Fragile environments, strong families - South African Afrikaners perseverance in an era of uncertainty
After the era of formal apartheid ended in 1994, South Africa’s white Afrikaners have been studied very little, despite having been economically successful in a country where income inequality is one of the highest in the world.
Simultaneously, all South Africans have been increasingly exposed to new vulnerabilities. Crime, problems with infrastructure and economic as well as environmental issues have made life in South Africa challenging.
Yet, the Afrikaners have managed to battle these fragilities. Their success can be explained partly by the inherited advantages from the apartheid era and social networks where whiteness is capital, but it does not explain all of it.
In my preliminary field research, I made some observations, which hint that their tight kinship organisation, strong marital relations, and the ensuing exchange relations might have a pivotal role in their success.
I have done ethnographic fieldwork among the Afrikaners since 1997. My strong field relations ensure that I will be able to study their kinship organisation and exchange relations in depth, and these are aspects, which would otherwise be hard to track. Methodologically, I combine the use of the new kinship software (SILKin) with participant observation.
My research questions will study the maintenance of family relations and exchange relations, and boundaries of kinship. I will study these through religion and moral practices and thinking, as well as ideas around the family.
Final report
Purpose of the project and how it has developed during the project period
The initial purpose of the project was to study the South African white Afrikaners (Boere) in the post-apartheid era, and to understand how they had succeeded in maintaining their privileged position, despite the increasing fragilities in a country struggling with the extreme economic inequality, crumbling infrastructure, crime and corruption. Their success can be partly explained by the inherited advantages from the apartheid era, and social hierarchies, where whiteness is capital, but these did not explain all of it. My project examines, how the extended family networks contribute to the Afrikaner economic success? What was the connection between this success and the material exchange relations, family hierarchies and moral ideals?
The Covid-19 pandemic caused difficulties for the planned progress of the project, which was dependent on gaining of field data and participant observation. Yet, I managed to successfully carry out two periods of fieldwork in Stellenbosch in September 2019 and from October to December 2021. I fell ill with Covid during the second fieldwork, and had ensuing health problems, which hindered me from traveling back to field during 2022. Instead, in 2022 I focused on writing my new manuscript and developing my concepts.
Also, some of my plans for organizing workshops and participating in the conferences had to be postponed. Despite these substantial obstacles, the project has developed and produced some interesting results, publications, and new concepts.
A short description of how it was implemented
I had a solid access to my field as I had been working with the same Afrikaner family since 1997. After the two long periods of participant observation, I have remained in constant connection with the family. They are fully aware of my research, and read and comment on my work.
During my 2021 fieldwork, I was quarantined for weeks with my research interlocutors. While frustrating, this was also a great opportunity to deepen my view on my research questions. Since we couldn’t leave the house, members of the local (family) network assisted us with food. The importance of these exchange relations and networks became very concrete, and I focused even more on the practices of exchange, and the personal attachments that followed the movement of goods and services within the family network.
I observed how the individuals systematically valued the benefits and coherence of the family above their own needs, which could lead to tensions when there were family members, who were acting selfishly. These tensions guided me to examine the hierarchies of care within the extended family. For example, I observed how the senior women worked constantly on solidifying and reproducing the family networks, supporting the marital relations and parenthood of the next generation.
The project’s three most important results and contributions to the international research front and a discussion about this
The most important results for the international research front have been publications, and new theoretical insights. I used the materials from my fieldwork first, to refocus (and largely rewrite) my unfinished book manuscript, and on the writing of two new chapters. The monograph came out in 2021 (2022) under name “Afrikaners and the Boundaries of Faith”. Second, we published an edited volume “Power and Informality in Urban Africa” (2022) with Professor Laura Stark, Jyväskylä University. Third, I am presently working on a manuscript of a new monograph (working title: From Table to Bed – Afrikaners’ Extended Family Economies, and the Regimes of Belonging), which I hope to finish next year. There were also a number of conceptual innovations, of which I list the most important ones:
1) I developed a holistic understanding on the Afrikaner informal networks, and how they support their economic position. While the members of these networks made a concentrated effort to maintain them, there were certain expectations of compliance and reciprocity. This reciprocity also kept the networks active.
