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‘Temporary’ relocation: Spaces of contradiction in South African law
Abstract
Purpose
– This study aims to examine how temporary relocation areas (TRAs), urban forms that facilitate evictions and forced relocations, have been written into South African legal and governmental structures through contested urban planning and legal regimes.
Design/methodology/approach
– Proceeding from the macro-scale of TRAs spread across the nation, to the mezzo-scale of the Delft Symphony Way TRA in Cape Town, to the micro-scale of an individual “blikkie” (housing unit) within this camp, the article looks at the form and function of the TRA in urban resettlement practices. Special attention is given to relocation areas’ designation as “temporary” spaces and the consequences of this temporal designation in law and on the ground.
Findings
– These sites have developed as technologies for negotiating competing demands on the state, and their presence foregrounds some of the deeply rooted contradictions in post-apartheid South Africa. They are places both within and apart from the city, often managed by city officials according to municipal specifications, but located proximally to key urban amenities, utilities services and employment centers. They also place contradictory demands on their residents, for whom making the TRA liveable also legitimates it as a form of housing.
Originality/value
– This article uncovers several concerns about TRAs, including their inadequacy for long-term settlement, their problematic usage as tools of dispossession and the spatial-material-legal imbrications by which TRAs exist, persist and act back upon both individual lives and policy spheres.
... As I demonstrate in the previous section, even if inadequately housed residents were willing to wait, there is no feasible way for them to do so. TRAs are mostly at capacity, and besides, they are notoriously undesirable (Levenson, 2018;Ranslem, 2015). The extent of overcrowding means that staying with friends or relatives is not always possible. ...
... Often, this means potential inclusion in one of the state-run temporary encampments (TRAs) discussed above. These are widely despised by residents in Cape Town, viewed as particularly dangerous and overcrowded (Ranslem, 2015). At the very least, they sever residents from their existing social networks, substantially impacting their livelihood strategies (Levenson, 2018). ...
In South Africa, the scale of rural–urban resettlement after apartheid continues to overwhelm the capacity of the government to house city dwellers in need of shelter. But the legitimacy of the postapartheid government rests on its ability to secure the rights of citizens who enjoy constitutional guarantees, including the right to housing. Because the government cannot simply repress this unhoused surplus population, it seeks instead to delegitimize some portion of it. It does so by developing a number of moralizing discourses, the subject of this paper, which distinguish between patient, deserving citizens, and unruly queue jumpers perceived to threaten the democratic project itself. Housing officials misrecognize squatters as a cause, rather than a consequence, of the state's failure to deliver, policing new land occupations with a draconian severity. They justify such repression in the name of protecting the democratic order, which is assumed to require waiting instead of improvisation.
... TRAs potentially exacerbate social isolation and atomisation (Macgregor et al., 2007;Pillay et al., 2017), as well as failing to actually serve as transitional means towards more adequate housing (Chance, 2015;Ranslem, 2015). Rather, they reinscribe squatting as an adequate form of shelter, accompanying a larger shift in South African housing policy from actual housing delivery to self-help housing schemes. ...
... These unregistered settlements -called 'land invasions' by the state -were viewed as both a human rights emergency as well as a blight on the city's status as 'world-class'. In Johannesburg, TRAs went under the name 'decant camps', and they were frequently deployed in situations of environmental hazard (Ramutsindela, 2002;Ranslem, 2015). Most commonly, new land occupations took place on land prone to dolomitic sinkholes, and safeguarding against potential collapse would require the installation of expensive concrete slabs under all new shack settlements. ...
