The practices studied in this thesis occurred in a certain place, and were backed by certain ideas in respect of the management of space. Space is always a culturally organised phenomenon. The social, mythical and geo-graphical dimensions of human life manifest themselves in spatial terms and in the ways in which humans outline space and its boundaries to re-fl ect cultural ideas. Spatial organisation and built environments not only refl ect and contain the categories of culture, but are also actively used in cultural processes, such as constructing the identities of individuals and communities (Rapoport 1994: 482-483).
A place becomes visible through the narratives, the socially construct-ed discourses of its inhabitants, but also through praxis (Rodman 1992:
640-643). In recent anthropological discussions an interest in the place has been rife, and it has also inspired a multitude of differing discussions.
For the purposes of this study, I am interested in the place in a very nar-row sense: how it is used in order to produce racial differentiations and boundaries. As de Certeau noted: ”space is a practised place” (de Certeau 1984: 117).
In South Africa, urban space was used to produce and re-produce racial categories. The use and separateness of space are particularly important phenomena in the history of the South African nation-building proc-ess. The spatiality of apartheid continues to exert a strong infl uence on the present use of space (Robinson 1996: 1; Goldberg 1993: 185-205).
Michel Foucault perceived the use of discursively constructed power as controlling and reforming the body, which he saw as a dense index of institutional forces, discourses and space. The latter he perceived as fun-damental in any exercise of power (1976, 1980). The ideas of space and body are connected, since the body not only creates meanings for spaces and places, but is also in itself a socially controlled physical space.
Urban space is often considered a potentially dangerous area that needs to be supervised, since people and bodies move and mix there relatively freely. In South African society both the human body and urban space were tightly controlled. Under apartheid rule, but also prior to that, the politics of segregation wished to ensure that no racial or spatial mixing
would take place (Dubow 1995:171). This was by no means a unique way of perceiving the urban areas, since all over the Western world urban space was seen as dangerous and detrimental,20 producing degeneration and cultural hybridity. These urban fears lead to the spatial rendering of the poor by locating them where they could be observed and disciplined (Goldberg 1993: 200; Marriott 1999: 87-88).
Epping Garden Village was thus a place largely defi ned by the mutual concerns regarding the use of space and the control of the social body of the poor whites. The politics of space segregated people from one an-other, and aimed to ensure that people lived in an environment that was seen as natural for their designated racial group.
In the South Africa of the twentieth century, this eugenic environmen-talism produced mimetic urban spaces.21 Like was supposed to produce like, hence in order to create proper white people, proper environments were needed. Consequently, everyone classifi ed as White had to be situat-ed in a space that would uplift this person. It was considersituat-ed self-evident that the Whites needed more of everything: larger houses, more space in the yard, better services, and, in order to maintain all this, higher incomes.
When offered suitable spaces to surround their properly educated bodies, even the poor whites would turn into good whites.
During the twentieth century, the category poor white – while hardly visible in the everyday life of the majority of South African whites – be-came increasingly central to the White imagination. This category was important for keeping proper whites and poor whites separate and also for keeping the whites from racially mixing with the coloureds or Africans.
The term ‘poor white’ was originally coined in the U.S in the 1870s, and was thereafter rapidly adapted to South African circumstances (Gi-liomee 2003: 315-317). It is often a problematic notion, for it is easily taken for granted, as the American term ‘white trash’ is.
When studying the Hillbillies of Detroit, John Hartigan noticed that
‘white trash’ is a socially constructed category, which is not neutral, but a result of certain historically defi ned social and racial hierarchies, which it also further serves to reinforce (1997b: 47). Similarly, the South African
20 Totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century Western world attempted to ‘purify’
the urban space in respect of their ideological emphasis. The Nazis turned the culturally colourful and multicultural Berlin into a monocultural statue city. In the Soviet Union, the urban design of Moscow emphasised Stalin’s endless ambition and desire for power.
These attempts were accompanied by ‘purifi cations’ of any unwanted social elements from these spaces.
21 On the principals of mimesis, see Taussig 1993: 255.
term ‘poor white’ can be regarded as more than just a stigma attached to an anomalous group, and can be helpful in making the boundaries of the categories of class and race visible.
In this study a ’poor white’ refers to a person who has been labelled or classifi ed as a poor white, not just any pale-skinned person who exists under conditions of poverty. Similar to any racial classifi cation, this clas-sifi cation also operates on an ad hoc basis, and none of the signifi ers of its categories are ever permanent. Sometimes an individual’s racial status changed, but the poor white has persisted as a social category throughout the twentieth century, and into the twenty-fi rst, although the content of the category has changed in South Africa over time.
Saul Dubow pointed out what an intriguing social category the poor whites are, commenting on the anomalous nature and unacceptability of being a poor white (see Dubow 1995: 171). But while South African whites as a racial category and the racial essentialism at the bottom of this category has been studied,22 the poor whites have thus far been ignored as a signifi cant underlying category in the process of building a collective white identity after the onset of apartheid.
This is therefore a perfect situation for studying embodiment and boundaries. The ways the social boundaries of the human body, class and space were drawn and are presently being redrawn in Epping Garden Vil-lage are vital in order to develop an understanding of the discourses on White identity and poor white as a category, which still infl uence popular thinking and everyday lives of South Africans. Towards the end of the empirical part, this thesis concentrates increasingly on the strategic and situational aspects in the building of identity, and the perpetual nature of its construction.
22 Most notably, Vincent Crapanzano in his 1986 book “Waiting: the Whites of South Africa” studied the life of white South Africans. See also Ribeiro 1995.