How Deep is ?Deep Democracy?? Grassroots globalization from Mumbai to Cape Town

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From "medical miracles" to normal(ised) medicine : AIDS treatment, activism and citizenship in the UK and South Africa

This paper compares and contrasts the cultures of activism and illness and treatment experiences of UK and South African AIDS activists. By the 1990s AIDS public health discourse in the UK, and elsewhere in the West, was reconfiguring AIDS as a manageable chronic illness that could be treated much like diabetes. By contrast, the introduction of anti-retroviral therapy (ART) in the South African public health sector in 2000 was described using quasi-religious phrases and narratives: “the Lazarus effect” and “God’s gift of life.” The paper is concerned with investigating these significant differences between Northern and Southern experiences and responses to ARV treatment. It is specifically interested in the ways in which relatively easy access to treatment in the UK has, in certain cases, contributed towards the individualisation, medicalisation and “normalisation” of HIV/AIDS. For example, some of the UK activists I interviewed claimed that the availability of ART through the NHS had “killed activism”. The paper shows how the individualising and depoliticising medicalisation processes associated with NHS treatment programmes stand in stark contrast to South Africa, where the ongoing legal and political struggles for treatment access continue to strengthen and sustain collective forms of social activism and mobilisation. The paper explores the implications of these strikingly different treatment contexts, experiences and responses. These include differences in the availability and quality of treatment and health services, infection and mortality rates, socio-economic profile of PWAs, political cultures of activism, and contrasting government and activist responses to the pandemic. In sum, individualising and normalising processes of “medicalisation” associated with the NHS are increasingly, it would seem, becoming obstacles to collectivist forms of mobilisation

At the limits of spatial governmentality: a message from the tip of Africa

Urban studies scholars drawing on Foucault’s analysis of govern-mentality have investigated how urban social orders are increasingly moreconcerned with the management of space rather than on the discipline ofoffenders or the punishment of offences (Merry, 2001). This paper examines the‘rationality’ and efficacy of spatial governmentality in post-apartheid CapeTown, and shows how the city has increasingly become a ‘fortress city’ (Davis,1990), much like cities such as Los Angeles, Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro. These‘global cities’ are increasingly characterised by privatised security systems inmiddle class suburbs, shopping malls and gated communities (Caldeira, 1999).These spatial forms of governmentality draw on sophisticated security systemscomprising razor wire and electrified walls, burglar alarms and safe rooms, aswell as vicious guard dogs, neighbourhood watches, private security companies,and automated surveillance cameras

Letters of stone

Includes bibliographical references.As a young boy growing up in Port Elizabeth in the 1960s and 1970s, Steven Robins was haunted by an old postcard-size photograph of three unknown women on the mantelpiece. Only later did he learn that the women were his father’s mother and sisters, photographed in Berlin in 1937, before they were killed in the Holocaust. Having changed his name from Robinski to Robins, Steven’s father communicated nothing about his European past, and he said nothing about his flight from Nazi Germany or the fate of his family who remained there, until Steven, now a young anthropologist, interviewed him in the year before he died. Steven became obsessed with finding out what happened to the women in the photograph, but the information from his father was scant. The first breakthrough came when he discovered facts about their fates in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC and the Landesarchiv in Berlin, and the second when he discovered over a hundred letters sent to his father and uncle from the family in Berlin from 1936 to 1943. Steven was finally able to read the words of the women who before had been unnamed faces in a photograph. Letters of Stone tracks Steven’s journey of discovery about the lives and fates of the Robinski family. It is also a book about geographical journeys: to the Karoo town of Williston, where his father’s uncle settled in the late nineteenth century and became mayor; to Berlin, where Steven laid ‘Stumbling Stones’ (Stolpersteine) in commemoration of his family who were victims of the Holocaust; to Auschwitz, where his father’s siblings perished. It also explores the complicity of Steven’s discipline of anthropology through the story of Eugen Fischer, who studied the “Basters” who moved from the Karoo to Rehoboth in German South West Africa, providing the foundation for Nazi racial science; through the ways in which a mixture of nationalism and eugenics resulted in Jews being refused entry to South Africa and other countries in the 1930s; and via disturbing discoveries concerning the discipline of Volkekunde (Ethnology) at Steven’s own university Stellenbosch. Most of all, this book is a poignant reconstruction of a family trapped in an increasingly terrifying and deadly Nazi state, and about the immense pressure on Steven’s father in faraway South Africa, which forced him to retreat into silence