Dispossession need not be the product of malicious intentions or a deliberate programme of accumulation. As I argue in this article, it may paradoxically be the consequence of social spending, or what I call dispossession through delivery. Using as a case study the proliferation of temporary relocation areas (TRAs) in post-apartheid Cape Town, I show how what appears as adequate housing from the municipal government’s perspective exacerbates social isolation, perpetuates squatting and aggravates unemployment, transport costs and interpersonal violence. I draw on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in TRAs and land occupations, NGO reports and interviews with housing officials to understand dispossession through delivery in these relocation sites. While TRAs began as emergency housing in cases of environmental catastrophes, they have become regularised as a form of state-provisioned housing even in non-emergency situations and, above all, in cases of land occupations. They are but one of a range of technologies of delivery that facilitate dispossession, and I conclude this article with a discussion of how formal housing distribution and informal settlement upgrading have similar effects. When these various technologies of delivery are understood as bound together in a single articulation, ‘dispossession through delivery’ challenges the standard opposition between neoliberalism and social spending that characterises much of the literature and begins to map novel socio-spatial effects of one trajectory of urbanisation in a Southern city.
... These sites have been labelled inhumane and unjust for their living conditions and location. Criticism centres on their distance from residents' communities, schools, and places of work; overcrowding; small, non-secure, leaking and uninsulated shacks; as well as crime and the lack of amenities such as police stations and hospitals (Pillay et al., 2017;Ranslem, 2015;Cirolia, 2014). ...
Community psychology is deeply committed to the liberation and wellbeing of communities. Seemingly missing from the discipline, however, is an explicit interrogation of coloniality. In keeping with the decolonial process, one paradigm that allows for the disruption of hegemonic knowledge is Participatory Action Research (PAR). PAR facilitates opportunities for critical consciousness, self and collective determination, shared decision-making, and social change as defined by communities. This chapter engages two questions: What does it mean to decolonise PAR within community psychology? What are key elements toward the development of a decolonial PAR praxis? Pursuing these questions requires centering decolonial Global South and Indigenous cosmologies in relation to a PAR paradigm. PAR in community psychology must disrupt the coloniality of power. Thus, to engage with elements of decoloniality this chapter proposes ten axioms toward a decolonial PAR praxis in community psychology that align with the decolonial turn.
... As a result, little attention has been given to the governance dynamics of temporary relocation during urban regeneration. What we know about temporary relocation derives mainly from studies of disasters such as flooding or earthquake (Caia, Ventimiglia, & Maass, 2010;Ranslem, 2015). ...
Stadterneuerung in Ghana ist seit Jahren auch durch den Widerstand von Bürgerinnen und Bürgern geprägt. Auf der Grundlage einer qualitativen Analyse und Fallstudie zur Sanierung von Marktinfrastrukturen in Kumasi und Cape Coast zeigt diese kumulative Dissertation, dass es zum besseren Verständnis der Ursachen von zivilem Widerstand insbesondere Aufmerksamkeit für die Qualität der Governance-Prozesse selbst bedarf. Marktsanierungsprojekte in Ghana sind durch fünf Prozessphasen geprägt: Scoping, Planung, Finanzierung, Standortverlagerung und -zuweisung. In allen Phasen lassen sich jeweils anders gelagerte Kombinationen aus staatlichen Praktiken des Klientelismus und Neoliberalismus, des Aktivismus nichtstaatlicher Akteure sowie externer, globale und entwicklungsorientierter Investitionspraktiken internationaler und bilateraler Agenturen beobachten. In jeder Phase der Stadterneuerung spiegeln sich städtische Governance-Politiken, auf die wiederum stadt-politische Akteure mit Interventionen reagieren, um diesen Politiken entgegen zu wirken. Konzeptionell trägt die vorliegende Studie zu verschiedenen Diskursen bei: eine multidimensionale analytische Rahmung der geographischen Handelsforschung mit Fokus auf Märkte; eine Betrachtung von Aktivismus als zusätzlicher Dimension der städtischen Governance; die Auseinandersetzung mit politisch induzierter Verdrängung durch staatliche Handlungsweisen als alternativem Konstrukt zur Analyse von marktinduzierten Verdrängungsprozessen; und einen Beitrag zu Debatten um städtische Effekte ausländischer Direktinvestitionen. Die Ergebnisse können integrative Stadtentwicklung und eine nachhaltige Existenzgrundlage urbanen Zusammenlebens im anglophonen Westafrika fördern. Weitere Forschung wird empfohlen, um ein Verständnis für die Governance-Prozesse und die Dynamiken städtischer Infrastrukturentwicklung in der Subregion zu generieren.
