SAFELY BEHIND BARS, INTRUDING

Colonial Patterns and Territorial Rites
in white South African middle class suburbs

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3.  BOUNDARY

In order to exist, by definition every field must have an edge, a boundary. It is vital to physical and psychological well being to know where the limits are.  Yet this is only learnt in time.  Drawing a boundary is a cultural act.  It divides the un-colonised, innocent space of nature. On a deep symbolic level, human culture functions as a strategic defense against the dark, unknowable forces of nature.  Culture is the ordered language that allows us to assimilate and bind the chaos of our perceived reality.  In this way culture both constructs and deconstructs the notion of the boundary.

• Regardless of the degree of tolerance for closeness of physical presence of others in various cultures and individuals, there is a limit for everyone.  In some animals behaviour is grossly distorted whenever there is extreme crowding of members of the same species.  Similar reactions have been noted among people, but social adaptions sometimes work to prevent violent reactions among them.  A great deal of research remains to be done on the effects of crowding on people, but we already know enough about their seriousness to make us add crowding to our list of adverse effects of excessive population growth (Glassner 1996:19).

Statistically, population increases lead to an increase in fencing, a need to differentiate ‘what’s mine and what’s yours.’  This is especially imperative in times of mental crisis or war, which one could argue we are experiencing in South Africa at the moment. 

What is needed in such cases is a boundary.  The human is “the only animal to surround his territory by a delimited frontier which is to him a matter of life and death, regarded with a sentiment that is almost religious in its intensity”  (Malmberg 1980:91).

A British fence manufacturer was quoted as saying:  “It’s man putting his own stakes into the ground, staking out his own little share of land.  No matter how small, he likes his own frontier to be distinct.  In it he’s safe and he’s happy.  That’s what a fence is” (quoted in Malmberg 1980:94).

Visually and politically, there is a fascism inherent in the sameness of these gardens and houses, which is at odds with many of our deepest cultural ‘memories’.  The poem on the following page deplores the origins of the situation I found myself in in February 2003.

Jennifer Robinson writes that the new white South African insularity is based on “Long traditions of maintaining separateness in situations of intimacy (such as sharing a home with a domestic servant) (Robinson 2001:168).

Analysing the concepts of taboo and pollution, one is struck by the intrinsic links to all areas of social organisation. "Dirt is matter out of place" on many levels of human interaction, social, spiritual, linguistic, psychological and scientific (Douglas 2002)

 “The proverb ‘A man’s home is his castle’ strongly suggests that home is a defended territory, and an average Western person spends about three quarters of his lifetime at home”  (Malmberg 1980:311).  It is here that we find spiritual peace.

"For us [living in a Judaeo-Christian Westernised society], sacred things are to be protected from defilement. Holiness and impurity are at opposite poles" (Douglas:2002, 7). The concept of defilement is responsible for most of our norms and values, and therefore primal taboos such as that governing pollution.

Douglas argues that the fear of dirt on one level is an instrument to reinforce the dominant culture and the power of its rulers. At the second level, the fear of dirt expresses the separation between those adhering to a culture's moral and ethical code from those who do not conform (Douglas 2002:3). Conformity by adhering to norms and values is achieved through sanctions. These can be positive or negative (Haralambos & Holborn 1995:5).

When a young child learns to wash itself on its own, it is rewarded by positive sanctions from parents such as smiles or encouraging words. Breaking a taboo, like urinating in public, is negatively sanctioned by society. This can lead to violent reactions by onlookers, and even arrest. Psychologically, taboos encourage us to distance ourselves from those sanctioned negatively. "Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. (Douglas 2002:35). Dirt is all that is socially rejected and must stay outside the home.

At the same time, dirt is a powerful rebellion against oppression. Douglas’ theories have a strong socio-biological dimension.  The marking of territory through defecation and urination has been well studied by behavioural psychologists, for instance boys and girls placing their excreta in their bedrooms or on the possessions of visiting strangers.  There is also the phenomenon of grumus merdae, excrement left by burglars at the place of crime.  This apparently represents “a marking of territory as an act of social release and personal integration” (Malmberg 1980:310).

Farred argues that for white South Africans "identification with the colonized country has for centuries replaced any affinity with the European motherland." (1997:74)  Yet  It is almost as if we have re-kindled our affinity by exoticising Europe.

“Surburbia is above all a residential nursery and reproduction territory, riding high on human multiplication and the protective instinct of parents”  (Malmberg 1980:312).  Europe is the traditional safe place, subconsciously the Eden of our origins.  It is no coincidence that our homes and gardens so often mimic the architecture and landscapes of the old world.  So that our children, perhaps, might know what they will one day be returning to? Home is the field which we defend most vehemently, it is our strongest enclosure.

Of course the fear of violence is primarily a fear of death, perhaps perceived as a lack of containment.  Death is the final symbolic boundary between the self and the world at large, as it is conceived in western binary terms, and the greatest of all human fears. The threat of death is very real and very much part of conversation in all sectors of South African society.

I discovered quite unintentionally that the elaborate 19^th century fences around the graves in the Primrose Hill cemetery were identical in pattern to some of the 21^st century burglar bars and fencing literally across the road.  It seems that not only does the fence keep death out of the home, it also keeps death in the cemetery.  As in the example of Karen Blixen’s lover Denys Finch-Hatton discussed in the introduction to this article, a dead body comes to signify ownership of the land. 

The 'boundary' emerges as a device to keep out death, this being a perceived similarity between the function of the security fence and the graveyard fence.  In one, death is kept in.  In the other, it is kept out.