Feminist Ethnography, State Fragility and Situated Praxis in Post-apartheid South Africa

This article explores the affective and epistemic demands of ethnographic fieldwork within the uneven terrain of post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on long-term research in Duncan Village, a historically Black township in the Eastern Cape province, I analyse how the state is encountered through waiting, silence, refusal, and care in struggles over housing, services, and recognition. I argue that these are practices through which residents navigate governance and, at the same time, conditions through which the state becomes legible ethnographically. The article makes three linked interventions. First, I reconceptualize vulnerability and refusal as constitutive features of fieldwork rather than methodological shortcomings. Second, I treat Duncan Village not simply as an empirical setting, but as a location through which post-apartheid rule can be thought through. Third, I show that knowledge of the state emerges through the same relations in which political life is endured, interpreted, and maintained. The article thus advances a feminist ethnographic practice that is historically situated, embodied, and accountable to the lived worlds through which the state is continually made and contested.