Doctoral Degrees (Sociology and Social Anthropology)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (Sociology and Social Anthropology) by Author "Broadbridge, Helena Tara"

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    Negotiating post-apartheid boundaries and identities : an anthropological study of the creation of a Cape Town Suburb
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2001-12) Broadbridge, Helena Tara; Frankental, S.; Bekker, S. B.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Sociology and Social Anthropology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study explores the complex and contested processes of drawing boundaries and negotiating identities in the post-Apartheid South African context by analysing how residents in a new residential suburb of Cape Town are working to carve out a new position for themselves in a changing social order. Drawing on data gathered through participant observation, individual and focus group interviews, and household surveys between November 1998 and December 2000, the study examines how residents draw and negotiate boundaries in their search for stability, status, and community in a society characterised by social flux, uncertainty, ambiguity and contradiction. It explores the construction and shifting of identities believed to be embodied in those boundaries, at the levels of the individual, the household and the community. A range of everyday social and spatial practices - including streetscape design, its use and contestation, neighbourliness and sociality, .household livelihoods and strategies, home maintenance and improvements - are shown to reveal residents' own conceptualisations of boundaries, their practical significance and symbolic power, as well as their permeability and transgression. The marking and maintenance of boundaries convey how social relationships, practices and power in the suburb are structured and continually negotiated. By analysing these actions and responses, the study illustrates some of the ways in which recent changes in South African society have unsettled the relationship between class, race and space to construct new boundaries and shape new identities. The fmdings suggest that although social differentiation among the residents is increasingly being restructured around class, race remains a salient variable in residents' constructions of themselves and each other. Ethnic-religious prejudice is also shown to influence local conflict and constructions of community. The study draws out four discourses through which residents contemplate and formulate circumstances and processes in their neighbourhood. The first emphasises racial integration, the second middle class suburban living, the third safety from crime, the fourth distrust and disorder. The discourses are significant, not only in their practical manifestation in everyday interaction but also because they suggest some of the ways in which connections and disconnections with the past, with (he old identities and the old affiliations, are managed in a new, post-Apartheid South Africa.