Our recent edited volume (Stark and Teppo 2022) focused on the informal networks. My research on the Afrikaners contributed to development of the conceptual approach for this book, while also contributing to my project work. The approach on informality, which has normally been used to study poverty and inequality, is also workable on the middle-class, as wealth and privilege as reproduced through particular economic practices that also tie the extended family together.
2) I advanced the concepts of spatial and religious mediation, and discussed the mediation processes in my 2022 volume “Afrikaners and the Boundaries of Faith”. This is what professor Paula Uimonen from Stockholm University stated about the book:
”Den nyutkomna monografin Afrikaners and the Boundaries of Faith in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Teppo 2022), bygger på Teppos långvariga fältarbete i Western Cape. Boken undersöker vita afrikaaners nya religiösa praktiker i relation till integration, segregering och rasrelationer i dagens Sydafrika. Utgiven av ansedda Routledge i serien Contemporary South Africa utgör boken ett rejält bidrag till antropologi, religionsstudier och Afrikastudier.”
The theoretical innovation in this monograph provides a fresh perspective on the mediation of social boundaries with physical movement. It is thus a theoretical and practical tool for studying how people draw, and eventually cross their previous sociocultural boundaries in the spaces they inhabit.
3) Inspired by the Afrikaner family networks, I developed term “affective regimes of belonging”, with an initial interest in how the moral ideals and the material exchanges were intertwined. One of my findings was that there was a gendered division of labor, where women regulated the moral and affective worlds, and relations within the extended family, as well as between the family and the surrounding society. This is the central concept of my new book manuscript (now 63 thousand words), and I will be presenting and developing it further in workshops, conferences, and academic articles. It will also be a useful concept for examining family relations elsewhere than in the South African context.
The RJ funding had a crucial significance my promotion to a full professor in Cultural Anthropology in November 2022, at the end of the grant. The evaluation of my application for professorship crystallizes the international significance of this project: ”In sum, Dr Annika Teppo is an internationally recognised researcher, whose trajectory has for the past several years indicated considerable progression. She has expanded her research themes through new fieldwork and conceptual reflection, all of which has made her contribute to bodies of literature that go beyond a narrow specialism. Those bodies of literature include racism and “whiteness”, socio-economic inequality and “neoliberalism”, ritual and religion, to name but a few. She is well established in international academic networks and is planning to develop new and complementary research interests, such as ethnic and racialised minorities elsewhere than in South Africa.” (Professor Harri Englund, Cambridge University).
New research questions generated through the project
In this project, I have consolidated the theoretical ideas for my future works. Based on these conceptual insights, I have been inspired to develop new project ideas and co-operations, thinking how these ideas could be applied to Nordic countries, especially Sweden and Finland. In 2023, I produced two new project applications for a research group to study a little studied minority, Swedish Finns (sverigefinnar) in the Swedish suburbs from the perspective of social and spatial mediation, and affective regimes of belonging.
The project’s international dimensions, such as contacts and material
During the project, I have collaborated with researchers from Finland (Jyväskylä), Sweden (Uppsala), Denmark (Århus), Uganda (Gulu University) and South Africa (Stellenbosch University). Some of them I invited to our department to give a seminar, or to visit as researchers, or to participate in a wedding workshop I organized in Uppsala in May 2022.
How the project team has disseminated the results to other researchers and groups outside the scientific community and discuss and explain how collaboration has taken place.
