Moral order as necessity and as impossibility :common sense, race and the difficulty of change among four 'poor white' families in Newcastle

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The thesis examines the lives of four families in Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal and what the situation in which these families find themselves tells us about race, poverty and social change in contemporary South Africa by using ethnographic participant observation techniques. Central to the thesis is a concern with contradiction expressed in the entanglement of these four families with a particular moral order. This moral order is the basis of continued material survival, but at the same time, it is not adequate to transform conditions of poverty nor to change feelings of entitlement, making it impossible for these families to imagine their condition as shared with other races. The problem appears to be just about individuals not thinking correctly about their position and about them not seeing how many South Africans are struggling to survive and therefore share similar difficulties. The thesis shows that the difficulties experienced have rather more to do with changing the families' common sense notions. Their common sense is grounded in material realities, in realties of institutions that provide for them but also dictate a particular way of seeing the world, a moral order. Common sense is embedded in the material practices of people, in how they inhabit space and make place for themselves, in how they interact with family, in how they work with the institutions that are the very condition of their survival, and in how they come to understand and judge the past. At the moments when the limits of the moral order become clear, it is then not the moral order that comes into question but rather it is reasserted through explanations based on particular structural changes as contingencies that reinforce the moral order rather than challenge it. It is at these moments that people reassert race since their common sense explanations seem limited.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University