Arthur Kleinman

Veena Das

Margaret M. Lock

Pamela Reynolds

Mamphela Ramphele

Remaking a World completes a triptych of volumes on social suffering, violence, and recovery. Social Suffering, the first volume, deals with sources and major forms of social adversity, with an emphasis on political violence. The second, Violence and Subjectivity, contains graphic accounts of how collective experience of violence can alter individual subjectivity. This third volume explores the ways communities "cope" with—endure, work through, break apart under, transcend—traumatic and other more insidious forms of violence, addressing the effects of violence at the level of local worlds, interpersonal relations, and individual lives. The authors highlight the complex relationship between recognition of suffering in the public sphere and experienced suffering in people's everyday lives. Rich in local detail, the book's comparative ethnographies bring out both the recalcitrance of tragedy and the meaning of healing in attempts to remake the world.

Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery

Remaking a World

Where did we lose our idealism and why and at what cost?' In these conversations with people of a younger generation Mamphela Ramphele responds to the growing despair among young South Africans about the cracks that are appearing in our system of governance and threatening the idealism of the country that reinvented itself with the dawn of democracy in 1994. She shows incisively how successive post-apartheid ANC governments have betrayed the nation for a culture of impunity among those close to the seat of power, where corruption goes unremarked and accountability has been swept aside. Enduring poverty, inequity and a failing public service, most notably in health and education, are the results. At once challenging and encouraging, Ramphele urges young South Africans - our future leaders - to set aside their fears; to take control of their rights and responsibilities as citizens in upholding the values of the constitution; and to confront the growing inequality that is undermining good governance, social justice and stability.

Conversations with My sons and daughters

In the last three years the migrant labor hostels of South Africa, particularly those in the Transvaal, have gained international notoriety as theaters of violence. For many years they were hidden from public view and neglected by the white authorities. Now, it seems, hostel dwellers may have chosen physical violence to draw attention to the structural violence of their appalling conditions of life. Yet we should not lose sight of the fact that the majority of hostel dwellers are peace-loving people who have over the years developed creative strategies to cope with their impoverished and degrading environment. In this challenging study, Dr. Mamphela Ramphele documents the life of the hostel dwellers of Cape Town, for whom a bed is literally a home for both themselves and their families. Elaborating the concept of space in its many dimensions--not just physical, but political, ideological, social, and economic as well--she emphasizes the constraints exerted on hostel dwellers by the limited spaces they inhabit. At the same time, she argues that within these constraints people have managed to find room for manoeuvre, and in her book explores the emancipatory possibilities of their environment. The text is illustrated with a number of black-and-white photographs taken by Roger Meintjes in the townships and hostels.

Life in the Migrant Labour Hostels of Cape Town

A Bed Called Home

A collection of original essays that address the ways in which violence manifests itself on societal and interpersonal levels, analyzing how different kinds of violence are, and are not, interpreted on the world stage. By looking at hotspots of conflict, the contributors discuss the nature of violence in an age of worldwide "crisis management."

Mamphela Ramphele

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