No abstract

The paper explores the benefits of performative ethnography as a methodological intervention. The intervention discussed in this paper utilizes the persuasive power of aesthetics and performance to attain participation amongst a broad spectrum of research interlocutors and to challenge my own power and positionality in the fieldwork, whilst rendering me invisible as a participant observer. The performative ethnography discussed in this paper took place in the central business district (CBD) of Bellville, in the Cape Town area in South Africa, and consists of two performances, curated by the author, that took place at the same time. One is a painting performance through which Somali participants were invited to express their emotional experiences of living in Cape Town, and their memories, nostalgia and attachment to their land of origin. The painting performance revealed Somali diversity, multiple belongings and a politics of making cultural difference. The second performance was staged to overlap, in ways unanticipated by the participants, and consisted of a South African minstrel troupe walking through Bellville CBD, attaining a moment of conviviality through the unmaking of cultural difference. Beneath this methodological intervention is an exploration of the politics of difference and the conviviality of Bellville CBD's everyday multiculturalism.

The paper explores two opposing yet simultaneous forces of aesthetics as transformative and constitutive force of Muslim identity politics, religiosity and cultural style in Cape Town The ethnography focuses on Muslim artists in Cape Town, namely Thania Petersen and twin brothers Hasan and Husain Essop, whose artworks embody a ‘social drama’ of a lived experience of Muslims’ ongoing individual and collective active engagement with and appropriation of the plurality of competing discourses that are religious and secular, local and global. The discussion unpacks the ways in which the artworks of Petersen and the Essop brothers serve as a transformative force and as a politic of authenticity to Muslim identity, religiosity, and cultural style. The paper offers an appreciative but critical reading of Talal Asad’s idea of an anthropology of Islam. Taking into consideration the incommensurable diversity and internal contradiction that could be conceived as Islamic discursive traditions, this paper argues that the aesthetics of Muslimness is what inspires coherence within and across diverse, contradictory Islamic traditions.

This ethnography explores the aesthetic dimension of religion and the sensational ways in which it contributes to shaping ordinary ethics on Long Street in Cape Town, South Africa. In the context of everyday social life on Long Street, homeless peoples’ claim of an ethical character is denied recognition. Long Street is a public space of conviviality and differences, a hybrid social reality marked with growing urbanization, globalization, and neoliberalism, and overseen by a continuous presence of security units. It is a street saturated with ever‐increasing social problems resulting from a revival of class differences. Ordinary ethics on Long Street is complex, unpredictable, dynamic, and vulnerable, and stands the risk of potential breakdown. Against this backdrop, this ethnography recounts the ways in which aesthetic formations of religion stimulate technologies of imaginations that offer homeless people sensory experiences of refuge, recognition, being, and belonging amidst social exclusion and a harsh lived experience. Aesthetics of religion are ethics made visible in public life.

No abstract