Belief and bereavement: the notion of “Attachment” and the grief work hypothesis.

Death and bereavement are both unavoidable points along the imaginary of life, as we navigate lives that are punctuated by a seeming infi nite number of events, including the eventuality of death. For some individuals, religion appears to provide the theoretical and theological frameworks that constitute the multiple socially and culturally determined narratives through which one can make sense of the eventuality of death and loss. This sense-making often entails reconstructing and reassembling the grasp of the loss in a way that reaffi rms core theological beliefs about the self and world, and the world beyond. This paper is a theoretical engagement with the widely held conviction that religion and religious beliefs offer reflective tools for accepting and coping with the death of a loved one and brings a critical gaze to the notion of “attachment” and “continuing bonds” within the context of the “Grief work” hypothesis. “Grief work Theory” puts forward a model for “detachment” and severing ties and bonds with the deceased to aid the process of coping with loss and grief, and suggests that this severing is essential for the process of healing, restoration and return to normality for the bereaved. However, the paper engages with the view that religious frameworks and “death specifi c beliefs” offer a form of ‘attachment’ or ‘continuing relationship’ that is healthy and benefi cial rather than pathological, and is more in accordance with insights from later grief research and ‘Continuing bonds Theory’. By peeling back the theoretical wrappings around the notion of attachment, more specifi cally within grief and death counselling, the paper attempts to lay bare a theological reunderstanding and re-contextualisation of ‘attachment’ in the context of grief and bereavement, and bereavement counselling

‘Topless’ tradition for tourists: Young Zulu girls in tourism.

This study works through the ethnographic narratives of two young girls who perform in a tourist cultural village, and probes how certain cultural constructions of ‘Zulu girl’ or maiden are enacted in the context of cultural tourism. The article demonstrates that the girls live with a certain level of cultural discordance between their own experiences as young Zulu-speaking girls and how they are positioned in tourism consumption as 'Zulu maidens'. The study situates the narratives of the two performers, Zodwa and Pumi [pseudonyms] alongside the perceptions of a group of Zulu-speaking girls as an outside audience and how they see the dancers

Creating an African tourist experience at the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site.

This article considers the example of palaeo-heritage tourism at Sterkfontein Cave, situated in a geographic area designated the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, or Cradle for short. The article looks at how a particular “African” tourist experience is constructed through the architectural vocabulary and the narrative built around the Sterkfontein Cave, which, with the adept use of a particular theory of human origins, allows the visitor to identify with a trajectory of a shared prehistory and shared humanity. These appear to be constructed in an attempt to redefine the visitor’s image of himself or herself in terms of a shared African history. This sense of a shared history is attempted through the architectural design of the interpretive centre, the virile narrative contained in the logo of the centre, and the process of appropriating seminal fossil artefacts found here. The constructed tourist experience is itself fed by a larger emerging discourse to rearticulate the identity of the African

Perceptions around second generation female condoms: Reporting on women’s experiences.

This empirical study on the knowledge and perceptions of the female condom was cast against the assumption that the female condom could potentially be a powerful contraceptive tool whose use women could initiate and use against sexually transmitted diseases, and in so doing, allow them to exercise control over their bodies and sexuality, more especially within the context of the high prevalence rates of HIV/AIDS in the country. Many African women in rural spaces are faced with the situation when the male condom cannot always be comfortably demanded due to gendered power imbalances. This is where the promoting of female condoms may come into play. Against this background, we embarked on a large scale study that included 1,290 women in the greater KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) province in South Africa. The findings revealed that a staggeringly high number of African women surveyed and interviewed, who are potentially the beneficiaries that stand the most to gain from female-initiated contraception, have very little exposure and knowledge of the female condom

Indian women in marriage: When the sacred marriage thread becomes a noose.

