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

dium of the human body. It was a useful concept for the social sciences
in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but it has also persistently
occurred when and where there is a perceived social or cultural deviance
or anomaly, which is then perceived as a social pathology. (Harris 1998:
4.)
The idea of a social pathology has been used in political state propaganda,
and is a popular form of common knowledge in Western societies,
where the images of decay, dirt, and impurity have often been used to
outline and condemn the polluting, degenerating Other (Goldberg 1993:
200).
In sum, the organic analogy tends to show a people, or volk, as an
organic entity and the society as a body where anything strange and ambiguous
is potentially contagious and thus dangerous. This danger is thus
controlled by the elitist power that penetrates all levels of a society.
In applying the organic analogy, the Nazis compared the Jews to parasites
or disease that had to be cured through eugenic methods. The fear of
the Other as a dirty or sick part – a social pathology of the collective body
– was a common notion in Western societies during the twentieth century:
nothing illustrates this better than the expression ’ethnic cleansing’.
In South Africa, scientific racism was supported by biological and
medical arguments. It also employed several manifestations of social pathology
in its discourses. Racial miscegenation and the paradigm of degenerationism
(the discourse on the downfall of the white race in Africa),
which included the poor white debate, were presented in the language of
the organic analogy – markedly so in the social scientific research.
The best known example of research on the poor white problem in
South Africa is the first Carnegie Commission investigation (1929-32)
– a massive developmental research project on the South African poor
whites. It was the first systematic attempt to understand and change the
living conditions of the poor whites. South Africa was seen as a vast
open-air laboratory for these social experiments (Dubow 1995: 14).
Funded by the US Carnegie Corporation, 32 it represented the top social
research of its time. The Carnegie Commission’s work supported the prevailing
status quo in South Africa, and the conclusions of its work show
32
In the programme of the Volkskongres of 1934 the Dutch Reformed Church stated that
it had initiated the investigation of Carnegie Commission in 1927 when the president and
secretary of Carnegie Corporation had visited South Africa. (Programme of the National
Conference on the Poor White Problem, Kimberley 1934.)
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