Introduction

This chapter is animated by questions arising from core ideas in Elias's thinking, which are explored in relation to research concerned with South Africa over a 200-year period. First, does Elias's analysis of the civilising process, forged in the crucible of European histories and societies in France, Germany, Italy and Britain, ‘travel’ to other parts of the world and specifically South Africa, or is a racialising process more apparent there, and if it is, then what is the relationship between racialising and civilising processes? Second, does figuration, another central component of Elias's sociology, play a significant part in the South African trajectory of change, and if so in what ways? And third, what is the relationship between figuration and the civilising or racialising process in South Africa, and can this be helpfully understood by exploring its established and outsider group dynamics?

These questions are considered by reference to a research project on ‘Whites Writing Whiteness’ (WWW) spanning the period from the 1770s to the 1970s. This is a qualitative longitudinal investigation of how South Africa's distinctive apartheid racial order came into being, exerted power, was contested, then eventually replaced by a democratically elected government. It explores this by analysing the complex relationship between the materiality of the racial order and the representational ‘world’ as inscribed in letterwriting, over this lengthy period (Stanley 2017; see also Stanley 2020, 2018, 2016, 2015, 2013). The work of Elias provides the ideal framework for WWW research, which draws on his thought-provoking interrogation of long-term processes of change and encompasses state formation as intermeshed with sociogenetic everyday social practices.

WWW has constructed a large longitudinal dataset of historical materials, formed by collections of letters and related everyday documents of life written by South African white people, with many archive collections spanning three or more generations of contributors (Stanley 2015). Analytical attention has been on the changing representational practices in which some people and groups were ‘Othered’ in race terms in these epistolary writings. In investigating this, Elias's thinking about figuration, established and outsiders, pronouns and relationality among other ideas have been drawn on, as well as the civilising process and whether it is an appropriate framework for thinking about this data or whether other processes connected with racialising have been more impactful in South Africa.