Angela Storey, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Louisville and the director of the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research, was the latest lecture presenter in the Anthropology Speaker Series Sept. 19 in the College of Liberal Arts. Storey’s presentation focused on the actions of locals to fix community problems that are often ignored or neglected by their governments. Specifically, she spoke about residents’ efforts to increase access to potable water in Cape Town, South Africa, and the maintenance of Eastern Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky, by the volunteer group Friends of Eastern Cemetery.
Storey earned her doctorate at the University of Arizona in Tucson and has numerous published works, including “They Always Promise Toilets: Electoral Politics and Infrastructural Inequality in Post-Apartheid Cape Town,” and “Teaching the City: Exploring Pedagogies of Urban Becoming.”
At the start of the lecture, Storey explained how the presence or reparative state of objects within a community could be indicative of the cultural and political forces present within that community.
Storey said, “The power of objects as the foundation for telling stories about human experience is not only the train of archeology, but can be powerful for cultural anthropologists as well, and, indeed, objects in the present can both reinforce and upend understandings of the world around us.”
She focused on the availability of water taps in the impoverished suburbs of Cape Town. During apartheid, social amenities and living spaces were heavily segregated, similar to the Jim Crow Era in the southern United States.
Many of the racialized laws and social orders created by apartheid are present even after its abolishment. Local communities are still in the process of rectifying the inequalities present within their own communities as a result of apartheid. One such disparity is access to potable water.
In Cape Town, it is required that there is at least one water tap per 25 households. However, this requirement is not always met in the suburbs, especially those previously set aside for native Africans only, and not all of the taps contain potable water. Additionally, surveyors may include illegal or defunct water taps in their accounts of these suburbs, ruining the data surrounding what these communities actually need.
Storey observes that the people in these suburbs have created ways to access potable water. Some create illegal water taps by drilling into existing pipelines and others have formed organizations that lobby for creating new water taps for areas with little to no access to clean water. Either way, these communities have united to gain access to potable water for all.
After concluding her discussion of Cape Town’s struggles with water taps, Storey began discussing Eastern Cemetery in Louisville. The cemetery began to fall into disrepair after it was abandoned as a burial place due to the discovery that Eastern Cemetery was reselling burial plots and exhuming the remains without the consent of the deceased families.
No company had been willing to take on the responsibility of caring for Eastern Cemetery because of the enormous financial burden that compensation for the grieving families would require. Similarly, the government of Louisville is wary of taking responsibility for the maintenance and care due to the large financial burden it poses. As a result, the cemetery became overgrown with weeds and the headstones fell into disrepair.
In 2013, a volunteer group known as Friends of Eastern Cemetery began to mow, weed whack, and otherwise care for the gravemarkers at the cemetery. Every Sunday, all of the volunteers, including Storey, converge on Eastern Cemetery in an attempt to maintain this abandoned and forgotten space.
“While finicky and also frustrating, the need to maintain the mowers and trimmers and the necessity of showing others how to best use these fussing machines offered key space. Spaces of connection between volunteers shared labor and challenges,” Storey said.
She ended her lecture by commenting on how the challenges that these situations posed to their communities allowed for the possibilities of forming connections and bonds within these communities.
Storey said, “They are replete with possibilities, not because they are filled with easy or good ones, but because they are not easily fixed, and because they hold within them the kind of flux that make up the matter of urban life and within which new things and new ways of interacting.”