Abstract
Embarrassment is a theme that recurs like a heavy conscience in my ethnographic field notes on boeremusiek. Because it has so often stood central to my research experiences, and since it is at the same time an intensely self-reflexive and social emotion, I have come to think of embarrassment as particularly meaningful in understanding my position as a researcher of this much-stigmatized genre of white folk music. In this chapter, which draws on George Devereux’s ideas on anxiety and method, I trace the development of my own critical stance toward the music and its practitioners through a self-reflexive meditation on my own embarrassment. But this is not the only thing at stake here; I am also concerned with how my anxieties are embedded within more encompassing registers of boeremusiek reception. I am interested, in other words, in how white listeners are enregistered into embarrassment and how it functions as an ambivalent modality of aesthetic engagement. In order to tease out how pleasure has been put under erasure through an aesthetic of embarrassment, I trace the genealogy of embarrassment in boeremusiek’s reception history. This leads me to a consideration of boeremusiek’s originary moment in the 1930s, its embroilment in religious notions of (racial) hygiene, and the music’s transgressive role in defining the sacred and the profane in early modern white-Afrikaner society of the early twentieth century. I then attempt to bring my own ethnographic experiences of embarrassment into a relationship with this genealogy.
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Notes
- 1.
WAT: Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal (2014).
- 2.
Henning (1932), p. 756.
- 3.
Dempers (2014).
- 4.
Piet Bester’s tribute to Sam Petzer, in an unmarked typescript in Piet Bester’s personal archive.
- 5.
Letter by Miemie de Clercq to the presenters of Nog ‘n draai, March 26, 1994. Part of Piet Bester’s personal archive in the possession of the author.
- 6.
Anon (1955).
- 7.
Goffman (1956), p. 264.
- 8.
Robbins and Parlavheccio (2006).
- 9.
My comment translates as, “WHAT? I want to be able to post—all in the name of research” to which Stoltz replied, “Amandla (a Zulu and Xhosa word for “power”—a popular rallying cry in the resistance movement against apartheid), in the name of research. Hope your comrades enjoy your postings.”
- 10.
Steyn (2004), p. 153.
- 11.
Devereux (1967), p. 44.
- 12.
Robbins and Parlavheccio (2006), pp. 325–326.
- 13.
Devereux (1967), p. 275.
- 14.
Devereux (1967), p. xvi.
- 15.
Devereux (1967), p. xvii.
- 16.
Devereux (1967), p. xvii.
- 17.
Devereux (1967), p. 97.
- 18.
Devereux (1967), p. xvii.
- 19.
Devereux (1967), pp. 316–317.
- 20.
Goffman (1956), p. 264.
- 21.
Goffman (1956), p. 271.
- 22.
Robbins and Parlavheccio (2006), pp. 321–345.
- 23.
Goffman (1956), pp. 269–270.
- 24.
Fourie (1997), p. 288.
- 25.
Saayman (1996), p. 203.
- 26.
Van der Mescht (2006), p. 175.
- 27.
Muller (2009).
- 28.
Douglas (2001), p. 3.
- 29.
Venter (2017).
- 30.
Venter (2017), p. 269.
- 31.
Bataille (1986), pp. 38–39.
- 32.
Bataille (1986), p. 48.
- 33.
- 34.
Giliomee (2003), p. 432.
- 35.
Giliomee (2003), p. 432.
- 36.
Kriel (1938).
- 37.
Cf. Stead (1938).
- 38.
Hamersma quoted by Van Wyk (n.d.), p. 2.
- 39.
De Klerk and Venter (1926), pp. 6–7.
- 40.
Krüger (n.d.), p. 10.
- 41.
Carnegie Commission (1932).
- 42.
Swanepoel (1938a).
- 43.
Buys (1938).
- 44.
- 45.
Brink (1938).
- 46.
Swanepoel (1938b).
- 47.
Reinecke (1938).
- 48.
Hofmeyr (1988), p. 527.
- 49.
Kestell (1928), pp. 41; 46.
- 50.
Kestell (1928), p. 46.
- 51.
Kestell (1928), p. 41.
- 52.
See Durkheim (1995), pp. 412–417.
- 53.
Anon (1938c).
- 54.
The relevant Biblical passage, often used to open boeremusiek events (see Chap. 6), reads: “A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.”
- 55.
Anon (1938d).
- 56.
Anon (1938e).
- 57.
De Swardt (1938).
- 58.
Verster (1938).
- 59.
Brink (1938).
- 60.
Caillois (2001), p. 23.
- 61.
Durkheim (1995), pp. 37–38.
- 62.
Kristeva (1982), pp. 9–10.
- 63.
Pienaar (2017).
- 64.
Bataille (1986), pp. 38–39.
- 65.
Kristeva (1982), p. 5.
- 66.
Kristeva (1982), p. 1.
- 67.
Agha (2015), pp. 27–53.
- 68.
Kristeva (1982), p. 28.
- 69.
Kristeva (1982), p. 28.
- 70.
Kristeva (1982).
- 71.
Douglas (2001), p. 74.
- 72.
Froneman (2011).
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Froneman, W. (2024). The Riches of Embarrassment. In: The Groovology of White Affect. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40143-5_2
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