... A pobreza e o desemprego continuam concentrados nas antigas áreas dos bantustões, mas com uma tendência de crescimento cada vez maior nos assentamentos informais periurbanos, a saber, "povoados" negros com condições de moradia similares às "shanty towns" ou "favelas" dos países menos favorecidos do mundo, e com um alto fluxo de migrantes africanos internos e transfronteiriços. São pessoas pobres que foram despejadas, uma vez que suas casas estavam na linha de frente da privatização de habitação, pela gentrificação urbana ou por prestigiosos projetos governamentais; esses pobres se concentraram, sempre e de novo, nos "blikkies" (barracos de ferro ondulado) das chamadas "áreas de realocação temporária" (Ranslem, 2015). ...
Resumo O artigo discute a precariedade como um ponto de convergência para a resistência, assim como uma condição social ligada à transição da elite na África do Sul pós-apartheid. Concentrando-se nas forças sistêmicas que impulsionam pobreza, desigualdade e meios de subsistência precários, o artigo aborda a transformação da força de trabalho da África do Sul e seu sistema migratório desde uma gestão centralizada de trabalho não-livre pela burocracia estatal do apartheid para um Estado de precariedade pós-apartheid movido pela “flexploitation”. O nexo entre trabalho precário e uma cidadania dividida é visto como um "dualismo da flexibilidade" que liga práticas de emprego e controle do trabalho a áreas como benefícios sociais, status de cidadania, participação política e meios de subsistência informais. Isso é aplicável tanto aos migrantes como aos nativos, sendo os migrantes particularmente "flexíveis". O autor conecta a questão da precariedade com a política da xenofobia, vista como um estratagema para a manutenção de uma hegemonia política pós-apartheid no enfrentamento das desafiadoras lutas laborais e uma cidadania insurgente dos pobres.
... It currently houses roughly 1800 structures (cf. Ranslem, 2015). Other major TRAs on the Cape Flats include Bosasa, Tsunami (just across the road from Blikkiesdorp), Langa Intersite, and Happy Valley. ...
This article demonstrates how popular struggles over housing distribution lead to the transformation of the welfare state. In post-apartheid South Africa, municipal governments distribute free, formal housing to recipients registered on waiting lists. But as formally rational distribution fails to keep pace with growing demand, residents begin to organize mass land occupations. Municipalities respond to these land struggles by either organizing repression, making clientelistic exceptions, or providing transitional housing in temporary relocation areas (TRAs). The growth of TRAs – a direct response to land occupations – signals the institution of a new form of housing distribution alongside the old: substantively rational delivery. This argument engages recent work on the rise of new welfare states in the global South, demonstrating the limits of viewing social expenditure in narrowly quantitative terms. Instead, drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Cape Town, it interrogates the emergence of qualitatively novel logics of distribution.
... Poverty and unemployment remain concentrated in former Bantustan areas, but increasingly tilt towards peri-urban informal settlements; black 'townships' with conditions similar to 'shanty towns' or 'favelas' in the globe's least favoured states, and with a high inflow of internal as well as African cross-border migrants. Poor people who have been evicted, as their homes have been seized on the frontlines of housing privatization, gentrification or governmental prestige projects, have, time and again, become concentrated in the 'blikkies' (new-build corrugated iron shacks) of depressing so-called 'temporary relocation areas' (Ranslem, 2015). ...
