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Item Open Access Identity and environmental harmony as practised by Table Mountain Doctors: a struggle over land and African healing systems.(University of the Free State, 2024) Shange, Nombulelo Tholithemba; Sithole, Pearl MpilenhleMountain Doctors who refer to themselves as Rastas, Khoi and San, Sakmanne and other names wear mostly brown hessian sacks. They walk barefoot and grow their hair long as an indication of their African pride. Resident in the entirety of South Africa, they are most visible in the Western Cape where my study was located. Their brown hessian sack earned them “the Sackcloth people” label, a term that comes from Rastafarianism. They are African healers who harvest different herbs from natural spaces all over the country and beyond and sell them in city centres like Cape Town, George, Stellenbosch and many other areas the study interacted with. The study tracked the Sackcloth people’s philosophy and way of life, including healing methods and their relationship with the environment – through participant observation and in-depth interviews with members of the community. The sample consisted of mostly young men between the age of 18 and 30 and a smaller pool of women and men who were over 40 years old. This study of Mountain Doctors had to explore the previous work of anthropologists and other social scientists on identity and culture, juxtaposing it with the Mountain Doctors’ projection of 𝘶𝘣𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘶, a social discourse that has also been theorised by social scientists. 𝘜𝘣𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘶 and 𝘐-𝘯-𝘐, a pluralistic understanding of the self, are discussed comparatively as grounded philosophies that Mountain Doctors pull from to construct their particular African identity. The Mountain Doctors’ notion of self as a version of the African ontology of 𝘶𝘣𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘶, includes resistance to modernism. Thus, from Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ (1983), to caution on ‘culture as invented’ as argued by South African anthropologists (for example, Robert Thornton 1988) on the one hand; and on another hand the articulations of 𝘶𝘣𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘶 by Mogobe Ramose (2005) and others, to how Mountain Doctors invent their cultural identity through 𝘶𝘣𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘶 - my study provides a rich tapestry of etic and emic views on African identity. As my fieldwork shows, there is a tendency to restore ‘the right to have identities’ as a snowballing of creolisation that is in constant flux in search for essentialisation, even if temporary and era-specific. This means that Mountain Doctors pull from different indigenous groups to construct their identity. This study demonstrates how the ideological aspects of making sense of identity influence the existential and cosmological view of life with specific reference to the Mountain Doctors. In an attempt to make sense of lived experiences the Mountain Doctors and I shared a crisis of ‘appropriate’ theorising. This crisis occurred in part because notions of resilience were intricately enmeshed with existential issues for both the researcher and researched, and I found myself wedged between potential representation of a power imbalance between researcher and participants. This is a situation of a researcher doing a study where the community has a strong opinion about my background in the context of resilience which is part of the identity ideology of the community. This ‘acute mutual judgement’ was further exacerbated by doing fieldwork during the Covid-19 pandemic where there was a blur between ‘participation’ and ‘observation’ in a general environment of fear over health, government regulations relating to travel, as well as general despair for regaining control over socio-economic life. Assuming a mixed methodology approach, a combination of ethnography, grounded theory, engaged heritage institutions and archives, and ‘thick descriptive’ approaches were used. While these methods were useful, there are challenges that come with using only western approaches to explore sometimes contradictory African contexts. Decolonial methods, rooted in African thought are important for remedying this challenge. The study makes an original contribution to methodology by exploring 𝘶𝘬𝘶𝘵𝘩𝘶𝘯𝘺𝘸𝘢 methodology, an approach found in African households and which the Mountain Doctors used to teach me their way of life in similar ways to how they teach each other. 𝘜𝘬𝘶𝘵𝘩𝘶𝘯𝘺𝘸𝘢 also helped ease some research challenges. This approach strips the researcher of their ‘elevated status’ and centers power in the hands of the participants. 𝘜𝘬𝘶𝘵𝘩𝘶𝘯𝘺𝘸𝘢 draws from 𝘶𝘣𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘶 and requires that the researcher be in-service to the participants. 