Sharlene Swartz, 2009
New York, Palgrave Macmillan
$85.00 (hbk), 248 pp.
ISBN 978‐0‐2306‐1891‐6
The term ikasi (the title under which the book is published in South Africa by Wits Press) is a vernacular expression for the black residential townships created by the Apartheid policies of the former South African government. More than 90% of black youth live in the townships and it is in one of them, Langa, near Cape Town, that Sharlene Swartz spent nearly two years trying to understand the moral context of the vulnerable young people who lived there. What is the moral ecology of youth who grow up in a post‐conflict society marked by partial parenting, partial schooling, poverty and oppression? How do they construct right and wrong? What moral distinctions are made and in what sense do normative rules regulate conduct? To answer these questions Swartz followed 37 young men and women between the ages of 14 and 20 using a variety of ethnographic techniques. The results have yielded what is arguably the most interesting work in moral psychology of the last few years.
The book is organised into three parts. Part I describes the South African Moral Context in three chapters. Part II, in four chapters, gets down to the empirical details as to how young people in the townships construct right and wrong (Chapter 4), how goodness is construed—and how it attaches to various social crowds (Chapter 5), how decisions are made (Chapter 6) and how moral influence is understood (Chapter 7). Part III attempts to put the empirical realities of Part II into a broader theoretical context, in this case, the notion of moral capital (Chapter 8) and its implications for education (Chapter 9).
Swartz finds, for example, that ikasi youth construct multiple overlapping moral codes that reflect traditional values, but also contested ‘modern’ codes with respect to money and sex, and ‘post‐modern’ codes that point to the importance of self‐authorship as the arbiter of morality. Morality is both enacted (what one does) and embodied (who one is). But morality is not only about what you do or who you are, but where you are. Home, school and street are locations that penetrate moral sensibilities and affect moral choices. Moreover, ikasi personal morality and the notion of goodness are embodied in terms of four moral stances (‘Mommy's babies’, ‘Right ones’, ‘Kasi girl/boy’ and ‘Skollies’) that position the self and others in moral space within the township. Swartz argues further that poor ikasi youth know and desire the good and possess a moral self‐identity like their middle‐class counterparts, but mostly lack opportunities for doing the good. They lack an enabling environment. When it comes to the sources of moral influence in their lives, it is not moral pedagogy that counts for very much but, rather, spiritual experiences, cultural practices and the inspiration that comes from personal encouragement or the prospect of employment.
One salutary feature of this remarkable work is that it is not mere description. There is a strong theoretical impulse that weaves the various descriptive strands into a rich tapestry illustrating the moral vibrancy of township youth culture. Moreover, the book is a primer on effective ethnography. Swartz demonstrates sensitivity to matters of internal validity and her interviews were undertaken with evident methodological care.
The book is highly readable. The writing is crisp, entertaining and informative. The narrative is saturated with penetrating insights, theoretically‐rich observation and other elements of high scholarship without abandoning the well‐turned phrase or illuminating example from the case material.
Swartz also has her aim on the traditional literatures of moral psychology and education. One gets the sense, reading Swartz, that the traditional categories that animate scholarly discourse in moral psychology fall to pieces when coming to grips with the realities of lived experience in the townships. She makes the case for an ethnography of morality and appeals to Bourdieu's notion of capital to suggest ways that morality, poverty and social reproduction are connected. In her view a concern with moral capital shifts the discussion about what is absent in the moral lives of youth to what is present, a shift that aligns moral capital with the positive youth development movement more generally. And with this comes a new focus for moral education. Moral education is not simply a matter of developing cognitive skills or inculcating virtue, but must include a concern with the enabling environment and the moral capital of settings.
The vivid account of ikasi moral culture will invite readers to wonder how the analysis translates to other settings, a question that faces all ethnographic research. One might wonder if the book could have been written much the same way during the height of Apartheid and if undue attention is drawn to post‐conflict and post‐Apartheid ikasi culture. Put differently, is there something about the aftermath of Apartheid that is crucial to understanding the moral ecology of these youth, or could the moral ecology found here be just as likely to be evident during the height of Apartheid? In spite of the certain particularity of ikasi youth culture, many of the theoretical categories used here, from Bronfenbrenner's contextualism to Bourdieu's moral capital, would seem to have broad resonance for understanding the moral ecology of youth raised under conditions of poverty, parental absence, partial schooling and segregation and, hence, the present work is crucial for building a comparative study of moral youth culture.
This is an impressive bit of scholarship in the best ethnographic tradition. It is an academic work but not just for scholars. It is evocative, engaging and theoretically‐informed and I am confident that it will make a splash in the fields of moral development and education.
© 2010, Daniel K. Lapsley