Patricia C. Henderson

South African AIDS Orphans Examining assumptions around vulnerability from the perspective of rural children and youth

The article examines assumptions circulating in development or interventionist discourse concerning the vulnerabilities of AIDS orphans in South Africa. Ongoing ethnographic research, begun in March 2003, with 31 rural children and youth between the ages of 14 and 22, in Magangangozi, KwaZulu-Natal, points to the ways in which global terms may fail to describe local particularities. Too narrow a focus on the vulnerabilities of AIDS orphans obscures the ways in which they share similar circumstances with other poor children, as well as the strengths they bring to bear on their circumstances. Research methods include: documenting meetings between the children and NGO intervention facilitators; ongoing home visits; the use of open-ended recorded interviews and of theatre techniques; accompanying children in household and agricultural tasks; and facilitating group workshops with the young people outside their community. Findings show the varying circumstances in which the ‘orphans’ live; the degrees to which they have been accommodated within wider kin groups; their dexterity, knowledge and skill in navigating local environments; and a reiteration of rich sets of cultural understandings and local performance repertoires in holding experience and loss. Some of the implicit meanings in childrens rights discourse as filtered through interventionist programmes aimed at AIDS orphans, namely, what it is to be a child, and the social placement of children in relation to caregivers, are thus challenged.

A Gift without Shortcomings: Healers Negotiating the Intersection of the Local and Global in the Context of HIV/AIDS

Abstract The paper will examine the idea of citizenship from the point of view of two healers, an inyanga and isangoma, one of whom is HIV positive, who live in the remote Okhahlamba region of South Africa. It will therefore provide a view of citizenship from below. The ways in which both healers explore their relationship with the world beyond Okhahlamba illustrates their personal wanderings beyond local environments and the ambivalence with which the wider world is viewed – a common perception of many rural dwellers whose lives, nevertheless, intersect with wider worlds due to migrancy: the experience of the inadequacies of local government, formal health and social welfare provision, and the arrival of international ARV programmes. Healer narratives suggest ways in which rural communities in South Africa claim an otherness in relation to wider worlds, an otherness that reiterates identities of difference in relation to wider structures of governance. Local explanations for the HIV/AIDS pandemic are outlined and are given meaning through being placed within the experience of how the divided and divisive history of South Africa continues to haunt present constructions of worlds and notions of identity in response to widespread death and the politicisation of dis-ease.

The vertiginous body and social metamorphosis in a context of HIV/AIDS

Ethnographic research for this paper was undertaken in the Okhahlamba District in the Drakensberg of South Africa and formed part of an on-going five-year project focussing on peoples everyday experience of living with HIV/AIDS in rural communities. The paper explores metamorphoses of the body in relation to HIV/AIDS, showing how the experience of bodily disintegration is expressed, but also how the falling away of the body is linked to social fault-lines. From an in-depth story of one young man—a narrative seeking to confront individual suffering—the paper moves to theoretical concerns. As Mary Douglas and others have argued, those aspects of the body that threaten its coherence—the bodys permeability and its fluids—are often linked with pollution. The fluidity and erosion of the individuals body in experiencing AIDS is thus inextricably intertwined with the idea of both bodily and social pollution and their attendant fears and prejudices. In bringing the biological into relation with sociality, the dividing line between the two is blurred. Space, often conceptualised as external to a ‘bounded’ individual, traduces both internal and external landscapes where experience of the bodys disintegration interweaves with social relations.

AIDS, metaphor and ritual: The crafting of care in rural South African childhoods

Based on a two-year study of 31 young people aged 14–20 who had lost one or both parents to HIV/AIDS, in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, the article draws on an in-depth ethnographic account of a 17-year-old girl’s life process. It traces forms of care between adults and children within her family across several generations, exploring how social repertoires and forms of ritual pre-dating the HIV/AIDS epidemic are brought to bear on relationships compromised through death, dispersal and disappearance. Temporalities in relation to loss, the reconfiguration of the past and of imagined possible futures emerge from the account.

Unsettling Notions of Participation: A View from South Africa

On the day of his release from prison in 1990, Nelson Mandela read Ingrid Jonker’s poem The child who was shot dead by soldiers in Nyanga to the crowds who welcomed him in Cape Town. In the poem, the child becomes a symbol of freedom and defies death through living on in others in the quest for freedom, a quest whose message travels without restriction throughout the world. It is a poem that demonstrates how children are part of all aspects of social life, a reality sometimes ignored in circumscribing the ‘proper’ place of children.

Cloth as a membrane of the imagination in the artwork of Mary Sibande

This paper brings future-orientated theories of becoming to bear on the work of artist Mary Sibande. Contemporary social theory is increasingly interested in how human life and matter join in vital forms of assemblage. In relation to Sibande’s work in particular, I explore her sculptures and images in terms of the interplay between body, skin, cloth and the world. I suggest that these interminglings enable forms of transfer between inner longings and outer forms of actualisation, between experience and imaginative reach. Using cloth as a technology of the imagination, Sibande embodies critique and possibility in her work. The paper shows how the artist strives for a form of world-making that is not “a simple reaction to social and political conditions” (Eyene 2013) but a performative enactment of the possibility of living and imagining outside the constraints placed on black bodies under apartheid or narrow foreclosed colonial identities. The paper draws on theories of futurity and possibility, arguments about assemblages formed between matter and persons, and on notions of technologies of the imagination that conjoin matter and human skill.

Exit/Exist: Gregory Maqoma's dance and the call to life

The paper explores life-giving qualities of creativity and self-stylisation in the performance art and dance of contemporary South African choreographer Gregory Maqoma. Placing his performance Exit/Exist in conversation with social theories of becoming, desire and futurity explored in the work of anthropologists Elizabeth Povinelli and Henrietta Moore, and the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, the paper gestures towards a vitalist understanding of sociality. The approach suggests potentiality rather than limitation, fragmentation and depletion. In the face of a neo-liberal world order and the lingering influence of apartheid history, much of South African social analysis continues to reiterate forms of structural violence that constrain lives. Such an emphasis cannot account for the ways in which individuals sometimes force celebratory and defiant images of themselves into the public realm, issuing into being new publics, locally and abroad.