𝘜𝘬𝘶𝘵𝘩𝘶𝘯𝘺𝘸𝘢 experiences sent me on an unanticipated journey to disrupt and dismantle the representation of groups like the Mountain Doctors, western ontology and epistemology itself. In addition to wrestling with constructions of the Mountains Doctors’ identity/ies and resilience in the thesis, I further explore their aesthetics, focusing on the significance of long, hair and hessian sack. The symbolism of their aesthetic varies from biblical, colonial and neoliberal resistance and influence and a desire to revitalise and reconnect with lost African practices. The discussion also extended to exploring the revitalisation of Khoi and San languages as dying indigenous African languages. Their symbolism and worldview incorporate their view of land as more than just a resource. For the Mountain Doctors land is a sacred reference point that anchors humanity materially and spiritually. The neoliberal valuation of land as a resource is perceived/interpreted as harmful to ecology and African spirituality. Their focus on African spiritual understandings of land challenges the proposed first African Amazon development in Cape Town. The development rubs up against a colonial wound, as the development is set to be erected around the Two Rivers Urban Park, the first site of colonialism in 1652. Mountain Doctors’ integration of symbolism, spirituality and resilience extends to the manner in which they guard flora and fauna for purposes of healing humans and repairing the environment as a source of healing. Much of the Mountain Doctors’ knowledge is scrutinised or overlooked by people, institutions and by a colonial history that sees the contributions and experiences of indigenous people as inferior. This study tables afresh the questions of who has a right to theorise, create and share knowledge. It does this by showing important knowledge embedded in African rituals and beliefs, some even offer Mountain Doctors solutions to modern day struggles like poverty, unemployment and general deprivations of resources and opportunities. In essence, this thesis wrestles with the complexities of identities, like how Mountain Doctors project their identity and meaning around being an 'African', 'Khoi' and 'San'. It also looks at how they construct resistance identities around critiquing of western hegemony, colonialism, capitalism and modernity. Through grounded theorisation the thesis acknowledges the social actor consciousness and critique of the world around them while critically examining the basis of the identities that they project as deserving recognition with conviction. The target audience for this research is scholars, students and communities interested in indigenous knowledge and decoloniality.Item Open Access Women in patriarchy in Lesotho: a deconstructive study(University of the Free State, 2005) Molapo, Ethel Lea 'M'ajonathane; Erasmus, P. A.𝑬𝒏𝒈𝒍𝒊𝒔𝒉 The motivation for this study was a realization of the need to seek from the perspectives of both males and females the different meanings and experiences of patriarchy. Through reviewing existing feminist theories and explanations in Anthropology it became clear that the focus is, to a large extent, only on female views and experiences. The phenomena of patriarchy can thus not be understood and interpreted in terms of the total socio-cultural context which encompasses it. As is suggested by the title of the thesis, Lesotho was chosen as the research area. Lesotho has a pre-industrial, migrant labour driven, subsistence economy where traditional values seem still very much reflecting on gender relations. The study was conducted in Peka, in the Leribe district, where six villages were selected. The research took as its point of departure an insider perspective. The emphasis, therefore, was on data collecting by means of unstructured interviewing, participant observation and life histories. Regarding the analysis and interpretation of the qualitative data, an inductive analytical strategy was followed. Apart from that, an important emphasis was placed on deconstruction. Surprisingly handbooks on social research are not dealing with the topic and guidelines for practical application almost do not exist. Therefore, it was necessary to develop an own methodological approach. The deconstruction of ethnographic texts provided access to the mode in which patriarchy is/was constructed, constituted and entrenched in Basotho customs, beliefs, practices, social relations, family life and institutions. It detects the shifted, deferred and concealed meanings of patriarchy, it reveals that patriarchy hinders gender equality and that it has several facets, and that male and female informants viewed, understood, explained and experienced patriarchy differently. In conclusion, the possibilities, on the one hand, for future research on the methodological refinement of the deconstruction of ethnographic texts, as well as on the other hand, the challenges to the Basotho government and society in order to address gender discrepancies and inequalities, are adumbrated. ___________________________________________________________________Item Open Access After the triumph: an anthropological study into the lives of elite athletes after competitive sport(University of the Free State, 2015-12) Grundlingh, Susanna Maria; Gordon, RobertEnglish: The decision to retire from competitive sport is an inevitable aspect of any professional sportsperson’s career. This thesis explores the afterlife of former professional rugby players and athletes (road running and track) and is situated within the emerging