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

expressive through the process of embodiment. In this process, minor
physical differences are given a great social weight. The differences in
the social body are expressed in a different manner in different cultures.
Douglas portrayed the body as a medium in the drawing of social categories’
boundaries, and elaborated on the danger of moral pollution ensuing
from the transgression of those boundaries (1966, 1970).
In addition, Douglas’ (1970, 1996) theories on social boundaries and
her group-grid theory are used to illuminate the transformations in the
social structure of Epping Garden Village/Ruyterwacht and to analyse
the changes in the life in the suburb. This application allowed me to build
social typologies from my fieldwork data. It also helped to attain an understanding
of how the social/racial categories, their boundaries and their
differentiation have changed in the suburb, and of their significance in the
present, post-apartheid era.
The elite often re-forms social bodies to suit its purposes. In the case of
the poor whites, the elite used the medium of the social body to smother
racial and cultural hybridity, which it saw as anomalous and threatening
to the prevailing order. The ensuing bodily experience was reinforced by
the capitalist institutions of wage labour, the nuclear family and ideals of
home ownership. The forms of bodily control to which the elite subjected
poor whites in return for accommodation and jobs were undoubtedly
governed by a capitalist ethos. Social engineering and the production
of White identity in South Africa were processes influenced by the conglomeration
and interaction of intellectual and economic forces. 18 The
subjects of these – apparently – abstract forces were residents of Epping
Garden Village.
Thus, the second task of this analysis is to look at the interplay between
the maintenance of social identity, its categories and boundaries in the
larger South African 19 White society and local, embodied poor white
experience. The idea of the body as a symbol and a metaphor for social
cohesion and differentiation is central in the analysis of the treatment of
the poor white body. What were the dangers following transgression of
18
The economic perspective on the social position of poor whites has produced some
important analysis, such as Dan O’Meara’s Volkskapitalisme (1983) and Charles Van
Onselen’s studies of the social and economic history of the Witwaterstrand (1982).
19
South Africa was not the only colonial country where the boundaries between poor
whites and good whites were constructed and contested as something socially distinct.
In Indonesia and Latin America, for example, these processes also shaped the historical
consciousness of their subject. (Wray and Newitz (eds) 1997; Killian 1985; Stoler 1997.)
20