This paper argues that memories of ‘home’ are evoked through ‘indigenous’ or ‘home food’. Even though the act of eating does not, literally bring ‘home’ to migrants, as artefacts and (social) events associated with ‘home’, they however, evoke powerful memories of home. This paper adopts an ethnographic approach and qualitatively investigates the different food-related memories that Sierra Leone migrants have, which assists them to stay connected to their home and cultural identity while in South Africa. It discusses issues pertaining to sensory memories and emotions around food. The paper reveals through individual interviews and focus group responses, that preparing and eating ‘home food’ acts as a form of re-territorialising, and show that the migrants are able to re-experience their memories and feel, the warmth of their sending country through ‘home food’. The responses reveal that ‘home food’ is one of the main artefacts by which migrants are able to be emotionally transported back home.

Anthropology of experience : touring the past at Robben Island.

Abstract This paper has a transdisciplinary orientation and is located in both anthropology and tourism studies. It draws on the seminal theoretical work of the post structural anthropologist Victor Turner and brings to the study of tourism, the concepts of performance, memory and ‘experience’. The paper focuses on what the world has come to know as the place of incarceration for Nelson Mandela, and now declared a World Heritage Site and museum, established as the blurb goes, ‘as a poignant reminder to the newly democratic South Africa of the price paid for freedom’. The paper looks at the construction of the site of Robben Island Prison Museum, in Cape Town South Africa as a performance space for the reliving and experiencing of a collective shared past and history and probes how visitors to the site, experience the space. Methodologically the paper uses narrative analysis of tourists’ sharing stories of their visits in small focus type groups and in one-on-one interviews. It also draws on a thematic analysis of the visitor entries in a Visitors Book spanning a six month period of visits. The paper attempts to show that the site and constructed heritage product (or tour), emerges as a ‘liminal space’ where different racial categories of visitors, who have had differently shaped life histories, might be made to ‘experience’ a shared past of denial and oppression. Liminality speaks to a dislocation of structure and hierarchies, and by drawing on the ethnographic interviews of a randomised sample group of local and international visitors to the site, the paper shows that the visitor is placed into a liminal space by the manner in which the tour space is constructed and experienced.

Performing illness and health: the humanistic value of cancer narratives.

Cancer is a potent example of a disease that grips and plays out on the body in ways that are both visceral and visual. This paper explores issues of disease and disorder, functioning and malfunctioning in bodies marked by cancer and a sense of non- belonging. By working through the heuristic device of ‘narrative’, the paper argues for the humanistic value and currency of the personal (subjective) illness narrative in social science scholarship in being able to convey to audiences the emotional and existential complexities of cancer, beyond the merely medical. The paper, by drawing on ethnographic narratives of a small group of women with cancer and their inscriptive treatment practices, probes the shifting and constructed concepts of a so-called ‘healthy’ body and ‘ill’ body as experienced by the women, and attempts to show that a recognition of these experiences of the physical body is potentially able to contribute to shaping more compassionate, person-centred health care models of illness and healing.

Understanding African Indigenous Approaches to Reproductive Health: Beliefs around Traditional Medicine 1

Abstract Illness and health is more often than not, embedded in a matrix of cultural beliefs and is often more than about simply ‘being ill’ or ‘being healthy’. The cause of the ‘ill health’ may also be located in social and spiritual realms, so that ethnomedical aetiology may include witchcraft and sorcery, and ‘attack’ by familiars or malevolent spirits. In many communities, constructed understandings of the body and health, for oneself, as well as that of the unborn child, extend back inter-generationally, and point to wider understandings of the (cosmological) world and how the individual is ‘located’ within this world. Likewise, with many categories of peri-urban and rural African communities, there is an entrenched belief that a pregnant woman and her unborn foetus can be protected from harm, and reproductive health can be promoted by turning to traditional health practices. This paper examines one particular traditional practice; that of offering a decoction known generically as isihlambezo in isiZulu, meant to aid in the delivery of a healthy baby. The paper works through qualitative data gathered from a sample group of pregnant women and traditional healers (sangomas), and probes the popularly constructed meaning of the decoction or isihlambezo. The narratives of the isiZulu participants around isihlambezo, in turn reveal that a complex web of beliefs cohere around understandings of reproductive health and the well-being of the unborn child. These narratives additionally problematise what appears as the hegemonic positioning of the western biomedical discourse which appears to ‘push’ the faith and reliance on indigenous herbal remedies underground, thus rendering its use somewhat invisible against the more visibly championed western reproductive health care and prenatal medicines.

