Space, society and culture: housing and local level politics in a section of Alexandra township, 1991-1992

[摘要] This thesis presents an analysis of the relationship between social processes, cognitiveunderstandings and the organisation of space, as this pertains to local-level politicsin a section of Alexandra township, South Africa, during 1991 and 1992. The contextof the thesis is the attempts by the Alexandra Civic Organisation and the Alexandrabranch of the African National Congress to elicit support from people living in formaland inform~i housing during a period of intense violence. The focus of theethnographylis on local-level civic structures and political leadership, which in someways support and in others contradict the aims and objectives of these twoorganisations.The reason for this internal political diversity is that local-level politics is embeddedwithin social maps - cognitive orderings of space that represent patterns of socialrelations and structures of power. This points to the main theoretical focus of thethesis: the interrelationship of space, culture and society in an urban context.Urbanism is conventionally defined in sociological and geographical terms as thearticulation between social process and urban spatial form. The thesis shows howanthropology can make a contribution to this field of study by incorporating a concernwith culture. The mutually constitutive relationship of urban space, culture andsociety presents a way of looking at urbanism that does not depend on a rural-urbandichotomy; a social. and cultural dualism which is conventionally fitted into amodernist narrative of urbanisation. The ethnography in the thesis demonstrates theinapplicability of this narrative, and the categories of rural tradition and urbanmodernity which it implies.Keywords: anthropology, urbanism, urbanisation, rural-urban dichotomy,space, Alexandra, politics, civic organisation, informal housing.

[发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand