Reproducing criticality: South African social-cultural anthropology's contemporary challenge—the UCT experience

Abstract

For many who were drawn to the discipline during South Africa's apartheid years, social anthropology offered a means for a cohort of primarily middle class persons to crystallise an otherwise inchoate criticality about the regime, in large part by providing opportunity for what has been called exposé. For a while after the collapse of apartheid, such exposé seemed to have become passé because it was assumed that the new democratic government would address the problems that such work had exposed and find means to remedy them. Moreover, it seemed inappropriate, at least in the early years of the new government, to be seen to be attacking its policy implementation. Although such criticism is often labelled as reactionary racism, continuing inequalities suggest a need to re-open the door for such critique and to return to the fray, drawing our students with us.To do that we need to ask: what are the imperatives that drive the post-apartheid generation of social anthropology students, and are they such that they will permit students to become critical citizens rather than subservient subjects? The article suggests that South Africa is today marked by a coalescence of neo-liberal imperatives and a media-driven hegemony of that ideology; by a growing embourgeoisement of the population from which South African higher education students are drawn and who are increasingly polarised from the poor. It argues that those factors have led to tertiary level students developing a set of aspirations that, without the students being carefully mentored, constrain most from adopting a substantively critical perspective, and that the challenge our discipline faces is to rekindle in that kind of student population an interest in, indeed to revive a passion for, criticality in a way that will enable a public anthropology of good citizenship. It also provides some indication as to how that rekindling might be effected.