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.
Access Agreement
Open Access
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Miller, Killian Richard, "Sanctioned Silencing, Symbolic Resistance: Race, Space, and Dispossession in a Marginalized South African Community" (2016). Senior Projects Spring 2016. 158.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2016/158
This work is protected by a Creative Commons license. Any use not permitted under that license is prohibited.
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