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Collective Memory and Collective Fear: How South Africans Use the Past to Explain Crime

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Abstract

The past is a resource that individuals can draw upon as they try to make sense of the world around them, and scholars have long assumed that individuals internalize and utilize collective memories in their daily lives. Yet capturing and analyzing the deployment of collective memory has proven elusive. This paper offers a novel approach for tapping whether, and how, individuals selectively draw on their collective pasts to explain the present. Analyzing interviews with young South African managers and professionals, this paper demonstrates racial variation in how respondents organically introduce the country’s apartheid past as an explanans for current crime, and suggests how these differences are related to divergent levels of commitment by blacks and whites to the South African nation-building project. In so doing, the paper offers a method for examining how individuals selectively use the past to construct, justify, and explain their present-day attitudes and behaviors. The study further highlights the importance of attending not only to what people remember, but also to how they think through and with collective representations of the past.

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Notes

  1. Several scholars also show how attempts to remake the past to serve present interests are curtailed by a variety of factors (see Coser 1992; Olick 1999b; Schudson 1989; Schwartz 1991).

  2. For an overview on the collectivist and individualist traditions in the literature, see Olick (1999a) who proposes that the field of “Social Memory Studies” be divided into two main traditions: studies of “collective memory” (publicly available representational symbols) and studies of “collected memories” (aggregated individual memories). In keeping with the bulk of the literature (including Olick et al. (2011)), I use the term “collective memory” rather than “social memory” to refer inclusively to both traditions.

  3. Special hearings were held into the role of business and faith communities in the past. Participation in these hearings was completely voluntary and there were no potential consequences to non-participation. This was not the case with individual perpetrators who risked criminal prosecutions should amnesty not be granted.

  4. Gibson’s (2004; 2006) survey is an exception in this regard.

  5. For comparative purposes, the murder rate per 100,000 of the population in the United States was 5.6 (FBI Uniform Crime Reports 2007).

  6. Black Africans are slightly more fearful than whites, with 48.4 % indicating that they have never feared crime in their homes as opposed to 59.3 % of whites.

  7. South African social science tends to divide the population using the apartheid categories and these remain salient in how individuals self-identify. These are: African, coloured, Indian, and white. Echoing anti-apartheid resistance movements, many South African social scientists use the term “black” to refer collectively to Africans, coloureds and Indians. This study reports only on interviews with black Africans, from now on referred to as blacks.

  8. I also conducted interviews with two respondents who moved to South Africa as adults, and with three Indian and two coloured respondents. The responses of coloured respondents resembled those of African respondents and those of Indian respondents were similar to those of white respondents. For the sake of parsimony, this paper reports only on interviews with South African born black African and white respondents.

  9. Even if English was not the respondents’ first language, all respondents worked in workplaces where English was the medium of communication (as most workplaces in Johannesburg are) and spoke it with first-language fluency (as most professionals in Johannesburg do).

  10. I left a question about whether the past could be viewed as responsible for current social issues for the very end of the interview, after respondents had finished offering their appraisals of the crime situation in South Africa. Aside from one respondent (Damian), none of my interviewees responded to this prompt by offering opinions about the connection between apartheid and crime that had not already emerged in the interview. I have excluded Damian’s response from the analysis.

  11. Note the implicit assumption—made by white and black respondents in this study—that criminals in South Africa are black. On the processes through which individuals deploy—or remain mute about—race in interaction by drawing on “common knowledge,” see Whitehead (2009; see also Pollock 2004).

  12. None of these incidents was ever reported to the South African police (Mail and Guardian 2009)

  13. The decision was overturned in 2010 (see Mail and Guardian 2010)

  14. Townships refer to urban areas designated for blacks during apartheid.

  15. Two white respondents—neither of whom advanced the “anti-white violence” explanation—mentioned the “persistent class inequalities” explanation.

  16. South Africa’s gini coefficient was estimated at 0.67 in 2008 (Office of the Presidency of South Africa 2009). For a detailed discussion of patterns of inequality in South Africa, see Seekings and Nattrass (2005).

  17. The explanation was mentioned by one white respondent.

  18. For discussions of how racism is reconfigured following the elimination of de jure discrimination, see Bobo et al. (1997); Bonilla-Silva (2010); and Sears (1988).

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Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2009 annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society in Baltimore, MD. I thank Bart Bonikowski, Nicholas Christakis, Simone Ispa-Landa, Kevin Lewis, Jeffrey Olick, Brenna Powell, Lauren Rivera, Graziella Silva, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, Mary Waters, David Smilde, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and insightful comments. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Jocelyn Viterna for her incisive feedback on this paper.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Johannesburg, C-ring 634, Kingsway Campus, PO Box 524, Auckland Park, 2006, South Africa

    Chana Teeger

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Teeger, C. Collective Memory and Collective Fear: How South Africans Use the Past to Explain Crime. Qual Sociol 37, 69–92 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-013-9267-3

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