During the project era, I worked as the editor-in-chief of the Nordic Journal of African studies (NJAS) until March 2022. This Open Access journal has a number of readers outside the scientific community. https://www.njas.fi/njas/index
In summer 2021 I gave a long one-hour interview in the Finnish national radio regarding the project. It is now a podcast in: https://areena.yle.fi/podcastit/1-50569733
In 2023, I have co-operated with Demos, which a progressive, independent think-tank in Helsinki (https://www.demos.org/) as we submitted a joint ERC-research proposal in March. I have also negotiated with Dr. Marja Tiilikainen, a research director from the Migration Institute of Finland (https://siirtolaisuusinstituutti.fi/en/frontpage-eng/) regarding a future Swedish-Finnish co-operation. Both these operators have a wide communication task and network, and they are highly visible to both policy-makers and general public.
The initial purpose of the project was to study the South African white Afrikaners (Boere) in the post-apartheid era, and to understand how they had succeeded in maintaining their privileged position, despite the increasing fragilities in a country struggling with the extreme economic inequality, crumbling infrastructure, crime and corruption. Their success can be partly explained by the inherited advantages from the apartheid era, and social hierarchies, where whiteness is capital, but these did not explain all of it. My project examines, how the extended family networks contribute to the Afrikaner economic success? What was the connection between this success and the material exchange relations, family hierarchies and moral ideals?
The Covid-19 pandemic caused difficulties for the planned progress of the project, which was dependent on gaining of field data and participant observation. Yet, I managed to successfully carry out two periods of fieldwork in Stellenbosch in September 2019 and from October to December 2021. I fell ill with Covid during the second fieldwork, and had ensuing health problems, which hindered me from traveling back to field during 2022. Instead, in 2022 I focused on writing my new manuscript and developing my concepts.
Also, some of my plans for organizing workshops and participating in the conferences had to be postponed. Despite these substantial obstacles, the project has developed and produced some interesting results, publications, and new concepts.
A short description of how it was implemented
I had a solid access to my field as I had been working with the same Afrikaner family since 1997. After the two long periods of participant observation, I have remained in constant connection with the family. They are fully aware of my research, and read and comment on my work.
During my 2021 fieldwork, I was quarantined for weeks with my research interlocutors. While frustrating, this was also a great opportunity to deepen my view on my research questions. Since we couldn’t leave the house, members of the local (family) network assisted us with food. The importance of these exchange relations and networks became very concrete, and I focused even more on the practices of exchange, and the personal attachments that followed the movement of goods and services within the family network.
I observed how the individuals systematically valued the benefits and coherence of the family above their own needs, which could lead to tensions when there were family members, who were acting selfishly. These tensions guided me to examine the hierarchies of care within the extended family. For example, I observed how the senior women worked constantly on solidifying and reproducing the family networks, supporting the marital relations and parenthood of the next generation.
The project’s three most important results and contributions to the international research front and a discussion about this
The most important results for the international research front have been publications, and new theoretical insights. I used the materials from my fieldwork first, to refocus (and largely rewrite) my unfinished book manuscript, and on the writing of two new chapters. The monograph came out in 2021 (2022) under name “Afrikaners and the Boundaries of Faith”. Second, we published an edited volume “Power and Informality in Urban Africa” (2022) with Professor Laura Stark, Jyväskylä University. Third, I am presently working on a manuscript of a new monograph (working title: From Table to Bed – Afrikaners’ Extended Family Economies, and the Regimes of Belonging), which I hope to finish next year. There were also a number of conceptual innovations, of which I list the most important ones:
1) I developed a holistic understanding on the Afrikaner informal networks, and how they support their economic position. While the members of these networks made a concentrated effort to maintain them, there were certain expectations of compliance and reciprocity. This reciprocity also kept the networks active.
Our recent edited volume (Stark and Teppo 2022) focused on the informal networks. My research on the Afrikaners contributed to development of the conceptual approach for this book, while also contributing to my project work. The approach on informality, which has normally been used to study poverty and inequality, is also workable on the middle-class, as wealth and privilege as reproduced through particular economic practices that also tie the extended family together.
