States of Nature: Creating ‘the normal’ through the tale of a farm school in South Africa

Abstract

First paragraph: This narrative is one of four major narrative pieces drawn from my doctoral dissertation, Voices in the Silence, and is a reflexive account of a visit to a farm school in rural post-apartheid South Africa. "States of Nature" embraces critical narrative methodology. It focuses on issues of normalization, localization, and proceduralism. It attends to past, present, and place in discourses of change as they encounter discourses and lived experiences of the "everyday," as well as their attending ideologies. It looks at the importance of context, prevailing ethos, and the political disjunctions between the local and global. Neoliberalism, political conservativism, and white governmentality are problematized in how they interweave and embed themselves in the fabric of the "everyday" to create "the normal."