scholarly journals Narrating Memory: Weighing up the Testimony

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 31-43
Author(s):  
Jan K. Coetzee
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Political Prisoner ◽  
Prison Sentence ◽  
Life World ◽  
Individual Attribute ◽  
Nelson Mandela ◽  
Subjective Interpretation ◽  
Individual Memory ◽  
The Individual

Memory is the ability to store, maintain and recall information and experiences. Although predominantly an individual attribute, memory coincides with the life-world, with consciousness and with the ability to define reality – all of which are shared with others. When analysing narratives the sociologist needs to situate individual memory within its broader context. The article follows the argument that individuals acquire their memories within a broader social context. They also recall and localise their memories within a broader social context. This article interprets a remarkable testimony: the story of a former political prisoner who circumcised a large number of young fellow inmates in the notorious prison on Robben Island, South Africa, during the period of Nelson Mandela‟s incarceration. The article relates the narrative in question to the life-world of the narrator and to his experiences whilst serving his 18-year prison sentence. It reflects on the epistemological questions regarding memories. Memory as recollection, as reconstruction of events and information, and as process of re-membering come under the spotlight. Narratives that are often repeated start taking on a life of their own – particularly in the case of trauma memories. When analysing these narratives, the sociologist needs to distinguish between objective markers and subjective interpretation. Memory does not constitute pure recall by the individual. The article illustrates the effect of intersubjective and collective factors on the process of remembering. It calls for a reflexive process to identify, re-interpret and unpack the process of remembering.

The Final ‘Thank You’

Derrida Today ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-36
Author(s):  
Grant Farred
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Political Transition ◽  
The Other ◽  
World Cup ◽  
The Core ◽  
Nelson Mandela ◽  
Black President ◽  
The Moment

‘The Final “Thank You”’ uses the work of Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Nietzsche to think the occasion of the 1995 rugby World Cup, hosted by the newly democratic South Africa. This paper deploys Nietzsche's Zarathustra to critique how a figure such as Nelson Mandela is understood as a ‘Superman’ or an ‘Overhuman’ in the moment of political transition. The philosophical focus of the paper, however, turns on the ‘thank yous’ exchanged by the white South African rugby captain, François Pienaar, and the black president at the event of the Springbok victory. It is the value, and the proximity and negation, of the ‘thank yous’ – the relation of one to the other – that constitutes the core of the article. 1

‘A Routh O’ Auld Nick-Nackets’ – the antiquarian collection of John Rae

2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Moral Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Representative Case ◽  
National Museums ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The University

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.

Fulfilling the Right to Food for South Africa: Justice, Security, Sovereignty and the Politics of Malnutrition

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 112-152
Author(s):  
Busiso Helard Moyo ◽  
Anne Marie Thompson Thow
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Food Justice ◽  
System Transformation ◽  
Right To Food ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Right

Despite South Africa’s celebrated constitutional commitments that have expanded and deepened South Africa’s commitment to realise socio-economic rights, limited progress in implementing right to food policies stands to compromise the country’s developmental path. If not a deliberate policy choice, the persistence of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in all its forms is a deep policy failure.  Food system transformation in South Africa requires addressing wider issues of who controls the food supply, thus influencing the food chain and the food choices of the individual and communities. This paper examines three global rights-based paradigms – ‘food justice’, ‘food security’ and ‘food sovereignty’ – that inform activism on the right to food globally and their relevance to food system change in South Africa; for both fulfilling the right to food and addressing all forms of malnutrition. We conclude that the emerging concept of food sovereignty has important yet largely unexplored possibilities for democratically managing food systems for better health outcomes.

