This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.

A country’s attitudinal profile is as much a part of its social reality as are its demographic make-up, its culture and its distinctive social patterns. It helps to provide a nuanced picture of a country’s circumstances, its continuities and changes, its democratic health, and how it feels to live there. It also helps to measure the country's progress towards the achievement of its economic, social and political goals, based on the measurement of both 'objective' and 'subjective' realities. South African Social Attitudes: Changing Times, Diverse Voices is a new series aimed at providing an analysis of attitudes and values towards a wide range of social and political issues relevant to life in contemporary South African society. As the series develops, we hope that readers will be able to draw meaningful comparisons with the findings of previous years and thus develop a richer picture and deeper appreciation of changing South African social values. This, the first volume in the series, presents the public's responses during extensive nation-wide interviews conducted by the HSRC in late 2003. The findings are analysed in three thematic sections: the first provides an in-depth examination of race, class and politics; the second gives a critical assessment of the public's perceptions of poverty, inequality and service delivery, and the last explores societal values such as partner violence and moral attitudes. South African Social Attitudes is essential reading for anyone seeking a guide to contemporary social or political issues and debates. It should prove an indispensable tool not only for government policy-makers, social scientists and students, but also for general readers wishing to gain a better understanding of their fellow citizens and themselves.

This book studies apartheid--its background, ideology, implementation, and function--and reform-apartheid, the South African government's latest solution to the continuing crisis. Part One demonstrates that the apartheid system was not unique; rather, that it was built upon the segregation order which had developed as South Africa industrialized with the discovery of diamonds and gold. Part Two critically examines the current South African situation and addresses possibilities for a resolution to the present conflict. The authors explore the emerging political trends, the effects of the sanctions campaign, the prospects for an internationally backed settlement, and the effects of internal pressure for change. Drawing on available literature, the authors then propose a framework for resolution.

This edited collection examines contemporary directions in geographical research on South Africa. It encompasses a cross section of selected themes of critical importance not only to the discipline of Geography in South Africa, but also of relevance to other areas of the Global South. All chapters are original contributions, providing a state of the art research baseline on key themes in physical, human and environmental geography, and in understanding the changing geographical landscapes of modern South Africa. These contributions set the scene for an understanding of the relationships between modern South Africa and the wider contemporary world, including issues of sustainable development and growth in the Global South.

This volume brings together seven empirically grounded contributions by African social scientists of different disciplinary backgrounds. The authors explore the social impact of religious innovation and competition in present day Africa. They represent a selection from an interdisciplinary initiative that made 23 research grants for theologians and social scientists to study Christianity and social change in contemporary Africa. These contributions focus on a variety of dynamics in contemporary African religion (mostly Christianity), including gender, health and healing, social media, entrepreneurship, and inter-religious borrowing and accommodation. The volume seeks to enhance understanding of religions vital presence and power in contemporary Africa. It reveals problems as well as possibilities, notably some ethical concerns and psychological maladies that arise in some of these new movements, notably neo-Pentecostal and militant fundamentalist groups. Yet the contributions do not fixate on African problems and victimization. Instead, they explore sources of African creativity, resiliency and agency. The book calls on scholars of religion and religiosity in Africa to invest new conceptual and methodological energy in understanding what it means to be actively religious in Africa today.

Winner of the 2002 Outstanding Book Award presented by the International and Intercultural Communication Division of the National Communication Association The election of 1994, which heralded the demise of Apartheid as a legally enforced institutionalization of "whiteness," disconnected the prior moorings of social identity for most South Africans, whatever their political persuasion. In one of the most profound collective psychological experiences of the contemporary world, South Africans are renegotiating the meaning of their social positionalities. In this book, Melissa Steyn, herself a white South African, grapples with what it means to be white, reflecting on events in her past that still resonate with her today. Her research includes discourse with more than fifty white South Africans who are faced with reinterpreting their old selves in the light of new knowledge and possibilities. Framed within current debates of postcolonialism and postmodernism, "Whiteness Just Isn't What It Used To Be" explores how the changes in South Africa's social and political structure are changing the white population's identity and sense of self.

In examining the intellectual history in contemporary South Africa, Eze engages with the emergence of ubuntu as one discourse that has become a mirror and aftermath of South Africa s overall historical narrative. This book interrogates a triple socio-political representation of ubuntu as a displacement narrative for South Africa s colonial consciousness; as offering a new national imaginary through its inclusive consciousness, in which different, competing, and often antagonistic memories and histories are accommodated; and as offering a historicity in which the past is transformed as a symbol of hope for the present and the future. This book offers a model for African intellectual history indignant to polemics but constitutive of creative historicism and healthy humanism.

Taking South Africa as an important case study of the challenges of structural transformation, the book offers a new micro-meso level framework and evidence linking country-specific and global dynamics of change, with a focus on the current challenges and opportunities faced by middle-income countries.

Fifteen writers explore the experimental, interdisciplinary and radically transgressive field of contemporary live art in South Africa, focusing on a wide range of perspectives, personalities and theoretical concerns Contemporary South African society is chronologically ‘post’ apartheid, but it continues to grapple with material redress, land redistribution and systemic racism. Acts of Transgression represents the complexity of this moment in the rich potential of a performative art form that transcends disciplinary boundaries and aesthetic conventions. The contributors, who are all significantly involved in the discipline of performance art, probe its intersection with crisis and socio-political turbulence, shifting notions of identity and belonging, embodied trauma and loss. Narratives of the past and visions for the future are interrogated through memory and the archive, thus destabilising entrenched colonial systems. Collectively analysing the work of more than 25 contemporary South African artists, including Athi-Patra Ruga, Mohau Modisakeng, Steven Cohen, Dean Hutton, Mikhael Subotzsky, Tracey Rose and Donna Kukama, among others, the analysis is accompanied by a visual record of more than 50 photographs. For those working in the fields of theatre, performance studies and art, this is a must-have collection of critical essays on a burgeoning and exciting field of contemporary South African research.

Firmly situating South African teams, players, and associations in the international framework in which they have to compete, South Africa and the Global Game: Football, Apartheid, and Beyond presents an interdisciplinary analysis of how and why South Africa underwent a remarkable transformation from a pariah in world sport to the first African host of a World Cup in 2010. Written by an eminent team of scholars, this special issue and book aims to examine the importance of football in South African society, revealing how the black oppression transformed a colonial game into a force for political, cultural and social liberation. It explores how the hosting of the 2010 World Cup aims to enhance the prestige of the post-apartheid nation, to generate economic growth and stimulate Pan-African pride. Among the themes dealt with are race and racism, class and gender dynamics, social identities, mass media and culture, and globalization. This collection of original and insightful essays will appeal to specialists in African Studies, Cultural Studies, and Sport Studies, as well as to non-specialist readers seeking to inform themselves ahead of the 2010 World Cup. This book was published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.