Browsing by Author "Riddles, Alton"

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    Cultural production and the struggle for authenticity : a Study of the Rastafarian student organization at the University of the Western Cape
    (University of the Western Cape, 2012) Riddles, Alton; Boonzaier, Emile
    This thesis explores the precarious nature of authenticity as it manifested itself in the activities of H.I.M. Society, the Rastafarian student organization at the University of the Western Cape. Ethnographic research was conducted, to explore the above mentioned issue, which involved observation of various activities and in depth interviews. I also inquired about outsiders' perspectives on Rastafarianism and H.I.M. Society in particular. Authenticity, as it is conceived in this thesis, is about what a group of people deem culturally important. Three important ideas follow from this. The first is that not everyone in a group agrees on what is important. Put differently authenticating processes tend to be characterized by legitimizing crises. Therefore, secondly, social actors need to invest cultural ideas, objects and practices with authenticity. Lastly the authenticating processes are predicated on boundaries not necessarily as a means of exclusion but as fundamental to determining the core of cultural being and belonging
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    Fear of crime, place and the moral order: A secondary analysis of gated communities
    (University of Western Cape, 2019) Riddles, Alton; Karriem, Abdulrazak
    This study will use secondary data analysis of academic articles to study the topic under question. Much has been written on fear of crime from a quantitative and to a lesser extent qualitative approach (Burgess and Doran 2012) but little attention has been on this fear as an emotion from an interpretive sociological approach. The approach to emotions employed in this study will draw on Hochschild’s (1983) notion that emotions have signal functions and that emotions constitute a sense just like hearing and seeing, and in her estimation the most important one. Briefly stated, fear (of crime) signals to the person experiencing the emotion that something is worth being wary of; this in turn is based on expectations –and assumptions– of what a safe and orderly situation/environment or person is.