The Making of a Good White - E-thesis - Helsinki.fi

ies, as Mellor and Shilling have named the process (1997: 35-62). 16 This
process was crucial for the larger project of white South African identity
formation, since it slowly inscribed the boundaries of the category White
in their bodies.
The first task of this analysis is thus to turn to the ethnographic material
in order to examine the impact of these practices of producing embodiment
and uplifting the habitus of those perceived as poor whites.
The attempts to uplift 17 them also created social differentiation. Pierre
Bourdieu’s writings and his notion of distinction are helpful when we ask
how the social spaces and structures of differences emerged in Epping
Garden Village. He did not create structural rules but concentrated on the
socially formed dispositions that formed the embodiment of the subject,
whose own will is secondary, as it is socially formed by the practices of
making habitus. For Bourdieu, the habitus of each individual is shaped in
a social game, which also changes its players, none of whom is a disinterested
outsider, while they might make an effort to seem so.
The end product of the rehabilitation conducted in the suburb was
supposed to be a successful and respectable citizen who moved out to
live in a middle-class area. But while many of the poor whites of Epping
Garden Village managed to leave the suburb, some never did. After the
Second World War, when the majority of South African whites became a
relatively wealthy elite group with a proper lifestyle, those who could not
succeed became stigmatised.
In the era of apartheid, the poor white suburbs became places where
those who were unable to comply with the ideals of being a good white
were placed, or into which they just drifted. Simultaneously, social and
spatial propinquity between middle-class whites and poor whites diminished.
Consequently, the residents learned what Erving Goffmann has
called “impression management” (1959). Even during my fieldwork
(1997-2001) the residents were still keen to present me their commitment
to being good whites, thus dissociating themselves from the stigma of
being a poor white.
Nevertheless, the process of making good whites was not simple or
16
It was one of this study’s points of departure that more than anything, the making of the
good white was a historical process. Also Ian Burkitt has discussed the ideas of re-formation
of the body. He points out that while “the human body is not formed anew in each
generation and shaped exactly according to the social influences of the moment; however,
the body is open to re-formation at the point where bio-history and social history meet”
(1999: 17).
17
To ‘uplift’ was used as either a noun or verb as an alternative for the expression ‘rehabilitation’
(see below). It originates from the Afrikaans word opheffi ng (to lift up).
18