"Most of them, they just want someone to under them:" Gender, Generation, and Personhood among the Xhosa

Drawing on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation focuses on gendered and generational conflicts about social reproduction in a rural Xhosa community in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. By exploring locally-contentious topics such as human rights, gender equality, love marriage, bridewealth, bride abduction, and the deployment of sexuality, I make several related arguments about personhood, the deployment of tradition, and the experience of modernity. The forms of personhood, tradition, and modernity that I discuss are all vernacular concepts, and are not overarching analytic tools. Firstly, I show that local people interpret these contests in generational, gendered, and also temporal terms, framing rural life and the will of elders as timeless tradition, in contrast with modern city life, and with the habits and aspirations of youth. The predilections of elders thus bear the moral authority of both imagined history, and ancestral will. Secondly, I show various ways in in which experiences of and aspirations about tradition and modernity are themselves deeply gendered, and that these divergent aspirations are sources of considerable interpersonal conflict. Thirdly, I demonstrate that inequality is intrinsic to the subject positions through which people understand their identity. Accordingly, idioms such as gender equality and (egalitarian) human rights render the meaning of these subject positions unclear. Accordingly, sociality between genders and generations is often characterized by antagonism and uncertainty. Finally, I identify a deep, ironic contradiction at the core of domestic life: worsening economic austerity means that people of all ages and genders are becoming more interdependent. However, this increasing interdependency, which has historically been central to local forms of personhood, is concurrent with the rising prominence of an ideological system which privileges autonomous, independent, choice-oriented forms of personhood as the cornerstone of a worthy self. Thus, South Africa's economic crisis is also a crisis of meaning about equality, gender, age, sexuality, and spirituality, played out through the messy intimacy of social reproduction and rural domestic life.Ph.D