Nation Building and the Battle for Consciousness: Discourses on Education in Post-Apartheid Namibia

Fumanti, Mattia

doi:10.3167/015597706780459386

Cited by 18 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Education and the respectable work to which it gives access serve to legitimate one's social position as earned through one's own effort. At the same time, middle-class discourses regard education not only ‘as key to an individual career and personal success in life’, but also ‘as the means to build a moral community of virtuous and responsible citizens’ (Fumanti 2006: 97). Moreover, many members of the middle class believe in education as the universal remedy for poverty and marginalization.…”

Section: Contemporary Middle Classes In the Global Southmentioning

confidence: 99%

Doing being middle-class in the global South: comparative perspectives and conceptual challenges

Lentz¹

2020

Africa

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Like many key terms in history and the social sciences, ‘middle class’ is at once a category ‘of social and political analysis’ and a category ‘of social and political practice’, in Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper's terms – two aspects that were, and continue to be, entangled in complex ways. Since the end of the eighteenth century, the term ‘middle class’, or the ‘middling sorts’, has been a catchword in political discourse, and it became one long before scholars defined it in any systematic fashion. Once it became a more or less well-established conceptual tool of research, however, it began to take on an academic life of its own, with scholars also using it to describe people who did not invoke this category for their own self-description. But scholarly terms could – and indeed did – also feed back into folk understandings of social stratification. In particular, the recent global popularity of the term ‘middle class’ seems to be at least in part a result of the appropriation of academic categories by policymakers. This article contributes to the discussion on African middle classes by tracing the genealogy of theoretical perspectives on class and by outlining some findings from studies of the history of European and American middle classes as well as recent research on middle classes in the global South. I discuss both the history of scholarly debates on the middle classes and what empirical studies tell us about people's contested self-categorizations, and how their understandings and practices of being middle-class have changed over time. The article argues that future research on the dynamics of African social stratification has much to gain from a regional and historical comparative perspective.

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Section: Contemporary Middle Classes In the Global Southmentioning

confidence: 99%

Doing being middle-class in the global South: comparative perspectives and conceptual challenges

Lentz¹

2020

Africa

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“…The UNAM Health Sciences department currently boasts an accredited medical school with health professional programs (in medicine, pharmacy, nursing, and public health), state-ofthe-art resources for the modern anatomical sciences, and high student enrolment (Wessels et al 2012), owing to the university administration's commitment to developing degree programs with the establishment of the institution in 1992, following Namibia's independence. Inspiring these developments, the SWAPO antiapartheid leader and first president of the Republic of Namibia, Sam Nujoma, made several postcolonial declarations in 1992 that tied the enhancement of postsecondary education to social improvement and nation-building political agendas (Fumanti 2006).…”

Section: Fertile Silencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘MSM’ as a ‘doing thing’

Lorway¹

2019

MAT

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Drawing upon long-term ethnographic research in Namibia, I examine the label ‘MSM’ through a materialist interpretation of affect, viewing ‘MSM’ as a ‘doing thing’ that unsettles the boundaries between subjects and objects. From this analytic perspective, I reconsider the ‘MSM’ label as an inadequate signifier that overlooks, conceals, or erases social complexity. Instead, this perspective reveals what happens when the MSM label travels, thereby better accounting for the socialities it is instrumental in making up. Its very design and appearance – which portray bodies and behaviours in universalistic ways – allow this ‘doing thing’ to gain entry to diverse spaces where it comes to exist alongside some contentious postcolonial political formations, such as those surrounding LGBT rights. I argue that although the label is designed to be insulated from politics, as a ‘neutral’ behavioural category, when ‘MSM’ travels it is still highly relational, continually entangling itself in contexts, stirring up postcolonial anxieties, and reinforcing global inequalities, while also setting the stage for global health worlds coming into being.

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“…One of the educational goals of the Christian schools was to turn their students into ‘good citizens’ (Fumanti 2006; Coe 2005). Thus, one of the Catholic schools had the motto ‘For God and our Nation’ and aimed to ‘enable the pupil the development of oneself, others and the nation’.…”

Section: ‘The Parents Have Trusted Us’: Disciplining Future Citizensmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Over the last decade, anthropologists have explored the everyday routines of moral self-formation – and the active internalization of values – in educational settings. They have shown how moral norms – as well as the awareness of the social, political and economic orders in which schools operate – shape the subjectivities and everyday interactions of students and teachers (Fumanti 2006; Coe 2005; Stambach 2009; Simpson 2003). They have also highlighted how a nation's or a society's values become embodied in the lives of young people as well as in those of their teachers and families (Rydstrøm 2003), and how children themselves are involved in the formation of their own moral worlds.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Embodying values and socio-religious difference: new markets of moral learning in Christian and Muslim schools in urban Tanzania

Dilger¹

2017

Africa

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Schools are institutionalized spaces of learning where children and young people are trained to become morally and ethically responsible members of society. Cultural ideas and values relating to friendship, social status and the nation, but also regarding one's own body, dress and emotional, verbal or gestural expression, are learned and performed by young people on an everyday basis. In this article, I build on ethnographic research on the ‘new’ generation of Christian and Muslim schools in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (2008–10), and I show that particular ways of learning and performing values can be understood as a form of embodied morality that orients students and teachers in relation to their educational and socio-urban environments. I argue that schools do not represent monolithic ethical or moral frameworks or that the actors in these educational settings learn or embody those frameworks in uniform ways. Rather, the processes of ethical and moral (self-)formation are often highly fragmented due to the diverse (social, religious and economic) backgrounds of students and teachers as well as the logics of class formation in the neoliberal market, which causes a high degree of fluctuation across the (equally fragmented) educational landscape of Dar es Salaam. I therefore define ‘embodied morality’ as a partial and discontinuous practice whose specific forms and experience are inseparably entwined with the specific ideological, social and institutional environments of particular educational settings.

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Nation Building and the Battle for Consciousness: Discourses on Education in Post-Apartheid Namibia

Cited by 18 publications

References 13 publications

Doing being middle-class in the global South: comparative perspectives and conceptual challenges

Doing being middle-class in the global South: comparative perspectives and conceptual challenges

‘MSM’ as a ‘doing thing’

Embodying values and socio-religious difference: new markets of moral learning in Christian and Muslim schools in urban Tanzania

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