2) I advanced the concepts of spatial and religious mediation, and discussed the mediation processes in my 2022 volume “Afrikaners and the Boundaries of Faith”. This is what professor Paula Uimonen from Stockholm University stated about the book:
”Den nyutkomna monografin Afrikaners and the Boundaries of Faith in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Teppo 2022), bygger på Teppos långvariga fältarbete i Western Cape. Boken undersöker vita afrikaaners nya religiösa praktiker i relation till integration, segregering och rasrelationer i dagens Sydafrika. Utgiven av ansedda Routledge i serien Contemporary South Africa utgör boken ett rejält bidrag till antropologi, religionsstudier och Afrikastudier.”
The theoretical innovation in this monograph provides a fresh perspective on the mediation of social boundaries with physical movement. It is thus a theoretical and practical tool for studying how people draw, and eventually cross their previous sociocultural boundaries in the spaces they inhabit.
3) Inspired by the Afrikaner family networks, I developed term “affective regimes of belonging”, with an initial interest in how the moral ideals and the material exchanges were intertwined. One of my findings was that there was a gendered division of labor, where women regulated the moral and affective worlds, and relations within the extended family, as well as between the family and the surrounding society. This is the central concept of my new book manuscript (now 63 thousand words), and I will be presenting and developing it further in workshops, conferences, and academic articles. It will also be a useful concept for examining family relations elsewhere than in the South African context.
The RJ funding had a crucial significance my promotion to a full professor in Cultural Anthropology in November 2022, at the end of the grant. The evaluation of my application for professorship crystallizes the international significance of this project: ”In sum, Dr Annika Teppo is an internationally recognised researcher, whose trajectory has for the past several years indicated considerable progression. She has expanded her research themes through new fieldwork and conceptual reflection, all of which has made her contribute to bodies of literature that go beyond a narrow specialism. Those bodies of literature include racism and “whiteness”, socio-economic inequality and “neoliberalism”, ritual and religion, to name but a few. She is well established in international academic networks and is planning to develop new and complementary research interests, such as ethnic and racialised minorities elsewhere than in South Africa.” (Professor Harri Englund, Cambridge University).
New research questions generated through the project
In this project, I have consolidated the theoretical ideas for my future works. Based on these conceptual insights, I have been inspired to develop new project ideas and co-operations, thinking how these ideas could be applied to Nordic countries, especially Sweden and Finland. In 2023, I produced two new project applications for a research group to study a little studied minority, Swedish Finns (sverigefinnar) in the Swedish suburbs from the perspective of social and spatial mediation, and affective regimes of belonging.
The project’s international dimensions, such as contacts and material
During the project, I have collaborated with researchers from Finland (Jyväskylä), Sweden (Uppsala), Denmark (Århus), Uganda (Gulu University) and South Africa (Stellenbosch University). Some of them I invited to our department to give a seminar, or to visit as researchers, or to participate in a wedding workshop I organized in Uppsala in May 2022.
How the project team has disseminated the results to other researchers and groups outside the scientific community and discuss and explain how collaboration has taken place.
During the project era, I worked as the editor-in-chief of the Nordic Journal of African studies (NJAS) until March 2022. This Open Access journal has a number of readers outside the scientific community. https://www.njas.fi/njas/index
In summer 2021 I gave a long one-hour interview in the Finnish national radio regarding the project. It is now a podcast in: https://areena.yle.fi/podcastit/1-50569733
In 2023, I have co-operated with Demos, which a progressive, independent think-tank in Helsinki (https://www.demos.org/) as we submitted a joint ERC-research proposal in March. I have also negotiated with Dr. Marja Tiilikainen, a research director from the Migration Institute of Finland (https://siirtolaisuusinstituutti.fi/en/frontpage-eng/) regarding a future Swedish-Finnish co-operation. Both these operators have a wide communication task and network, and they are highly visible to both policy-makers and general public.