Struggling to become : youth and the search for respectability in Khayelitsha, Cape Town

This is a story about the struggle to become. In detailing the everyday lives of a group of young men from Khayelitsha, this story provides a context for (or entry point into) a wider discussion about a generation of youth who have been born into precarious social environments bereft of toeholds on the ladder to social adulthood. These youth must attempt to come of age and live respectable lives within a politically saturated predicament of bleak prospects and socio-economic exclusion. Yet this is not a story of despair, but one of aspiration. It is an ethnographic account of what Patrick Chabal refers to as ‘the politics of suffering and smiling’: a delineation of dream and drama (Gondola, 1999) amidst precarity. Despite exclusion from the realms of work and power these young men jettison despondence, drawing on association to partake in theatres of sociability that provide them with new contexts for social mobility. It is within these novel ‘hierarchies of being’ (Fuh, 2012) that they are able to position themselves as eminent social actors (i.e. the dream) by acquiring valuable social capital through strategic performances of ritual and repertoire (i.e. the drama). By presenting a detailed ethnographic description of the theatres of sociability in which these young men enact their incarnation of eminence, this dissertation contributes to an emerging perspective on the role of association in the social fantasies and possibilities of youth in precarious situations. In this regard the primary goal of this dissertation is to provide an optic into young people’s navigation of precarity, focusing on how they draw on association to reconfigure the geographies of exclusion and inclusion as they chart trajectories from social dereliction to psychosocial redemption.

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Social Anthropology

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Stanford, Murray

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Fuh, Divine

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/13269

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/13269