Elsevier

Political Geography

Volume 98, October 2022, 102674
Political Geography

Full Length Article
Making sense of the state: Citizens and state buildings in South Africa

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102674Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • State buildings constitute a state body, a physical manifestation of the state.

  • Citizens engage with the state through sensory engagements with its buildings.

  • They use sight to produce metaphors that ‘make’ the state and haptic senses connected to memory and fantasy to ‘unmake’ it.

  • Material drawn from 24 FGDs in South African cities shows how this plays out in South Africa.

Abstract

Drawing on the example of South Africa, the article explores how the state, an incoherent and opaque set of ideas, discourses and relationships, is made into a ‘thing’ by its citizens. It describes how citizens encounter the state physically when they see, hear, touch and smell its buildings and how these different sensory engagements generate thoughts and impressions that help them make and unmake the state-thing. The argument is made first theoretically, drawing on work from architecture, cultural geography and urban studies on sensory engagements with buildings; and then empirically through an analysis of South African citizens' accounts of their engagements with state buildings, drawing on focus group discussions in urban centres and observations of state buildings in action. It finds that the state is reified through citizens' ability to think and feel their way from material form to idea, using sight to produce abstractions and metaphors, and the haptic senses to connect to personal memory and fantasy. This layered account of the state, described locally through the analogy of the face-brick, constitutes the making and unmaking of the state-thing that illustrates a deep but ambivalent involvement in it.

Keywords

South Africa
State-making
Architecture
Sensory-engagement
Citizen-perspectives

Cited by (0)

Thank you to Anastasia Slamat and Selemo Nkwe for research assistance in South Africa. Thank you for constructive comments from the reviewers and editors of Political Geography, and from Nnamdi Elleh, Peter Vale, Stephen Chan, Daniel Mulugeta and Jo Tomkinson who read and commented on early drafts of this article.