Food and Maintaining Identity for Migrants: Sierra Leone Migrants in Durban

Abstract Food can be considered a vital and dynamic part of people’s ‘culture’ and identity, as people often identify and associate themselves with the particular foods they eat. This paper explores the importance of traditional or ‘home food’ in maintaining a sense of ‘self’, and an articulation of a particular identity for Sierra Leoneans. Away from a nutritionist paradigm and the subsistence discourse (around food) the study probes the role of ‘home food’1 as a vital resource and an identity marker. Findings reveal that for migrants, ‘home food’ is able to emotionally transport migrants back to the sending country. It also shows that, in an attempt to maintain their identity, migrants sometimes form (im)permeable boundaries that appear to aid in preserving and further enacting their ‘cultures’.

Peacebuilding in the Congo: Arguing for Inclusion of the Subaltern Voice of the Congolese Refugee

Abstract The migrant crisis of displaced populations has taken on astronomical proportions globally. In the context of sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa is one of the countries that has drawn an increasing number of displaced people or refugees from other parts of Africa. Refugees such as the Congolese, one argues, become displaced ‘subalterns’. This paper contends that recognizing the voice of such transnational subalterns allows one to see that there are levels of subaltern agency as a response to being forcibly uprooted, including having legitimate opinion/s on what is happening back home. This paper attempts to offer a critical survey of the work done in the context of Congolese refugees to South Africa and reveals that while the extant work is extensive, it is also myopic, and shortsighted in not including the voice of the actual Congolese refugees in South Africa. The paper suggests that gaining such vital insights and perspectives from the subaltern Congolese in South Africa, will allow one to cast a more ‘grounded gaze’ on the motivations propelling South Africa’s peacebuilding efforts in the Congo.

I want sex too … What is so wrong with that?

abstract This focus piece works on a micro-level and is based on a qualitative study with four differently-abled young Black African women living at a university hostel in South Africa. The piece proceeds through their stories, taking as a starting point that ‘ethnographies of the particular’ offer a critical and intimate window into how these young women self-interpret and attempt to (re)claim their sexuality. The young womens excavated narratives testify to how both ‘sexuality’ and ‘disability’ have been co-constructed within the able-bodied community, which in a sense works to ‘erase’ their sexuality and render them both asexual and sexually invisible. The recovered narratives also reveal that disability is deeply imbricated within gender and gendered regimes of aesthetics. The narratives further expose fissures in their reclamation stories, as they also show up instances of ‘internalised oppression’ alongside other life-affirming aspirations and ideas of romance, love, sexual liaisons and motherhood.

Seeing with the Blind: Teaching and Learning with Differently-Abled Students

Abstract This paper is situated at the junction of feminist pedagogy and critical disability theory and draws from the insights gained from interviews with visually impaired students as part of a project on ‘body’, learning and ‘disability theory’. The paper attempts to bring into mainstream discussion, tertiary teaching amongst the visually impaired, compelling us to rethink their corporeality within our classes. The paper works through the methodological approach of narrative analysis and suggests that teaching the visually impaired calls for recognition of a more specific kind of productive pedagogy that works to embrace the (social) learning experiences of this category of student. While critical disability theory speaks to the political insights and issues of power (or lack thereof) within contexts of material and social impairment, feminist pedagogy speaks to a democratic (co)creation of knowledge, and participatory teaching and learning in classrooms that we seek to construct as being inclusive.