Voice and functionality

Reaping ideas from Favret-Saada’s (1980: 4) approach during her witchcraft study, the question that should be asked when encountering incidents or utterances that can be described as ‘racist’, should not so much be that of a curious outsider asking ‘what is the (hidden) motivation behind such talk’, but rather a more insider-oriented approach asking ‘what are people trying to express through such a discourse?’ Acknowledging a discourse as meaningful in its own terms enables one to gain more insight into it than any ‘objective scientist’ would ever be able to. It is through this that Favret-Saada alerts the reader to how careful one must be to make immediate distinctions between ‘our right/true beliefs’ and ‘the other’s ‘untrue beliefs’ – such evaluative distinctions serve to silence the ‘other’s’ means of expression as it is then passed off as irrational, wrong, absurd, etc. If taking a paternalistic outlook on their discourse, we silence their means of expression by passing it off as ‘wrong’.

I attempted to move away from the interpretation of ‘Afrikaner racial discourse’ as one- track-mindedly geared toward defence and preservation of privilege. Acquisition of an emic perspective, crucial to ethnography, requires the understanding and representation behind a practice in such a way that I can see myself as able to entertain such a viewpoint. I thus have to convincingly ascribe some extent of legitimacy to it before I adopt a critical attitude toward it. Instead of a discourse solely aimed at a defence of privilege, it must also be seen as a discourse which, through creative means, answers to a wide array of needs in the speakers, e.g. securing themselves on both spiritual and material level in what they experience as a very insecure environment. This endeavour is exceedingly creative and utilises signifiers from the environment, like the media, parents, peers, and all other types of everyday experience. Depicting Afrikaner discourse as single-mindedly geared toward a single goal denies this creativity. A further problem is that ‘backward thinking’, ‘racism’ and ‘prejudice’ are often depicted as the ultimate evil, whereas it is not the role of the social anthropologist to identify and point out ‘evil’ in the first place.

As application to my own study, it could be said that exactly the same approach should be taken with racial discourse, namely that it should not be dismissed as irrational and untrue offhand, but that it should be studied for its meaningfulness and functionality to the subjects engaging in it. One of the characteristics of race discourse is that adherents make use of derogatory racial terms only when in the company of people who can ‘appreciate’ it, whereas refraining from it in the official South African national discourse. Such views are not conveyed with the aim of carrying across information; it is only shared with someone caught in the meaning, where you know the listener’s disposition allows for an immediate uptake of your utterance. The function of the utterance would then not be to ‘convey information’ but to reinforce the status quo. One student who is originally from a fairly conservative rural town background, assumed that my identity as white, Afrikaans, fellow small-town resident, provided the possibility for an immediate uptake of his claims. To him, the interview setup served not as an opportunity to convey information, but to reinforce a framework. In responding to the question of what he thinks of the insistence that the University of Stellenbosch should incorporate more English during lectures, he said:

‘Yes, see, why? I couldn’t understand a word of English, or I could speak a little English when I got here, I had to adapt, especially academically. But they, see, they

want everything to be done for them, don’t they? I mean, that’s not right, understand, think about us Afrikaners who had to adapt. Now why can’t they adapt and also start learning Afrikaans stuff, and, understand...’

His use of certain Afrikaans words illustrating his engagement with me as the listener to his discourse, assuming my identification with his situation, illustrates his perception of entering a space where we can agree. These words can best be translated into English with ‘see’, ‘understand’ (‘verstaan’) or ‘don’t they?’ (‘mos’). Furthermore, he uses ‘us’ (Afrikaans- speaking whites) and ‘they’ (blacks) in a way so as to assume my simultaneous identification with these pronouns. In doing so he wanted to establish solidarity between the two of us in his expressed sentiments, as he feels strongly about it and needs others to feel strongly about it too. Engaging me within his racial worldview presented a dilemma, as it is not the ethnographer’s place to openly challenge or reproach a respondent’s viewpoint, especially not in the name of establishing rapport. The first thing that I, as ethnographer, should have done in such a situation is to listen, consider, and then probe, the aim of which would be to understand the meaning and function behind the production of such utterances. After gaining insight, I had to take a standpoint myself on these issues, however, in this case for example, that reproducing frameworks such as cited above, in which non-whites are being othered, is detrimental to constructive racial discourse in the South African context.

Each of these methodological insights have implications for the study of racial discourse among white Afrikaans-speaking youth who find themselves within the context of a historically white and Afrikaans-medium South African university. A disconcerting experience compelling me to grapple with myself, firstly, urged me to formulate hard questions that have not been asked before, and secondly, helped me realise the complexity of the situation at Stellenbosch, a university housing various students who all value certain things (language, access to education), as well as carry certain historical baggage with them into the setting. The question can be asked as to if I was more distanced from this setup – e.g. not myself a student, white, Afrikaans-speaking or South African, or were I even older – how would the interpretation have differed? The point illustrates that distance is not necessarily desirable, as it might limit the extent to which an intersubjective space can be shared with the participant.

In this research, race, instead of forming a clearly identifiable part of discourse, served more as a subtext to frameworks and conceptualisations. The particular gravity and seriousness surrounding race was particularly highlighted by the silence with which it was met. Furthermore, a fine balance must be maintained between not allowing the subject to lose voice, and to simultaneously take a stance oneself that might be unapologetic to the informant’s sentiments. Key here is to first consider the utterance from the emic perspective before taking distance from it. The interview is not a case where a researcher extracts information from a subject, but is a dynamic process generating its own unique meaning, which means that the researcher has quite a task ahead of him in making sense of this fieldwork encounter. This data can though prove to be very rich in the end.