Making music, making money : informal musical production and performance in Venda, South Africa

This paper presents an ethnographic analysis of the popular economy of informal musical production in the Venda region of South Africa. It focuses on the activities surrounding the Burnin‟ Shak Studio; a recording house that specializes in reggae music. Reliant on second-hand computers, pirated software, borrowed instruments, networks of trust and cycles of debt, musicians and producers in the Burnin‟ Shak occupy a distinctly peripheral position in South Africa‟s music industry. Unlike artists in the formal sphere of musical production, who sign deals with specific record labels, musicians in the informal sector seek out sponsors – usually young local businessmen – to fund their recordings with local producers. Marketing and distribution is the sole responsibility of the artist and their sponsor, who often develop a „patron/client‟ relationship. And yet whilst their artistic entrepreneurial activity often earns them significant airplay on local radio stations, and associated cultural capital, the financial benefits are slim. In order to convert their cultural capital into cash, musicians in the informal sector must compete in the market for performances at government-sponsored shows. These shows are well funded by lucrative tenders, but they present musicians with a double-edged sword. To secure a contract with tender holders – or to entertain hopes of regular paid performances – musicians must ensure that their performances do not express critical political sentiment. As purveyors of a genre renowned for its critical social commentary, reggae musicians are particularly affected by this expectation of self-censorship. Informal musical production in the post-apartheid era thus affords musicians little artistic freedom. Rather, whilst the products of this culture industry may appear to be part of a „secondary‟ economy, removed from the spheres of formalized production and control, they are in fact regulated and standardized through the process of tender allocation.Cet article présente une analyse ethnographique de l’économie populaire de la production musicale informelle dans la région de Venda en Afrique du Sud. Il s’intéresse aux activités qui entourent le studio d’enregistrement Burnin’ Shak, spécialisé dans la musique reggae. Les musiciens et les producteurs du Burnin’ Shak, qui ont recours à des ordinateurs d’occasion, logiciels piratés, instruments empruntés, réseaux de confiance et cycles de dette, occupent une position distinctement périphérique au sein de l’industrie de la musique en Afrique du Sud. Contrairement aux artistes qui évoluent dans la sphère formelle de la production musicale et s’engagent par contrat auprès de labels spécifiques, les musiciens du secteur informel recherchent des sponsors (généralement de jeunes entrepreneurs locaux) pour financer leurs enregistrements réalisés avec des producteurs locaux. L’artiste et son sponsor, qui développent souvent une relation patron-client, assurent entièrement la commercialisation et la distribution. Pourtant, et alors que l’activité entrepreneuriale des artistes leur vaut de passer souvent sur les ondes des radios locales et leur rapporte le capital culturel associé, les avantages financiers sont maigres. Pour convertir leur capital culturel en argent, les musiciens du secteur informel entrent en concurrence sur le marché pour passer dans les spectacles parrainés par l’État. Ces spectacles sont financés par des offres lucratives, mais constituent pour les musiciens une arme à double tranchant. Pour décrocher un contrat auprès des adjudicateurs ou entretenir l’espoir de donner régulièrement des spectacles rémunérés, les musiciens doivent dépouiller leurs spectacles de toute expression de sentiment politique critique. Cette exigence d’autocensure affecte particulièrement les musiciens reggae dont le genre musical est réputé pour le commentaire social critique. La production musicale informelle ne laisse donc que peu de liberté artistique aux musiciens de l’ère post-apartheid. Et alors même que les produits de cette industrie culturelle peuvent sembler appartenir à une économie « secondaire », à l’écart des sphères de la production formalisée et du contrôle, ils sont en fait régulés et normalisés par le processus d’adjudication par appel d’offres.http://www.euppublishing.com/journal/afrcp201

An ethnographical analysis of HIV/AIDS in the Venda region of South Africa: Politics, peer education and music.

This thesis explores the dynamics of HIV/AIDS in the Venda region of South Africa through an exploration of post-apartheid traditionalism and the anthropology of knowledge at the juncture of planned AIDS interventions. It argues that current policies of peer education act to reinforce the patriarchal Venda aetiology through which men and older women explain sexually transmitted infections in terms of blood related taboos and the build up of pollution. This has resulted in a situation where many Venda men are more concerned with who they sleep with, rather than how "safe" the encounter may be, and has reinforced or even given rise to widely held idea that condoms cause AIDS. By looking at AIDS education through the political economy of traditional leadership in the region, the thesis locates concepts of AIDS, musical performance, power, generational authority, death and secrecy in the context of a post-apartheid struggle for the consolidation of political power between the royal houses of Mphephu and Tshivhase. This has exacerbated historical tensions between the rival centres of power, and encouraged the implementation of policies through which the ANC doctrine of African renaissance has taken centre stage. It argues that, in this context, official attempts to increase the frequency of female initiation schools have bolstered the generational authority of older women and increased the extent to which HIV/AIDS is understood through the "folk model" of blood taboos and pollution. Although peer education creates a space in which younger women - mostly through the singing of songs - promote biomedical notions of sexual health and healing, this space should not be conceptualised simply as a site of "resistance" against these structural forms of authority. It also provides them with a basis for securing positions of employment in health-related government programmes, and as such acts as a potential vehicle for upward mobility among the rural poor. Their desire to change the social/sexual health environment is thus matched by their desire to transcend and move away from it, given that it constructs them as vectors of the virus

