Respectable Mothers, Tough Men and Good Daughters

R. Salo

Description

The book examines how men and women in Manenberg township, on Cape Town�s inner periphery, manoeuvre to re-define themselves as gendered persons deserving of dignity, through the quotidian practices of ordentlikheid or respectability. Salo shows how reclamation of dignity is an intergenerational and gendered process that is messy and uneven, involves the expression of often-brutal physical and social exclusion of individuals through embodied and social violence. Theoretically, the narrative makes visible the careful, painstaking processes of place making and claiming dignity by men and women in a place represented as a wasteland in the dominant discourse of grand apartheid and in the contemporary neo-liberal turn in Cape Town.

Informations

• Publié par: Langaa RPCIG
• Date de parution: 08 septembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789956550388
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

It foregrounds the practice of living fieldwork—“in which the field is home”— that defines her work and decades-long commitment to mentorship, care, and advocacy of “Others” that has

‘The first to use the lens of respectability – ordentlikheid – in South African anthropology, Salo introduces us to the minutiae of quotidian life for those who self-define as unemployed and/or working class coloured men and women. Detailing the moral economy in Manenberg, she weaves locality, personhood (identity), respectability politics, hegemonic masculinity and intersectionality into an evocative text that resonates with authenticity and lucidity.’

‘Salo shows how differentiated notions of personhood are formed and how mothers, men, and young women understand and shape their life opportunities through concepts of respectability, motherhood, toughness, and sexuality. This will be a highly influential book.’

inner periphery, manoeuvre to re-define themselves as gendered persons deserving of dignity, through the quotidian practices of ordentlikheid or respectability. Salo shows how reclamation of dignity is an intergenerational and gendered process that is messy and uneven, involves the expression of often-brutal physical and social exclusion of individuals through embodied and social violence. Theoretically, the narrative makes visible the careful, painstaking processes of place making and claiming dignity by men and women in a place represented as a wasteland in the dominant discourse of grand apartheid and in the contemporary neo-liberal turn in Cape Town.

ELAINE R. SALO a feminist scholar and public intellectual, trained in anthropology at the University of Cape Town, completing her PhD at Emory University. She held positions at the University of the Western Cape, in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, from 1988 to 1999, moving to the University of Cape Town’s African Gender Institute from 2000 to 2008, before leaving to become director of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Pretoria from 2009 to 2013. She became an Associate Professor in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware, USA, in 2014.

Respectable Mothers, Tough Men and Good Daughters: Producing persons in Manenberg township South Africa

Elaine R. Salo

Respectable Mothers, Tough Men and Good Daughters: Producing persons in Manenberg township South Africa Elaine R. Salo

L a ng a a R esea rch & P u blishing CIG Mankon, Bamenda

Publisher: LangaaRPCIG Langaa Research & Publishing Common Initiative Group P.O. Box 902 Mankon Bamenda North West Region Cameroon [e-mail] www.langaa-rpcig.net Distributed in and outside N. America by African Books Collective [e-mail] www.africanbookscollective.com

ISBN-10: 9956-550-26-4

ISBN-13: 978-9956-550-26-5

©Elaine R. Salo 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher

Praise for Elain Salo and for this Book ‘To say that Elaine Salo’sRespectable Mothers, Tough Men and Good Daughters has been long-awaited is to signal both its importance and the conditions of its writing. Published posthumously, Salo’s book puts in print the culmination of a lifelong commitment to a profoundly intersectional black feminist praxis and the most ethical conduct in the writing of other people’s lives: in theorizing the processes of the making of persons and in the recognition of the constraints as well as the freedoms afforded people for self-authorship in the time of postapartheid.Respectable Mothers, Tough Men and Good Daughtersis not only long-awaited for the way it compels anthropology to rethink its method as theory and theory as ethics, but in the ways in which that very practice of living fieldwork—“in which the field is home”—defines Salo’s work not only on the printed page, but in a decades-long commitment to mentorship, care, and advocacy of “Others” that has reshaped the discipline. Such commitments emerge very clearly in the pages of this ethnography, which at one level simply describes the often brutal lives of women, men, and children living in Manenberg, Cape Town; and on the other, meticulously outlines the contradictions of their proximity to violence, dignity, and respectability.’ Anne-Maria Makhulu, Duke University, USA ‘If I was asked to use one word to describe Salo’s intersectional portrayal of personhood, alienation and hope in Rio Street, Manenberg it would be, compassionate. Through an intimate understanding of men and women, young and old, living in Rio Street, Salo coaxes the reader into her ethnographic account of deprivation, loss, creativity and respectability. The first to use the lens of respectability (ordentlikheid) in South African anthropology, she introduces us to the minutiae of quotidian life for those who self-define as unemployed and/or working class coloured men and women. Robbed of the identities vested in locality or place, Manenberg residents are compelled to create new forms of belonging and social networks when they are forcibly removed from their homes during apartheid, to a barren, windswept outpost. These networks, organized and led by older women (moeders), are invested with