Welfare tradeoff psychology is present in children and adults

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rhea M Howard ◽  
Annie C. Spokes ◽  
Samuel A Mehr ◽  
Max Krasnow
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Opportunity Cost ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Contextual Features ◽  
Limited Experience ◽  
The Individual

Making decisions in a social context often requires weighing one's own wants against the needs and preferences of others. Adults are adept at incorporating multiple contextual features when deciding how to trade off their welfare against another. For example, they are more willing to forgo a resource to benefit friends over strangers (a feature of the individual) or when the opportunity cost of giving up the resource is low (a feature of the situation). When does this capacity emerge in development? In Experiment 1 (N = 208), we assessed the decisions of 4- to 10-year-old children in a picture-based resource tradeoff task to test two questions: (1) When making repeated decisions to either benefit themselves or benefit another person, are children’s choices internally consistent with a particular valuation of that individual? (2) Do children value friends more highly than strangers and enemies? We find that children demonstrate consistent person-specific welfare valuations and value friends more highly than strangers and enemies. In Experiment 2 (N = 200), we tested adults using the same pictorial method. The pattern of results successfully replicated, but adults’ decisions were more consistent than children’s and they expressed more extreme valuations: relative to the children, they valued friends more and valued enemies less. We conclude that despite children’s limited experience allocating resources and navigating complex social networks, they behave like adults in that they reference a stable person-specific valuation when deciding whether to benefit themselves or another and that this rule is modulated by the child’s relationship with the target.

Stasis Anxiety

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew van der Vlies
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Individual Subject ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Past Experiences ◽  
Contemporary Writing

Two recent debut novels, Songeziwe Mahlangu’s Penumbra (2013) and Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2014), reflect the experience of impasse, stasis, and arrested development experienced by many in South Africa. This chapter uses these novels as the starting point for a discussion of writing by young black writers in general, and as representative examples of the treatment of ‘waithood’ in contemporary writing. It considers (spatial and temporal) theorisations of anxiety, discerns recursive investments in past experiences of hope (invoking Jennifer Wenzel’s work to consider the afterlives of anti-colonial prophecy), assesses the usefulness of Giorgio Agamben’s elaboration of the ancient Greek understanding of stasis as civil war, and asks how these works’ elaboration of stasis might be understood in relation to Wendy Brown’s discussion of the eclipsing of the individual subject of political rights by the neoliberal subject whose very life is framed by its potential to be understood as capital.

scholarly journals Siyabonga: a humble hero making a difference with his hands… and his heart

2021 ◽  
pp. bjsports-2021-104118
Author(s):  
Jon Patricios
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Patellofemoral Pain ◽  
Nelson Mandela ◽  
Making A Difference ◽  
High Level ◽  
Professional Capacity

Siyabonga Kunene’s athletic build and confident stance belie his humble roots. Born in an impoverished area of South Africa, he soon learnt the benefits of an education. He is now a PhD-qualified sports physiotherapist making a significant contribution in both academic and clinical realms. Remaining true to his origins and the inspirational words of Nelson Mandela, Siyabonga has created a framework for managing patellofemoral pain in under-resourced athletes. He has established himself as a physiotherapy lecturer at his university and has been appointed to national teams in his professional capacity. However, his focus primary remains on treating those with a passion for sport who would not normally be able to access high-level athletic care.

scholarly journals Contributions of Hypoxia-Awareness Training to the Familiarization of Personal Symptoms for Occupational Safety in the Flight Environment

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (6) ◽  
pp. 2904
Author(s):  
Kwo-Tsao Chiang ◽  
Min-Yu Tu ◽  
Chao-Chien Cheng ◽  
Hsin-Hui Chen ◽  
Wun-Wei Huang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Occupational Safety ◽  
Safety Issue ◽  
Hot Flashes ◽  
Occurrence Rate ◽  
Flight Safety ◽  
Awareness Training ◽  
The Past ◽  
Individual Memory ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Poor Concentration

