Racial categories in the social life of post-apartheid South Africa

The organization of societies around categories such as gender, kinship, social class and (more recently) race, is a pervasive feature of sociality, and one perhaps nowhere more starkly apparent than in South Africa, where race has historically been elevated to an especially heightened status with respect to the structuring of society. More than 15 years after the dismantling of the ultra-racialized apartheid system, race remains a ubiquitous feature of everyday life in South Africa, making it an important site for the investigation of the operation of social (and particularly racial) categories. In this study, I take up these matters, employing an ethnomethodologically informed, conversation analytic approach to investigate some features of the deployment of racial categories in ordinary interactions. The data corpus for the study consists of approximately 115 hours of audio-recorded interactional broadcasts from three different South Africa radio stations, which yielded over 600 stretches of interaction in which race was either overtly or tacitly made relevant by the participants. The first part of my analysis of this data demonstrates how racial categories may come to be treated as either resources or constraints in the production of actions, as a result of the common-sense knowledge and authority associated with the categories of which they are members. I then build on and extends this analysis, focusing on the ways in which racial membership categories are oriented to and managed by speakers and recipients in one particular type of action sequence, namely complaint sequences. These analyses demonstrate some ways in which the race membership categorization device functions as an omni-relevant social reality that informs everyday actions, and in which talk-ininteraction provides a virtually omni-present niche in which racial social structures can be reproduced. I conclude by discussing some of the implications of the study for research on race (particularly with respect to post-apartheid South Africa) and talk-in-interaction, and identifying some possible areas for future research in this regard.