THE RELATIONSHIPS OF COHABITING LESBIAN AND HETEROSEXUAL COUPLES: A COMPARISON

The relationships of cohabiting lesbian couples and cohabiting heterosexual couples were compared on three dimensions—Durability, interdependence, and Equality. The lesbian relationships tended to be somewhat less durable and interdependent but more equal. Reasons for these differences are discussed.     

WHITE URBAN IMMERSION,INTERSUBJECTIVITY, AND AN ETHICS OF CARE IN SOUTH AFRICA

The past decades have seen a rise in religious and secular responses to inequality that seek to offer those who are relatively wealthy an opportunity to personally engage with impoverished people and places. This article examines three cases of elite white South Africans who intentionally immersed themselves in poor urban environments. In dialogue with the anthropology of ethics, I argue that immersion was seen as an experimental tool for transforming the self and cultivating virtues of empathy and responsibility towards others. In this way, immersion acted as a technology of the self, linking care of the self to care of others. Yet such experimentation was not without risk. Though imagined as a tool that could promote care of the self and care of others, immersion carries with it the potential to reinforce power divides and/or solicit negative moral judgment.