[Anthropgrad] Wednesday Anthrop Seminar

[Fay castles]

*/Collective Responsibility and the Politics of Social Remembering in 
post-apartheid /**/South Africa/**//*
For ANU Seminar: May 2009

Lindi Renier Todd, Transforming Cultures Research Centre, University of 
Technology Sydney.

* *
*Abstract*
Identified as the former beneficiaries of a political system which 
actively institutionalized racist discrimination, Afrikaners in 
post-apartheid South Africa have arguably been /prescribed/ to recognize 
their collective responsibility and /prohibited/ from endorsing the 
previous regime, both of which have impacted on their ability to claim a 
moral identity for the future. By employing material on post-Holocaust 
discussions of German guilt and responsibility to the past, I ask what 
the relationship can be between morality and striving for recognition 
where the historically constituted subject or community is no longer 
recognised as morally legitimate by international and national 
commentators.
Drawing on the field of ‘social memory studies’ this paper explores the 
particular narratives and stories of the past claimed and rejected by a 
group of separatist Afrikaners in the wake of the Truth and 
Reconciliation Commission: established as a state mechanism involved in 
the process of remembering. Writing within the context of the 
‘history-wars’ in Australia, Goodall has suggested that it is less 
useful to think of history as a collection of facts, and more productive 
to think about history ‘as process’. I extend this idea to talk about 
history as /performed /in a process of social remembering and how these 
performances are influenced by their performers, their intended purpose 
and audiences.
Of particular importance to this discussion, therefore, is how this 
group is created by its social memory which both acts as a constraint 
on, and is used to establish, its position in relation to the wider 
national social group.



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Fay Castles
Departmental Administrator
Department of Anthropology
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200
+61-2-612 52162  Fax: +61-2-612 53023
Fay.Castles at anu.edu.au
http://rspas.anu.edu.au/anthropology
ANU CRICOS Provider Number: 00120C
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