Research Outputs (Architecture and Planning)

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2020 - 20222

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Start date: 2020Has files: Yes

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    The role of ritual in Southern African hunter-gatherer environmental adaptation
    (2022) Sechaba Maape
    Twentieth-century Southern African San hunter-gatherer communities are often depicted as a people who are environmentally fluid, adapting to climatic variability through mobility so as to ensure their survival. However, based on environmental psychology and phenomenology of place we also know that all humans possess the propensity to have a deep embodied attachment to place, and that change in place can cause a range of emotions between mild nostalgia to severe psychological and social crisis. Research has also demonstrated the centrality of ritual practices such as the trance dance in San culture and cosmology. This article aims to explore the phenomenological role rituals played in ensuring adaptability in the face of change, as well as providing the fundamental need for existential and psychological emplacement. Using literature from both environmental adaptation and ritual in San communities, as well as cultural neurophenomenology and embodiment as theoretical frameworks, the article will discuss how San rituals mediated people/place relationships as a means of coping with highly variable environments and change.
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    The role of ritual in Southern African hunter-gatherer environmental adaptation
    (2020) Sechaba Maape
    Twentieth-century Southern African San hunter-gatherer communities are often depicted as a people who are environmentally fluid, adapting to climatic variability through mobility so as to ensure their survival. However, based on environmental psychology and phenomenology of place we also know that all humans possess the propensity to have a deep embodied attachment to place, and that change in place can cause a range of emotions between mild nostalgia to severe psychological and social crisis. Research has also demonstrated the centrality of ritual practices such as the trance dance in San culture and cosmology. This article aims to explore the phenomenological role rituals played in ensuring adaptability in the face of change, as well as providing the fundamental need for existential and psychological emplacement. Using literature from both environmental adaptation and ritual in San communities, as well as cultural neurophenomenology and embodiment as theoretical frameworks, the article will discuss how San rituals mediated people/place relationships as a means of coping with highly variable environments and change.
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    Local Councillors: scapegoats for a dysfunctional participatory democratic system? Lessons from practices of local democracy in Johannesburg.
    (Critical Dialogue: Public Participation in Review., 208) Benit Gbaffou, Claire
    This paper starts with the study of participation patterns in different neighbourhoods in Johannesburg, and demonstrates that institutional channels (be it representative democracy, or various participatory institutions and instruments) are currently not working in Johannesburg. Be it in low income or high-income areas, suburbs or townships, residents have to resort to other means, sidelining in particular their ward councillor, to be heard. We question the reasons for this lack of bottomup dialogue, focusing on the figure of the ward councillor as a supposedly key link between residents and local government, but however not able to play his/her role. We contest the dominant vision that the failure of participatory democracy in South Africa is the consequence of a lack of training, education or democratic culture, and we argue that both the limited power of ward councillors in Council, and the lack of incentive for fostering their accountability in front of voters, make local democracy institutions dysfunctional. More broadly, we question the lack of importance of participatory democracy in the ANC and in the government agenda, despite the political discourses claiming the contrary.