sub-discipline of the anthropology of sport. I consider the elite sports culture within which athletes apply their sporting trade and show how the everyday life of elite athletes is shaped by the mass media and a culture of individualism. The elite sports culture informs how athletes perceive their bodies after sports retirement. By drawing on the notion of the sports body as a machine I show that professional rugby players disregard the potential future ailments that they may live with once their rugby careers are over. The importance of social networks established during their sporting careers is also explored with specific reference to the role that schools and universities play in promoting social capital. The research, moreover, hopes to contribute to knowledge about the afterlife of sportspeople by considering the interconnectedness between elite athlete’s private decision to retire from sport and the public representation of their sporting lives through sport heritage practices. The study of sports heritage in South Africa has been a largely neglected and hitherto closed field of study. The study concludes that the material culture of South African former sport heroes enables them to live on near perpetuity, as they become symbolically immortalised through sport heritage practices Conceptually this thesis draws on the theory of social capital, the body, the notion of symbolic immortality, and the politics of memory and heritage practices. Empirically, sport museums as expressions of heritage are investigated with specific reference to the preservation of South African rugby heritage at the Springbok Experience Museum in Cape Town and an analysis of the Comrades Marathon House museum in Pietermaritzburg. Besides these, I also visited places where the material culture of former South African sport heroes are exhibited. These included the houses of sports collectors, community sport museums, corporate sport museum, sport stadia and sport heritage exhibitions at prominent South African rugby schools and universities. Semi – structured interviews were conducted with former professional rugby players, athletes and sport heritage practitioners. Participant observation at sport events that commemorated sportspeople of the past also substantiate the findings. Primary sources drawn from the South African Rugby Board’s archives contributed to the understanding of rugby heritage practices prior to the professional era.Item Open Access Afrikaner values in post-apartheid South Africa : an anthropological perspective(University of the Free State, 2011-07-27) Van der Merwe, Jan Petrus; Erasmus, P. A.English: The aim of this study is to conduct an investigation from an anthropological perspective, on the impact that post-apartheid South Africa has had on the Afrikaner’s judgement of value, as well as on his identity-formation. Afrikaner values comprise therefore the central theme of three of the main articles, while narratives, myths, religion and identity represent the focus of incidence of the other two articles. Up to and including 1990, an official Afrikaner identity existed, which was largely determined by a grand narrative that was constructed around church membership, an association with political power and party membership, as well as membership of cultural organisations such as the Broederbond. After 1994, the loss of this official identity, has marginalised Afrikaners and plunged them into an existential crisis. In this regard, this study will point out two factors, namely that the Afrikaners’ emotional and intellectual ties with the Afrikaans culture, churches, politics and the Afrikaans language in the post-Apartheid dispensation are in a process of changing, even becoming attenuated; that Afrikaners are increasingly pursuing a new, cosmopolitan identity and way of life. Although commentators differ regarding the question as to what effect the post-apartheid dispensation had, and is still having on Afrikaners, it is undoubtedly true that the political and social transformations that South Africa has undergone since 1994 have indeed been far-reaching in nature and that these transformations largely took the great majority of Afrikaners by surprise. Afrikaners clearly were not prepared for the changes that ensued, with the result that after a period of fifteen years they are being confronted with the dire necessity to reflect on their values, their solidarity, their identity, as well as their role and place in the “new” South Africa. Recent anthropological information on the Afrikaner is limited – Afrikaans anthropologists have largely neglected the study of the changes that the culture and identity of Afrikaners have undergone since 1994. As a result, the contributions of Afrikaans-speaking anthropologists to the discourses surrounding current issues that affect the Afrikaner (religion, morality, identity, narratives and myths), and the characteristics of the so-called “new” Afrikaner, are relatively limited. In this regard the broad aim of the current study is to conduct a comprehensive ethnographic investigation into the current tendencies in Afrikaner culture and identity. Afrikaner values would thus be used as the point of departure from which the ethnographic material will be explored.