communal power to ‘make persons’; to make those who were normally invisible to the apartheid state, and arguably continue to be invisible to the current democratic South African government, visible. Detailing the moral economy created by themoedersSalo weaves locality, personhood (identity), respectability politics, hegemonic masculinity and intersectionality into an evocative text that resonates with authenticity and lucidity. In Salo we had a compassionate, endearing, and humane feminist anthropologist whose keen intellect and gift for story-telling are on show here.’ Joy Owen, University of the Free State, South Africa ‘Elaine Salo’s compelling case study of Manenberg township in Cape Town brings to life the residents of Rio Street in the 1990s, examining how they negotiated the multiple systems of inequality – defined by gender, race, age, class, and history – that shaped their daily lives and social practice. Her subtle analysis shows how changing South African social policies created the economic and spatial environments in which Manenberg residents live and how residents have formulated notions of community, morality, and identity within those environments. Salo shows how differentiated notions of personhood are formed through daily interactions, social relations, and decisions made in real life contexts and constraints, and how mothers, men, and young women understand and shape their life opportunities through concepts of respectability, motherhood, toughness, and sexuality. Salo’s powerful analysis of personhood in Manenberg is important and long overdue -- Respectable Mothers, Tough Men and Good Daughterswill be a highly influential book.’ Corinne Kratz, Emory University, USA

Table of Contents Acknowledgements ..................................................... ix Preface ......................................................................... x Sophie Oldfield, African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town............................................................................. x Desiree Lewis, Women and Gender Studies, University of the Western Capexiii .................................................................. Chapter 1: Manenberg - An In-between Place with In-between People............................................ 1 A. Introduction........................................................................................ 1 B. Autobiography and the research context: On being the “native” anthropologist................................................. 7 C. Negotiating access to Manenberg ................................................... 11 D. Learning about mothering in Manenberg .....................................13 E. Theoretical debates about structure and agency in contemporary anthropology..................................15 F. Power, agency and structure............................................................. 15 G. Personhood, agency and power...................................................... 18 H. Personhood and agency in the context of a South African township ............................................ 25 Chapter 2: Making Race, Making Space: Locating Coloureds in South African History and Urban Planning............ 31 A. Discourse and debate about race on the margins ........................32 B. Coloured in relation to which other? Depends on where you’re coming from ............................................. 39 C. Segregation and apartheid – the makings of the racially exclusive nation .................................45 D. Unifying white identity – the era of segregation ....................................................................... 46 E. Making nations: apartheid’s imagined communities ..................................................................... 53 F. Racial stratification and urban space v

in Cape Town, 1800s – 1980s........................................................... 57 G. Manenberg and the racial ideology of apartheid after 1950....................................................................... 60 Chapter 3: Clearing the Wilderness: Defining Identity from Within .................................... 65 A. Coming to Manenberg: erased histories and displaced persons ........................................................................ 71 B. The loss of personhood and identity.............................................. 79 C. Peopling Manenberg: Stories of arrival.......................................... 82 D. Clearing the social and natural wilderness: Defining colouredness in the new place ............................................. 85 E. Defining identity from within local spaces: A view from the periphery within.................................................... 93 F. Thirty years after the move: The economic and cultural aspects of identity ....................................................... 96 G. The economic capital of local identity........................................... 97 H. The spatial and temporal capital of identity: defining local communities ............................................................... 100 Chapter 4: Making Mothers, Producing Persons: The Gendered Ideology of Orality and Space in the Local Community.............................................. 111 A. Gendering housing and welfare access, gendering household formation ....................................................... 112 B. Makingmoeders:A daughter’s rite of passage into adult womanhood ........................................................ 119 C. Policing the moral career: Maintaining respectable mothers ..................................................... 128 D.Ordentlikheid:the ideological scaffolding of the................................................... 139moral economy E. Graciousness under fire: Stoic mothers encounter the state ........................................................................... 144 F. The masks of respectability: Managing the suffering from within................................................ 147 G. Judging and mothering persons

