Date of Submission

Spring 2016

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Anthropology; Africana Studies

Project Advisor 1

Yuka Suzuki

Project Advisor 2

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College

My field work and the written portion of my ethnography work through issues of marginality, state apparatuses, illusions of freedom, and making meaning in a context of oppression. All these power dynamics are historically-situated within the cultural context and community of Hangberg, a place forged by the race-based forced removals of Apartheid. British and Dutch colonization, Apartheid's racial regime, and the post-Apartheid oligarchical state, are all historical and contemporary authoritative forces that are impacting the everyday lives of people in Hangberg. Perspectives of power also serve as examples that the people of Hangberg embody by appropriating state power and dominant historical narratives in order to subvert the restrictions embedded within, for example, the law, such as building a home against a court mandate that disallows the existence of new structures. The people of Hangberg are delegitimizing a state-endorsed system of progressive displacement that tries to determine their economic means, access to infrastructural resources, and political and social organization, not through direct action, but forms of resistance layered into their practices of everyday life.

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