Negotiating post-apartheid boundaries and identities : an anthropological study of the creation of a Cape Town Suburb

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT:This study explores the complex and contested processes of drawing boundaries andnegotiating identities in the post-Apartheid South African context by analysing howresidents in a new residential suburb of Cape Town are working to carve out a newposition for themselves in a changing social order.Drawing on data gathered through participant observation, individual and focus groupinterviews, and household surveys between November 1998 and December 2000, thestudy examines how residents draw and negotiate boundaries in their search for stability,status, and community in a society characterised by social flux, uncertainty, ambiguityand contradiction. It explores the construction and shifting of identities believed to beembodied in those boundaries, at the levels of the individual, the household and thecommunity. A range of everyday social and spatial practices - including streetscapedesign, its use and contestation, neighbourliness and sociality, .household livelihoods andstrategies, home maintenance and improvements - are shown to reveal residents' ownconceptualisations of boundaries, their practical significance and symbolic power, as wellas their permeability and transgression. The marking and maintenance of boundariesconvey how social relationships, practices and power in the suburb are structured andcontinually negotiated. By analysing these actions and responses, the study illustratessome of the ways in which recent changes in South African society have unsettled therelationship between class, race and space to construct new boundaries and shape newidentities.The fmdings suggest that although social differentiation among the residents isincreasingly being restructured around class, race remains a salient variable in residents'constructions of themselves and each other. Ethnic-religious prejudice is also shown toinfluence local conflict and constructions of community.The study draws out four discourses through which residents contemplate and formulatecircumstances and processes in their neighbourhood. The first emphasises racialintegration, the second middle class suburban living, the third safety from crime, thefourth distrust and disorder. The discourses are significant, not only in their practicalmanifestation in everyday interaction but also because they suggest some of the ways inwhich connections and disconnections with the past, with (he old identities and the oldaffiliations, are managed in a new, post-Apartheid South Africa.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University