You don't love your mother just because she feeds you : amaXhosa and woodlands in the Peddie district, Eastern Cape
- Authors: McAlister, Gareth
- Date: 2013 , 2013-07-24
- Subjects: Xhosa (African people) -- Social life and customs Forest ecology -- South Africa -- Eastern Cape Forest conservation -- South Africa -- Eastern Cape Social change -- South Africa -- Eastern Cape
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2106 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006044
- Description: This thesis will discuss how the application of place theory might provide insight into how a selection of Xhosa-speaking people in a rural village (Ntloko), in the former Ciskei of the Eastern Cape, interact with and establish relationships with the local indigenous thicket forest (ihlathi). I am concerned with how these influence residents' perceptions and attitudes (relational epistemologies) towards this resource, and how these may (or may not) translate into conservation practices. I am also interested in how socio-political and economic changes have altered these people/place relations (including gender) and their corresponding cultural perceptions. It is argued that the local thicket forest's significance and importance moves beyond the economic and utilitarian value of its natural resources. The thicket plays an important part in local identity construction, due to both its socio-cultural significance and its role in local livelihoods. People form meaningful attachments and relationships (relational epistemologies ) with the thicket as a place, through their interactions with it. While this may or may not result in actions and attitudes in-line with the conservation agenda, it is shown that this relationship is necessary for a local concern and stake in the natural environment. Those who have no or minimal interaction, such as many of the young women of Ntloko, have no opportunity to forge a relationship with it. Ihlathi may be known through narrative, but not personal experience, and as such no significant attachments can be formed, and thus concern for its conservation status is irrelevant. It is clear that if you remove people from an environment, you remove the stake they hold in the environment in question, thereby disrupting the relationship, and alienating people from nature. While a relational epistemology may not equate to conservation practices, it does imply a stake or concern in the environment, and as such, may provide an opportunity for conservationists to work with local communities. Resistance to conservation and development projects that aim to exclude local interaction, and therefore relationships, with the environment, will always be strong when local identities are intricately tied to the places and experiences that form them. Threatening that relationship threatens local identities and the attachments that orient them.
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Occult forces -- lived identities: witchcraft, spirit possession and cosmology amongst the Mayeyi of Namibia's Caprivi Strip
- Authors: Von Maltitz, Emil Arthur
- Date: 2007
- Subjects: Yeye (African people) , Yeye (African people) -- Namibia -- History , Occultism -- Namibia , Witchcraft -- Namibia , Spirit possession -- Namibia , Cosmology
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2121 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1013279
- Description: Around Africa there seems to be an increasing disillusion with 'development', seen under the rubric of teleological 'progress', which is touted by post-colonial governments as being the cure for Africa's ailments and woes. Numerous authors have pointed out that this local disillusion, and the attempt to manage the inequities that arise through development and modernity, can be seen to be understood and acted upon by local peoples through the idiom of witchcraft beliefs and fears (see Geschiere & Fisiy 2001; Geschiere 1997; Nyamnjoh 2001; Comaroff & Comaroff 1993; Ashforth 2005) and spirit possession nanatives (see Luig 1999; Gezon 1999), or more simply, occult beliefs and praxis (Moore & Sanders 2001). The majority of the Mayeyi of Namibia's Eastern Caprivi perceive that development is the only way their regiOn and people can survive and succeed in a modernising world. At ~he same time there is also a seeming reluctance to move towards perceiving witchcraft as a means of accumulation (contra Geschiere 1997). This notion of the 'witchcraft of wealth' is emerging, but for the most part witches are seen as the enemies of development, while spirit possession narratives speak to the desire for development and of the identity of the group vis-a-vis the rest of the world. The thesis presented argues that, although modernity orientated analyses enable occult belief to be used as a lens through which to 1..mderstand 'modernity's malcontents' (Comaroff & Comaroff 1993), they can only go so far in explaining the intricacies of witchcraft and spirit possession beliefs themselves. The dissertation argues that one should return to the analysis of the cosmological underpinnings of witchcraft belief and spirit possession, taken together as complementary phenomena, in seeking to understand the domain of the occult. By doing so the thesis argues that a more comprehensive anthropological understanding is obtained of occult belief and practice, the ways in which the domain of the occult is constituted and the ways in which it is a reflection or commentary on a changing world.
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