Violence against women is a worldwide problem that transcends all boundaries – cultural, geographic, religious, social and economic. However, it is maintained that there are also added particular cultural ‘dynamics’ or constraints inherent in specific cultural groups. This focus attempts to sketch out the features of a category of Indian women who are assumed as being compelled by particular systemic cultural constraints or familial pressures to ‘play the dutiful wife’ at the expense of enduring sustained emotional and physical trauma. While there is extensive, even sensational reporting of violence within Indian families and against Indian wives in (predominantly Indian) tabloids, there is conversely less scholarly attention on this category of women and the dynamics and conflicts within Indian households. This piece focuses a narrow scrutiny on the Indian wife within abusive marriages. It looks at what is referred to as ‘culturally systemic’ violence and a certain commonality of marital discord and abuse experienced by Indian wives who live in extended families, and pays attention to the presence of the mother-in-law within the living arrangement

Editorial.

No abstract available

Glaring invisibility: dressing the body of the female cleaner.

The paper explores how the uniform of a group of female cleaners appears to be more than an abstract object framed by the practical exegetics of work. The uniform is seen as acting as a material exercise of discretionary and disciplinary power of inscription, and as the paper shows, emerges as a mode by which the cleaners are homogenously objectified and plastically turned into ‘subjects’ (Foucault 1982). The paper shows too that while the single layered cleaners’ uniform can be seen as disciplining the body and stripping down the complex multi-layers of their personality and attempting to naturalise their status as cleaners, the women’s narratives reveal their attempts to destabilise this conscription, if only outside the spatial and organisational domain of the work space

Queering women: disembedding the maternal script from woman and earth.

The paper is positioned inside the theistic tradition of Hinduism and approaches ‘body’ in the form of the Earth body and Woman body as masculine constructions in the sense that control is exercised over both these ‘bodies’. The paper queries these religiously connoted constructions, within Hinduism, and argues that they panoptically essentialise and mark women as child producing mothers, and are blind to the maternal objectification that strips other aspects of corporeality off the female body. Women are religiously ‘disciplined’ into having to biologically and socially fulfil a religiously authorized maternal role. There is thus a religiously sanctioned performance of discursive ‘othering’ or alterity that comes to be normatized. I argue that this conveniently confiscates much of the nurturing and mentoring responsibility away from the man, onto the woman in the same way as deifying the earth appears to work to remove ecological responsibility from us, with the claim that the ritually pure Earth Mother cannot be defiled. The paper attempts a queering of Hinduism and women by applying the deconstructive lens of queer theory in challenging both the feministic and eco-feministic assertions in Hinduism, and the congealed normatives around women and earth. The paper maintains that these normatives come to be naturalized through tradition. The genealogy of tradition creates and normalizes the ‘realities’ through textual history, which is in turn sustained by the genealogy of ritual praxis. The paper begins by pointing out that the claim of eco-feminism and environmental consciousness, within Hinduism, is routinely confused and conceptually entangled with the notion of bio-divinity. In the final analysis the paper queries the possibility of transforming feminisms in the context of the Hindu religious tradition, by ‘queering’ and re-signifying both woman and earth

Anthropology of experience : touring the past at Robben Island.

This paper has a transdisciplinary orientation and is located in both anthropology and tourism studies. It draws on the seminal theoretical work of the post structural anthropologist Victor Turner and brings to the study of tourism, the concepts of performance, memory and ‘experience’. The paper focuses on what the world has come to know as the place of incarceration for Nelson Mandela, and now declared a World Heritage Site and museum, established as the blurb goes, ‘as a poignant reminder to the newly democratic South Africa of the price paid for freedom’. The paper looks at the construction of the site of Robben Island Prison Museum, in Cape Town South Africa as a performance space for the reliving and experiencing of a collective shared past and history and probes how visitors to the site, experience the space. Methodologically the paper uses narrative analysis of tourists’ sharing stories of their visits in small focus type groups and in one-on-one interviews. It also draws on a thematic analysis of the visitor entries in a Visitors Book spanning a six month period of visits. The paper attempts to show that the site and constructed heritage product (or tour), emerges as a ‘liminal space’ where different racial categories of visitors, who have had differently shaped life histories, might be made to ‘experience’ a shared past of denial and oppression. Liminality speaks to a dislocation of structure and hierarchies, and by drawing on the ethnographic interviews of a randomised sample group of local and international visitors to the site, the paper shows that the visitor is placed into a liminal space by the manner in which the tour space is constructed and experienced