Hypoxia remains a flight-safety issue in terms of aviation medicine. Hypoxia-awareness training has been used to help aircrew members recognize personal hypoxia symptoms. There is still no study, as yet, to establish the association of within-subject data between inflight hypoxia events and the altitude chamber. The main purpose of our study was to use paired subjects’ data on inflight hypoxia symptoms compared with those experienced during training. A questionnaire was developed to obtain information on military aircrew members in 2018. Among 341 subjects, 46 (13.49%) suffered from inflight hypoxia. The majority of the subjects detected ongoing inflight hypoxia on the basis of their previous experience with personal hypoxia symptoms or sensations in previous chamber flights. Of the top five hypoxia symptoms, the data revealed that hot flashes, poor concentration, and impaired cognitive function appeared both during the inflight events and during the hypoxia-awareness training. The occurrence rate of hypoxia symptoms was found to not be significantly different between the in-flight events and the past chamber flights through an analysis of within-subject data. Because the individual memory had faded away over time, fresher hypoxia awareness training is still mandatory and valuable to recall personal hypoxia experience for military aircrew members.

scholarly journals Individual behavioural traits not social context affects learning about novel objects in archerfish

2021 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick A. R. Jones ◽  
Helen C. Spence-Jones ◽  
Mike Webster ◽  
Luke Rendell
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Social Environment ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Behavioural Phenotype ◽  
Social Species ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Animals ◽  
Novel Objects ◽  
The Individual

Abstract Learning can enable rapid behavioural responses to changing conditions but can depend on the social context and behavioural phenotype of the individual. Learning rates have been linked to consistent individual differences in behavioural traits, especially in situations which require engaging with novelty, but the social environment can also play an important role. The presence of others can modulate the effects of individual behavioural traits and afford access to social information that can reduce the need for ‘risky’ asocial learning. Most studies of social effects on learning are focused on more social species; however, such factors can be important even for less-social animals, including non-grouping or facultatively social species which may still derive benefit from social conditions. Using archerfish, Toxotes chatareus, which exhibit high levels of intra-specific competition and do not show a strong preference for grouping, we explored the effect of social contexts on learning. Individually housed fish were assayed in an ‘open-field’ test and then trained to criterion in a task where fish learnt to shoot a novel cue for a food reward—with a conspecific neighbour visible either during training, outside of training or never (full, partial or no visible presence). Time to learn to shoot the novel cue differed across individuals but not across social context. This suggests that social context does not have a strong effect on learning in this non-obligatory social species; instead, it further highlights the importance that inter-individual variation in behavioural traits can have on learning. Significance statement Some individuals learn faster than others. Many factors can affect an animal’s learning rate—for example, its behavioural phenotype may make it more or less likely to engage with novel objects. The social environment can play a big role too—affecting learning directly and modifying the effects of an individual’s traits. Effects of social context on learning mostly come from highly social species, but recent research has focused on less-social animals. Archerfish display high intra-specific competition, and our study suggests that social context has no strong effect on their learning to shoot novel objects for rewards. Our results may have some relevance for social enrichment and welfare of this increasingly studied species, suggesting there are no negative effects of short- to medium-term isolation of this species—at least with regards to behavioural performance and learning tasks.

Recovery Capital, Drug Policy and the Cycle of Incarceration

2010 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Lyons
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Drug Policy ◽  
Marked Improvement ◽  
Personal Responsibility ◽  
Alcohol Problem ◽  
Prison Inmates ◽  
Internal Process ◽  
Recovery Capital ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Recovering Addicts

By some estimates, more than half of prison inmates in America have a drug or alcohol problem (Mumola and Karberg 2006). Existing models of treatment for these individuals, both inside and outside prison, have typically focused on the individual addict. These interventions often neglect the users' families and communities, and view poverty and marginalization as tangential to recovery—which is seen instead purely as an individual, internal process. This perspective defines addiction as a brain disease, and emphasizes the need of recovering addicts to learn new skills and to take personal responsibility for their actions and lives (Committee on Addictions of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, 2002). These models, though a marked improvement over the idea of drug addiction as a moral failing, place an over-riding emphasis on the individual at the expense of the economic and social context.

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