Sylvia Bruinders

This project is an ethnography of the Christmas Bands Movement in the Western Cape, South Africa. It explores how members of the bands constitute themselves as respectable members of society through disciplinary routines, uniform dress, and military gestures, using Foucault’s notion of embodied subjectivity to interpret how certain members of the Christmas Bands construct their subjectivities as individuals and as collectives. Theoretical discussion engages broadly with international scholarship on various topics such as music and subjectivity, native ethnography, Third World feminist scholarship, gender and masculinity, from musical orality to literacy, masking as transformative, and loss of place.