The article focuses on systemic drivers of poverty, inequality and precarious livelihoods. It discusses the transformation of South Africa's labour force management and its migratory system from a centralized management of unfree labour by the apartheid state bureaucracy, to a post-apartheid state of precarity, driven by 'flexploitation'. The nexus of precarious work and a fracturing citizenship is seen to represent a duality of flexibility linking practices of employment and labour control to areas like welfare benefits, citizenship status, political participation and informal livelihoods. This is applicable to migrants and natives alike, but with migrants being particularly flexible. The author connects the issue of precarity with politics of xenophobia seen as a stratagem for the retaining of hegemony confronting looming labour struggles and an insurgent citizenship of the poor. The argument revolves around precarity as representing a rallying point for resistance as well as a social condition.
While spatial apartheid is no longer formally maintained in Cape Town, South Africa, it seems at times to be bolstered by a “colonial spatial imaginary”. This concept, which is introduced in this chapter, encompasses collective perceptions and values that shape place identities, construct belonging in different places, and normalise associated spatial patterns and activities. In this chapter, we trace the colonial spatial imaginary through Cape Town’s colonial era to the present, to reinforce the relevance of urban space to the work of decolonial community psychologists. Drawing on the findings of a Participatory Action Research project with members of Reclaim the City, we aim to understand how the movement challenges eviction and displacement from the gentrifying suburb of Woodstock in Cape Town. In particular, by seeking to analyse Reclaim the City’s multi-faceted work as a decolonial enactment of community psychology, we examine how its creative praxis enables members to challenge the colonial spatial imaginary and build alternative spatial imaginaries.
The City of Cape Town has used and continues to use the Temporary Relocation Areas as a tool to tackle homelessness and poor housing conditions. Relocation is nothing new in South Africa, but the use of Temporary Relocation Areas represents a shift in how the state attempts to fulfil their constitutional obligations to realize the right to adequate housing for all, with unclear long-term implications. Temporary Relocation Areas are not planned or built to house individuals for an extensive period of time. This has however proven to be inconsistent with the existing on the ground experience and has caused prominently poor social conditions for the people living there. Therefore, the aim of the study is to explore and clarify how power and planning rationality form tensions between planning intentions and reality, between vision and real life by studying the social effects of living in the Symphony Way Temporary Relocation Area in Delft. This is based on a qualitative field research conducted in the Symphony Way Temporary Relocation Area. The analysis has displayed that relocations are very complex as it has a wide range of adverse, unintended consequences, such as disruption of livelihoods and social networks.
This chapter presents a comprehensive review of housing institutions in South Africa. Since the end of apartheid, the political leadership has had the task of meeting a huge housing backlog and doing so in a way that is sensitive to cultural expectations, is manageable in a developing country with low capacity, and that empowers Africans through homeownership within the framework of the prevailing spatially segregated urban form. The South African Constitution codifies housing as a human right. An initial goal of the government was to create housing policies that provided compact and equitable cities. Despite the well-intended ambitions, there have been manifold problems associated with the delivery of both quantity and quality of government-provided homes. These problems range from what comprises housing, to the legality of land occupation, to the institutionalization of citizenship, and South Africans are left waiting for the state to fulfill their housing promise. The chapter concludes that, despite the extensive and progressive nature of housing provision in the country’s founding document, the South African state has failed to live up to its promises to the poor to provide housing and equality of opportunity. Apartheid-era spatial segregation persists across South African metropolitan areas, despite progressive policies. While this can be partially attributed to the ambitious nature of the constitution, there have also been fundamental flaws in the policy mechanisms developed by the state.
The article discusses migration, precarity and poor people’s mov ements. It relates a reproduction of poverty and unfree labour in postapartheid South Africa to shifting race-class alliances and the constitution
of political hegemony under variable historical-structural conditions. It charts the development of migrancy system from apartheid’s centrally managed labour regime to a post-apartheid neoliberal regime driven by policies of «flexploitation». A contentious enigma of «xenophobia» is related to nation and citizenship in the remaking of hegemony in an exceedingly unequal society where poor people’s movements carve out spaces of an «insurgent citizenship» beyond the reach of neoliberal governance. The author asks whether a reconstituted South African left, with the anti-apartheid coalition’s Freedom Charter as a memorandum for current struggles, will be able to advance a renaissance of «people power» at a junction where migration, xenophobia and winning the loyalty of an unruly precariat have become increasingly crucial stratagems?
