Reluctant Relations: And Ethnography of 'Outreach' in a Post-apartheid City

This dissertation focuses on performance, moral practice, and self-respect in an urban South African setting. Taking as its point of departure the emergence and rapid expansion, in the 1990s and 2000s, of an outreach organization I call Jesus People Pretoria (JPP), it discusses this NGO’s attempt to create a ‘moral community’ in the post-apartheid city from the diverse vantage points of its Afrikaner leaders, its clients, and—most emphatically—its lay workers, the majority of whom are black women. Gradually moving from the everyday stage of outreach labour towards women’s gendered performances within and beyond the work environment, it proposes that at stake in the making of the JPP moral community is the negotiation of self-respect, which hinges upon the degree to which interactions imply the fostering or refutation of mutual respect, or the measure of the ‘equality’ of the exchange. As an urban entity deeply entwined in and illuminative of South Africa’s broader post-apartheid ironies, including ongoing race-based differentiation and the pervasiveness of HIV/AIDS and death, predominantly moral practice here remains but ambivalently constituted. Yet this does not denote the absence of the moral but temporarily rests it in the region of the indistinct, the unresolved, in the moment of its apparent impossibility or unachievability.Ph

After apartheid: contradictory consciousness among white South African immigrants to Canada

In 1994 South Africa's racist apartheid policies, implemented since 1948 by the Afrikaner National Party, were officially dismantled and a new democratic government, led by the African National Congress, was established in its place. The events leading up to this transition, as well as its consequences, have generated an out-migration movement on the part of white South Africans. The fieldwork that I conducted in southern Ontario focused on the two major transitions that white South African immigrants to Canada, both British and Afrikaner, have experienced: the 1994 political transition in South Africa, and their international migration to and settlement in Canada. In the thesis, I analyze the memories and discourses that informants produced concerning these two transitions. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1977), Antonio Gramsci (1971), and Michel Foucault (1977, 1980), I demonstrate how the hegemony of apartheid shaped the lives of white South Africans. However, their stories are also indicative of a contradictory consciousness in light of apartheid oppression and its continued legacy in South Africa, generating counter-discourses that seek to oppose apartheid logic (Gramsci 1971). Pan I of the thesis, entitled 'White South African Experiences of Transition,' examines informants' memories of having grown up with nonwhite servants, as well as their privileged status as adult employers of nonwhite servants. I then consider discourses of subjectivity and violence concerning South Africa, as they were experienced both during apartheid and in the post-apartheid years. Such discourses work productively to justify informants' choice to emigrate from South Africa. My final chapter in Part I focuses on Afrikaner migrants' memories of the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa; a Calvinist Christian denomination that has come to be criticized for its segregationist role during apartheid. I engage with academic descriptions of Afrikaner religious life through a discussion of Afrikaner political awareness and involvement during and after apartheid. In Part n of the thesis, I draw on feminist and life story approaches in anthropology and related disciplines, analyzing 'The Stories of Two British South African Migrant Women' (Moore 1988, Leydesdorff, Passerini and Thompson 1996). The thesis contributes to an understanding of both the dominance and subjectivity inherent in the notion of whiteness (Frankenberg 1997, Hartigan Jr.1997)

Face and object visual processing linked to literacy: a longitudinal study

Reading is a cultural invention too recent to involve dedicated genetic or developmental mechanisms. It has been proposed that reading partly recycles pre-existing brain systems (neural recycling hypothesis, Dehaene, 2004). This hypothesis is supported by fMRI studies. Reading acquisition does not only lead to the development of a strong response to written materials in the left fusiform gyrus, the "visual word form area" (VWFA, Cohen et al., 2000; Dehaene & Cohen, 2011), but also reorganizes the ventral visual system: it competes with the cortical representation of other visual objects, especially faces, with less left and more right fusiform activation to faces in literates compared to illiterates (Dehaene et al., 2010). However, little is known about the behavioural consequences of this brain reorganization. How is face processing affected by literacy? One possibility could be that the stronger right-hemispheric lateralization for face processing in literates implies more holistic processing of faces. Alternatively, literacy may lead to a dynamic and flexible tuning of face processing (Harris & Aguirre, 2010). As a result, the depth with which a face is holistically encoded could depend on the nature of the task (Gao, Flevaris, Robertson & Bentin, 2011). To examine these possibilities, nine adult illiterate females participated in a longitudinal study in which they were offered an intensive alphabetization course for three months. Meanwhile, the evolution of reading skills as well as their memory for and sensitivity to configural vs. local properties of faces (and other objects) was measured. Participants were tested five times: two times before starting the literacy classes (pre-tests), two during the literacy classes, and finally after they completed the course. Results will be presented at the conference