Negotiation Of Categories Research Articles

Looking for Die Besten Boeren: The Normalisation of Afrikaner Settlement in German South West Africa, 1884–1914*

This article explores Afrikaner immigration into German South West Africa during the period of German colonialism, 1884–1914. It focuses on the response of the German colonial authorities in Windhoek and in Berlin to the prospect of large-scale Afrikaner immigration as well as the representation of Afrikaners in German colonial discourse. German justifications of colonial rule were psychologically supported by notions of the imagined cultural and racial differences between the colonisers and the colonised. These underpinned the construction of a polarised self/other, white/black dichotomy and separated the indigenous Africans and Europeans into distinct categories of identification. The presence of settlers whose cultural practices and lifestyle did not match with the norms attributed to the desirable settler threatened to undermine the boundaries of difference between the coloniser and colonised. Some elements of the German government as well as the colonial press envisaged Afrikaner immigrants as a potential threat to continued German control over the colony. Others welcomed the immigration of the Afrikaners as colonial pioneers. The categories of black and white were deployed and reconstructed in order to assess the desirability of Afrikaner groups, leading to their assimilation or exclusion from settler society, and underlining the organising power of the schema. Cultural markers and economic considerations were used to differentiate desirable Afrikaner settlers from those deemed undesirable. Undesirable Afrikaner immigrants were discursively blackened through the use of racial rhetoric as well as being politically excluded from access to resources and land, and even physically excluded from the colony. In contrast, desirable settlers were welcomed and Germanised. Afrikaner immigration was illustrative of the constant negotiation of categories of identification and the utilisation of a notion of whiteness in creating an exclusive settler society.

Social identity and the duality of structure in late Roman-period Britain

The central theme of this article is the relationship between material practices, social identity categories and the duality of structure. The latter concept, linking structure and agency in Giddens’ structuration theory, is here understood as dependent upon the negotiation of categories, such as ethnicity/community, social status, religion and gender, through practices like dwelling, eating and appearing. Such practices can be interpreted from the material patterns that emerge from multi-dimensional and multi-scalar analyses of archaeological data. These ideas are worked through in a case study of Britain in the fourth and early fifth centuries AD, wherein some of the relationships between practices and institutionalized identities (such as those associated with the military) can be discerned. An emphasis on the negotiation of identities in practice also places the theme of temporality at centre-stage, offering a new perspective on the balance between reproduction and transformation in the ongoing constitution of social life.