Because there is little literature about how law and space may be related, this has led to the notion that these two concepts should be separate from each other. However, there have been some notions that demonstrate how law is concerned with space and geography. Also, this chapter realises that both respects have embraced the notion of hybridity since law may be integrated with history, literature, economics, and other such aspects while geography has already been able to generate certain subdisciplinary fields. This chapter attempts to explain how law and geography may together create a novel discipline since such may be derived from various intellectual blockages such as how law and space are distinguished from what we commonly refer to as 'society'. As the chapter attempts to establish a validity for this field, the text also looks into certain insights that can be attained from thought that may also go beyond the law/space binary.
Small, home-based grocery stores, known as spaza shops, are ubiquitous throughout the township areas of urban South Africa, constituting an important business in the informal economy. In recent years, this retail market has become a site of fierce competition between South African shopkeepers and foreign entrepreneurs, especially Somalis, and is often cited in the media as one reason behind the xenophobic attacks on foreigners. Drawing on original data collected in the Delft township in the city of Cape Town, this paper demonstrates that foreign entrepreneurs, overwhelmingly Somalis, have come to own around half of the sizeable spaza market in Delft in the last five years. This increase is attributable to larger scale and price competitive behaviour as these entrepreneurs operate collectively in terms of buying shops, and stock, as well as in stock distribution. Also important are some more customer friendly services too. Compared to the more 'survivalist' local business model where individual owners look to supplement existing household income rather than generate an entire livelihood, the Somali business model has rapidly outcompeted local owners, bringing spaza prices down and forcing many locals to rent out their shop space to foreign shopkeepers. Consequently, while South African shopkeepers resent the Somali influx, most consumers appreciate the better prices and improved service. The rise of Somali shopkeepers thus represents a transformation of business practice in the spaza sector from survivalist to entrepreneurial modes. [End Page 47]
Taking its cue from the worldwide proliferation of struggles for access to the city, this paper aims to assess the impact of globalized neoliberalism on the juridico-legal techniques of contemporary urban governmentalities and to inquire into the ways in which such techniques can be resisted. It suggests that at least in urban contexts, the police order that, according to Foucault, was largely superseded by the modern liberal technologies of governing through freedom, today seems to be rather active. Arguably, global cities' competition for capital promoted by the globalized neoliberal economic order and its imperative to actively intervene in producing the market, pairs up conveniently with the detailed methods of regulating the early modern West. On the other hand, the self-limitation of governmental reason originating in the political economic criticism of the police state equips governance with the means of voluntary impotence and, placing the management of the economy at the centre of governmental activity, it increasingly adapts law to social and economic processes. While, according to Rancière, these tendencies lead to the effacement of the gaps between legal inscriptions and social realities, and thus tend to impede the occurrence of the political, in interpreting the struggles of South African shack dwellers, the paper aims to illustrate how inscriptions of equality may nevertheless trigger the political disruption of urban biopolitics.
Physical violence, whether realized or implied, is important to the legitimation, foundation, and operation of a Western property regime. Certain spatializations—notably those of the frontier, the survey, and the grid—play a practical and ideological role at all these moments. Both property and space, I argue, are reproduced through various enactments. While those enactments can be symbolic, they must also be acknowledged as practical, material, and corporeal.
Given the history of South Africa, which has resulted in a significantly skewed pattern of access to scarce resources in favor
of a wealthy racial minority, the issue of access to land and shelter is a central and emotive one. It is also a potential
arena of conflict and social and political divisions. It is therefore important to understand, monitor, and resolve these
conflicts. This paper is the first in a series of case studies, drawn from within greater Cape Town, which examine conflicts
over land and housing and how these conflicts are being managed. This case is that of Wallacedene, a primarily informal settlement
in the north of the city, which has been the subject of an informal settlement upgrading process. Different forms of conflict
occur over the life cycle of an informal settlement. Community-based institutions form an essential component of conflict
management strategies. However, there have to be checks and balances on how these institutions operate. Moreover, accurate,
local level records of transactions in land rights, which are often informal transactions, are an essential part of land and
housing delivery.
