The potentials of boundaries: steps toward a theory of the social edge (original) (raw)

In this paper, I am making a number of claims about the potentials of boundaries. The argument can be stated in the following several sentences. sometimes to impose boundaries. At that time, the essay was partly intended as a critique of the theories of culture that seemed to underwrite the policy of Apartheid. That essay has since found a wide and appreciative audience in South Africa, but a boundary has been crossed into a New South Africa and the terms of the debate have changed. My goal in the essay was to move towards a definition of culture that transcended ethnic and partisan boundaries. I saw boundaries as being central to the function of political culture in particular, but pointed to the paradox that this formulation presented. If cultures helped people to define their identities, and thus to create boundaries, then there must be 'culture' on both sides of any boundary. In other words that which divided people also united them in a strange way, 'This idea seemed to be especially valuable for South Africa, and 1 attempted to define culture as a sort of 'community resource' or set of resources available in principle to all people in South Africa. I argued then, against the Apartheid view of separate and incommensurable cultures, that South African culture had some regional coherence, but often very little logical coherence. 3 By attempting to define boundaries as cultural products, I intended to historicise them as human creations that, like any other powerful fiction or myth, had an historical beginning and could have an end. I would make the surprising claim, based on this reasoning, that South Africa is particularly suseptible to democratic forms of political activity, but that the limits and scope of participation in the polity of the coumty will always remain problematic. It is susceptible to democracy because democracy is not actually a form of government at all, but rather a method for choosing powerful political agents who will act on behalf of others. These actors, and their constituents can, of course, choose to be ruled by tyrants, and sometimes do. Democracy, therefore, unlike many other forms of government, is unable to guarantee its own future. The overlapping identities and the plethora of social edges in southern Africa, however, will tend to maintain a metapolitics-a politics about politics-and democracy is always likely to emerge and reemerge out of this. I believe that the history of South Africa supports this claim, but in this paper I examine and elaborate on the claims that I have made about southern Africa's special political character. • "•"'-' : ''' A. A theory of the social edge It is now dear to me that what is needed now is an integrated theory of historical and cultural 'edges', points of transition between identities, categories, regions and historical periods. This image of the edge evokes for me an idea of a transition point between planes, flat surfaces that can symbolize, like a map, relatively coherent cultural " "Culture: A Contemporary Definition" la South African Keywords: The Uses and Abuses of Political Concepts. (Edited by Emile Boonzaier and John Sharp, Cape Town: David Philip 1988.) pp 17-28. 9. In defining culture in this way, I was attempting to blend a Boasian view that cultures have regional distributions, in the manner of his 'age-area' hypothesis. Boas saw little logical coherence, where European theories of culture emphasized the logical coherence or structure and function of culture. The problem that 1 saw what how to integrate a regional view of culture (after Boas) with a holistic theory' of culture that saw separate cultures as internally consistent but regionally incommensurable (after Malinowski and Durkheim).