Missions and social identities in the Lower Orange River Basin, 1760-1998

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 214-224).The broad theoretical concern of the thesis is to examine an ambivalent dimension in the formation of social identities in which similarities in attributes and symbolic representations can become the source of conflict when they appear to have been appropriated and alienated. In studies of the role of ethnicity in the creation and reinforcement of social identity there is very often the assumption that social cohesion arises from similarity and that actual or perceived differences lead people to identify one another as members of opposing ethnic groups. I have suggested, however, that differentiation arises from the claims that are made to this distinctiveness, and that disputes over cultural commonalities or shared ethnic symbolism actually serve to sustain ethnic boundaries in situations where powerful external forces are at work in promoting integration. I have used Tambiah's theoretical model for the investigation of ethnic identity to structure a series of case studies drawn from a community study of Pella, a communal area with a Roman Catholic mission station, and studies of other former Coloured and Nama Reserves associated with Christian missions in the Lower Orange River Basin of Namaqualand. A distinctive historical feature of this region is a general trend towards social integration as opposed to the separation found in other parts of southern Africa. In the case studies that make up the body of the thesis I have presented the sociality of the community at Pella from three perspectives, socio- political, religious and material cultural, to show the complex ways in which ethnicity has operated over time in the formation of social identities. Setting the colonial and post-colonial encounters in Gramsci's notion of hegemony as involving asymmetrical class relations and cultural imperialism, I argue that the ongoing role of the universalist Christian churches in shaping patterns of identity has to be understood in terms of their commitment to what has come to be called "inculturation" as a way of indigenizing their versions of Christianity in Africa and throughout the world. In addressing the questions of coercion and resistance, hegemony and accommodation, localization and revitalization, and the role of missions in identity politics, I contend that the concept of "inculturation" is vital to an understanding of oppositional responses to globalization, as these are expressed in cultural and ethnic terms at local level through a politics of similarity as a form of everyday resistance to the coercive and hegemonic forces of globalization. The thesis is thus a contribution to a wider debate in anthropology on role of ethnicity in cultural transformation and continuity in the context of the gathering crisis of the nation-state and the ongoing revolutionary reconstruction of the contemporary world order