The UN’s Millennium Development Target to improve the lives of 100 million ‘slum’ dwellers has been inappropriately communicated as a target to free cities of slums. Cities with ‘Slums’: From informal settlement eradication to a right to the city in Africa traces the proliferation of this misunderstanding across several African countries, and explains how current urban policy, with its heightened focus on urban competitiveness and associated urban policy norms, encourages this interpretation. The cases it presents cover a range of conflicts between poor urban residents and the local and national authorities that seek to curtail their ‘right to the city’. It offers disturbing insights into post-apartheid South Africa’s urban trajectory, with uneasy parallels in other African countries, both in the form of ‘slum’ eradication drives and in ambitious, but flawed, flagship pilot projects. The book aims to inspire a wider understanding of, sympathy for and solidarity with struggles against informal settlement eradication in South Africa and beyond, and argues that the right to the city, in its original conception, has direct relevance for urban contestations in Africa today.
This paper examines the turn to considerations of property in arguments regarding the commons and the human right to water. It identifies commitments to liberalism in political economy approaches to property and human rights and develops a matrix for identifying non-liberal conceptions of the commons. The latter holds potential for an agonistic politics in which human rights are compatible with ecological sensibilities regarding the dynamics of conflict and cooperation in complex systems.
Critical legal geography is practised by an increasing number of scholars in various disciplines, but it has not had the benefit of an overarching theoretical framework that might overcome its currently rather ad hoc character. The Spatial, the Legal and the Pragmatics of World-Making remedies this situation. Presenting a balanced convergence of contemporary socio-legal and critical geographic scholarship, David Delaney offers a ground-breaking contribution to the fast growing field of legal geography. Drawing on strands of critical social studies that inform both of these areas, this book has three primary components. First, it introduces a framework of interpretation and analysis centred on the productive neologisms 'nomosphere' and 'nomoscapes'. Nomosphere refers to the cultural-material environs that are constituted by the reciprocal materialization of 'the legal' and the legal signification of the 'socio-spatial'. Nomoscapes are the spatio-legal expression and the socio-material realization of ideologies, values, pervasive power orders and social projects. They are extensive ensembles of legal spaces within and through which lives are lived and, here, these neologisms are related to the more familiar notions of governmentality and performativity. Second, these neologisms are explored and applied through a series of illustrations and extensive case studies. Demonstrating their utility for scholars and students in relevant disciplines, these 'empirical' studies concern: the public and the private; property and land tenure; governance; the domestic and the international; and legal-spatial confinements and containments. Third, these studies contribute to an ongoing theorization of the experiential, situated pragmatics of 'world-making'. The role of nomospheric projects and counter-projects, techniques and operations is therefore emphasized. Much of what is experientially significant about how the world is as it is and what it's like to be in the world directly implicates the dynamic interplay of space, law, meaning and power. The Spatial, the Legal and the Pragmatics of World-Making provides the interpretive resources necessary for discerning and understanding the practices and projects involved in this interplay.
This article seeks to give an outline of the key events in the unfolding struggle in Mandela Park, Cape Town, South Africa, against evictions and disconnections from water and electricity. It also seeks to situate this sketch of the emergence and trajectory of these struggles in a broader narrative about the Post-Apartheid State’s turn to neo-liberalism. We argue that, in certain instances, the increased political legitimacy of the State, consequent to the elite transition from apartheid to neo-liberalism, has enabled it to step-up attacks on the poor. Furthermore, we also argue that some of the new movements that have emerged to oppose neo-liberalism mark a new stage in the South African struggles: against the elitism of the ANC tradition, they believe that, in Fanon’s famous phrase, ‘the only magic hands are the hands of the people’. However we caution that, largely as a result of the strains and difficulties of organizing under growing state repression, there is a danger that new forms of authoritarianism could emerge and pose a serious risk to the growth and development of the rebellion begun by these new movements.