Helping, holding, hurting: a conversation about supervision

This article begins with an overview of some of the late Bill McWilliams's key contributions to probation research and scholarship, focusing in particular on how his work helps us think about how people experience supervision, and about how the practice of supervision should be conceived and constructed. In the sections that follow, three of the co-authors respond to these ideas from their different perspectives as service user, as frontline probation officer, and as probation manager. In the conclusion, we summarise the discussion by focusing on the role of values, of relationships and of evidence in the reform and development of probation

Speech Addressed To Children: Issues And Characteristics Of Parental Input

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/98418/1/j.1467-1770.1975.tb00251.x.pd

“You Think You’re Helping Them, But They’re Helping You Too”: Experiences of Scottish Male Young Offenders Participating in a Dog Training Program

increasingly popular in a range of contexts. Dog training programs (DTPs) are the most popular form of AAI in custodial contexts; prisoners often have multiple needs and DTPs seem to facilitate a diverse range of positive outcomes, including improvements in well-being, behavior, and offending behavior. However, evidence on the efficacy of prison-based DTPs is still limited and these evaluations often lack detail or methodological rigor. We examined the experiences of male young offenders (N = 70) using thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted following completion of a DTP. The themes that emerged indicated a broad range of inter-related experiences and positive outcomes. The most prevalent theme related to their experiences with Dogs (including feelings and attitudes), and there were perceived improvements categorized as: Positive Effects (including mood and well-being), Motivation, Charitable Purpose, Self-Efficacy, Improved Skills, Impulsivity, and Emotional Management. These themes mapped well onto outcomes previously identified in research on DTPs, and to the program’s core aims of improving behavior, educational engagement, employability, and well-being. The diversity and nature of these themes indicates that DTPs have considerable potential to engage and benefit those individuals with multiple needs, such as young offenders, and ultimately to achieve positive long-term outcomes with significant social, health, and economic impact

Gendered endings: Narratives of male and female suicides in the South African Lowveld

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11013-012-9258-y. Copyright @ Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012.Durkheim’s classical theory of suicide rates being a negative index of social solidarity downplays the salience of gendered concerns in suicide. But gendered inequalities have had a negative impact: worldwide significantly more men than women perpetrate fatal suicides. Drawing on narratives of 52 fatal suicides in Bushbuckridge, South Africa, this article suggests that Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘symbolic violence’ and ‘masculine domination’ provide a more appropriate framework for understanding this paradox. I show that the thwarting of investments in dominant masculine positions have been the major precursor to suicides by men. Men tended to take their own lives as a means of escape. By contrast, women perpetrated suicide to protest against the miserable consequences of being dominated by men. However, contra the assumption of Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’, the narrators of suicide stories did reflect critically upon gender constructs

Twitter influence on UK vaccination and antiviral uptake during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic

Objective: Information exchange via Twitter and other forms of social media make public health communication more complex as citizens play an increasingly influential role in shaping acceptable or desired health behaviors. Taking the case of the 2009–2010 H1N1 pandemic, we explore in detail the dissemination of H1N1-related advice in the UK through Twitter to see how it was used to discourage or encourage vaccine and antiviral uptake. Methods: In three stages we conducted (1) an analysis of general content, retweeting patterns, and URL sharing, (2) a discourse analysis of the public evaluation of press releases and (3) a template analysis of conversations around vaccine and antiviral uptake, using Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) as a way of understanding how the public weighed the costs and benefits. Results: Network analysis of retweets showed that information from official sources predominated. Analysing the spread of significant messages through Twitter showed that most content was descriptive but there was some criticism of health authorities. A detailed analysis of responses to press releases revealed some scepticism over the economic beneficiaries of vaccination, that served to undermine public trust. Finally, the conversational analysis showed the influence of peers when weighing up the risks and benefits of medication. Conclusion: Most tweets linked to reliable sources, however Twitter was used to discuss both individual and health authority motivations to vaccinate. The PMT framework describes the ways individuals assessed the threat of the H1N1 pandemic, weighing this against the perceived cost of taking medication. These findings offer some valuable insights for social media communication practices in future pandemics

Imaging of hydrothermal altered zones in Wadi Al-Bana, in southern Yemen, using remote sensing techniques and very low frequency–electromagnetic data

© 2019, Saudi Society for Geosciences. Economic mineralization and hydrothermally altered zones are areas of great economic interests. This study focusses on hydrothermal altered zones of high mineralization potentials in Wadi Al-Bana, in southern Yemen. An azimuthal very low frequency–electromagnetic (AVLF-EM) data acquisition was conducted in search for mineralization in the study area. The study integrated observations from geophysical field data with others extracted from object-oriented principal component analysis (PCA) to better map and understand mineralization in the investigated area. This technique was applied to two data sets, ASTER and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) imagery. The results of PCA revealed high accuracy in detecting alteration minerals and for mapping zones of high concentration of these minerals. The PCA-based distribution of selected alteration zones correlated spatially with high conductivity anomalies in the subsurface that were detected by VLF measurements. Finally, a GIS model was built and successfully utilized to categorize the resulted altered zones, into three levels. [Figure not available: see fulltext.]

Playwork goes to School:Professional (mis)recognition and playwork practice in primary school.

The article considers some of the key contemporary challenges facing playwork professionals in England when working in interagency and inter-professional contexts, specifically in English primary schools. This paper is based on a small-scale qualitative evaluation of a pilot play project situated within a primary school in a large English town. By drawing on broader debates within sociological literature and interview and observational data, this paper provides insights into the gendered, classed and interprofessional discourses that are in play within a new phase of the austere economic and occupational public sector landscape. Drawing on concepts of ‘misrecognition’, the authors’ explore issues of professional power, the process of professionalisation and how aspects such as gender and status shape contemporary inter-professional dynamics in schools and playwork contexts