Doctoral Degrees (Sociology and Social Anthropology)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (Sociology and Social Anthropology) by browse.metadata.advisor "Cousins, Thomas"

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    Naming the witch, housing the witch and living with witchcraft: an ethnography of ordinary lives in Northern Ghana's witch camps
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2019-12) Mutaru, Saibu; Van Wyk, Ilana; Cousins, Thomas; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Sociology & Social Anthropology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In Dagbambaland, northern Ghana, people who were accused and proven to be witches and who risked being harmed were banished by village chiefs and local elders (or fled on their own) to special settlements popularly known to locals as accused women’s (or old women’s) settlements, and to the media and NGO world as “witch camps”. Here, an earth priest and anti-witchcraft specialist, the tindana, ritually removed the dark powers of the morally compromised witch and committed him or her to the protection and necessary sanctions of the ancestral shrine. Post-1990 so-called “witch camps” have attracted much attention from churches, state agencies and NGOs interested in the human rights abuses that supposedly took place in these “camps”. This ethnography is an attempt to explore the “afterlife” of witchcraft accusations, when convicted witches settle in new villages after breaking trust with kinsmen and villagers in their original communities. And unlike many studies of witchcraft in Africa that focus on suspicions and rumours of witchcraft, this thesis critically analyses the ordinary lives of known, confessing witches. I look at their insertion in the social world of host communities where they lived as morally compromised strangers, and where access to community resources and networks was largely made possible through a local moral economy. Of paramount importance to ordinary life here was the question of trust. How did local host communities come to trust and accept these “moral criminals” into their midst when their own kinsmen and village friends had rejected them as untrustworthy because of the danger they posed to social order? What role did churches, NGOs and state agencies play in the social configuration of witch villages? My findings suggest that although stomach cleansing rituals played a vital role in villagers’ decision to accept the accused into their communities, such rituals were, by themselves, not sufficient to establish any meaningful social co-existence between locals and the accused. Co-existence and everyday survival were made possible through the enormous generosity shown by both the accused (in terms of the provision of their labour) and locals (who allowed dangerous Others into their midst); a mutually beneficial exchange relationship described by both as songsim. However, songsim was not neutral. In situations where witchcraft had been proven and accepted as a reality, its moral stain defined exchange relations between the accused and locals. Returns on songsim were often skewed in favour of locals who accepted to take on the risks of living with a witch.
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    Zimbabwean migrants and the dynamics of religion and informal support associations in mediating everyday life in Cape Town
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-12) Dube, Charles; Robins, Steven; Cousins, Thomas; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Social Anthropology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This ethnographic study is about Pentecostal spirituality and everyday social life among migrant members of Forward in Faith in Cape Town, South Africa. My focus is on the capacity of the church to reach into and shape individual congregants’ daily lives, through its various doctrines, moral instructions and forms of ‘social surveillance’. The study explores the extent to which individual believers conform to these injunctions in their daily social life both inside and outside the associational and formal context of the church. While much has been written about the effort made by Pentecostals to make a break with relations they had before conversion, and the challenges attendant to those attempts, this literature has not addressed the everyday social relations of believers in multiple and layered public and private spaces. I aim to critically engage contemporary scholarship on religion which assumes that born again Christians enact these church messages and injunctions into their daily lives in ways that influence their definitions and daily practices of social life. Is it possible that individual congregants may find ways to be convivial with non-congregants simply in order to get along with them? What does the church bring to the daily lives of its members? Is there a split or disjuncture between the spaces of the church and everyday life? What do other experiences outside of the church bring to the everyday lives of individual congregants? My findings indicate that in everyday life, people are pragmatic. Since congregants in my study lived in a socially diverse world, how their relations were built outside the church were informed by this diversity. For example, despite the existence of various social media platforms (WhatsApp and Facebook) to share information regarding accommodation, and job opportunities, most church members preferred to share apartments with non-church members. The desire to escape ‘social surveillance’ from fellow church members and leadership was one of the reasons for this preference. While they were aware of the church’s message about the ‘polluting’ world and the dangers of sharing social spaces with non-believers, in daily existence individual congregants arranged their lives and made decisions by themselves. In spaces outside the church, believers and non-believers sat together, ate together, travelled together in public transport and met in other public spaces. Through these mundane daily experiences, they arrived at an everyday ethics of conviviality. This study therefore concludes that, due to the complex social, cultural, economic and political environment Stellenbosch University within which the church operated in South Africa, it was limited in its capacity to influence church members’ daily lives