This paper analyzes at the level of space the invention and management of homelessness in postsocialist cities. Based on more than a year of ethnographic fieldwork in a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that provides shelter space in Bucharest, Romania, this paper foregrounds the political significance of placing homeless populations to better understand neoliberal governance as a set of spatially minded practices, arguing (ultimately) that space is a key domain through which homeless populations become managed. This paper, in the end, focuses on 'the place' of homelessness to bring the dynamics of postsocialist liberalization into clearer relief.
In this paper I sketch some of the practical connections between two kinds of displacement: experiential-material displacement and discursive or metaphorical displacement. I examine these connections in the context of legal struggles over the eviction of families from public housing. The evictions were authorized on the basis of interpretations of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 (the 'One Strike and You're Out' law) which allows public-housing authorities to evict blameless tenants if anyone in their family had been convicted of drug possession. The paper introduces a neologism, 'the nomosphere', and offers suggestions as to its utility for advancing the project of critical legal geography.
This article considers anew the utility of rights-discourse in alleviating social hardship. It revisits the Critical Legal Studies-inspired debates on the topic, but in the context of justiciable socioeconomic rights, such as those found in the South African Constitution. The article explains the "emptiness" of the socioeconomic rights jurisprudence of the South African Constitutional Court by comparing the South African socioeconomic rights narrative to Peter Gabel's account of the manner in which rights discourse enables the status quo to assimilate and defeat social movements. By doing this, the article shows that socioeconomic rights are accomplices to, rather than victims of, the sidelining of the needs they represent, despite their transformative potential. However, since rights remain one of the only viable political tools through which denial of socioeconomic needs may effectively be confronted, we should not abandon rights-discourse but should instead attempt to translate abstract socioeconomic guarantees into concrete legal entitlements.
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This article analyzes the temporalities that emerge in interactions before the tribal court of the Hopi Indian Nation. Particular attention will be paid to the interdiscursive strategies employed by courtroom interlocutors negotiating between adherence to Anglo-legal notions of fact and norm, and the narratives of Hopi tradition regularly raised by litigants in property dispute hearings. It will be argued that such negotiations are at once central to the “sovereign time” that contemporary Hopi law instantiates for the Hopi Nation, but also stand in a complex relationship to the temporalities generated by the “storied moments” of Hopi litigants' tradition discourses. The effect is that these traditions get legally framed as sometimes near to, sometimes far from, the lives and times of Hopi people today. In conclusion, it will be suggested that similar tensions of norm and fact resound in certain critical assessments of anthropology in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly those that focus on the implicit orientations to time and temporality that rest at the heart of ethnography's representational practices and the authority they generate. [time; tradition; law; interdiscursivity; Hopi]
This article studies space-time as revealed in narrative, especially narrative intended to validate truth claims. Narrative plot is uniquely suited to capturing truths about time, causal complexity, and space. Bakhtin's “chronotope” (space-time), which bridges plot, narrated events, and the real world, is critical to understanding this capacity, whether in fiction, in histories, or in didactic stories, myths, and parables. The chronotope is underutilized in the social sciences, but disputes over indigenous land in Canada exemplify its potential applications. To fully capture these heteroglot (“many-voiced”) conflicts, factual verification should not be the only test of a narrative's truthfulness.
This paper aims to show the reverse side of the (football) medal. The N2 gateway project in Cape Town is presented, by government
and media, as a ‘flagship’ project of the new Breaking New Ground strategy, to fight the housing backlog of 400,000 houses
in the city. But I want to argue that the fast-tracking of the project has to be understood as a beautification strategy to
prepare the city for 2010. Massive slum eradication and the construction of ‘beautiful formal housing opportunities’ between
the airport and the mother city are becoming a painful reminder of the forced removals under the apartheid regime.
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