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in the community .............................................................................. 150 H. Conclusion.......................................................................................... 158 Chapter 5: Mans is ma soe : Men, Moeders and Ideologies of Masculinity ...................... 161 A. Strong Bones: Making a coloured man.......................................... 162 B. Teaching Toughness: preparing boys for manhood ...................................................................................... 168 C. Becoming men through themoeders................................................ 170 D. Gendering boundaries, gendering persons: lesson in defining community......................................................... 171 E. Making‘n Ou: Gangs’ rites of passage............................................ 178 F.Ouens en Skollies: Respectable men and thugs ................................183 G. Claiming women, making fathers ................................................... 193 H. Conclusion.......................................................................................... 209 Chapter 6: Good Daughters: Incorporating young women into respectable personhood............................................... 211 A. Good daughters: Incorporating adolescent women intoordentlikheid.................................................................... 213 B. Respectable adolescent women in time and place..........................216 C. Becoming a working woman ............................................................. 223 D. Beyond the errand run and behind closed doors: Agency through the values and practices of respectability........................................................... 232 E.Onnosel en onbeskof: Young rebels challenging the boundaries ofordentlikhied......................................236 F. Conclusion............................................................................................. 241 Chapter 7: Taxi queens and glamorous gangsters: Emerging changes in Rio Street ................................................... 245 A. Taxi queens and glamorous gangsters: Emerging changes in Rio Street ..................................................... 245 B. Unravelling the economic scaffolding of local personhood............................................................................ 249

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C. Television programmes: Remaking race, remaking the nation ............................................. 251 D. Imagining the new femininity ......................................................... 257 E. Reconfiguring the masculine meanings of space in the local context ........................................................... 261 F. Conclusion........................................................................................... 263 Bibliography ................................................................ 275 Epilogue:A Tribute: Elaine Rosa Salo (1962-2016)................................................... 283 Kelly Gillespie, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of the Western Cape

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Acknowledgements This book is published in memory of Elaine Rosa Salo. It is dedicated to Jessica Salo and Miles Miller, who live Elaine’s legacy in so many beautiful ways, and to the women and men of Manenberg, who inspired Elaine’s life with wisdom and humour. Thank you to Colin Miller, Elaine’s partner, for his love and dedication and for his commitment, along with Elaine’s brothers, Ken and Bertram Salo, and sister-in-law Faranak Miraftab, to ensure the posthumous publication of this book. This book is based on Elaine’s doctoral thesis, completed in the Department of Anthropology at Emory University in the USA. Thank you to Corinne Kratz for her supportive, rigorous and always caring advising and to Ivan Karp, Randy Packard and Don Donham, members of Elaine’s dissertation committee. Thank you as well to the Department of Anthropology at Emory University for their financial support towards the editing of the book. The publication ofRespectable Mothers, Tough Men, and Good Daughters is the product of many caring hands. Thanks in particular to Zaide Harneker, who carefully read and copy-edited every word; to Francis Nyamnjoh, who wholeheartedly encouraged its publication and helped broker a relationship with Langaa Press; to Sophie Oldfield, who edited and helped shepard the manuscript to publication; to Desiree Lewis and Kelly Gillespie whose insights in the preface and epilogue, respectively, reflect in such meaningful ways on Elaine’s words, work and worlds. Thank you too to Koni Benson, Kelly Gillespie, Al Kagen, Corinne Kratz, Anne-Maria Makhulu, Francis Nyamnjoh and Joy Owen, dear colleagues and friends who participated in the initial planning of ways to publish this book following Elaine’s passing. And, lastly, thank you to many friends, students and colleagues at the Universities of the Western Cape, Cape Town, Pretoria, and Delaware, as well as elsewhere in the world, who inspired and were inspired by Elaine.

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