ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on Antonio Gramsci's writings on intellectuals and the production of knowledge. It focuses through a particular case study, on how individuals experience the hegemony of the social maps they are given; how even though their own attempts to use those maps may call them into question simply jettisoning them is difficult. The chapter examines the use of one basic term, community, in the specific context of South Africa, looking both at the associations it carries with it and the implications of using it to map the social landscape. Mapping South Africa's social landscape as a series of "communities" can indeed be a way of silencing the realities of power. The Afrikaners' sense of marginalization and exclusion found expression in the National Party, which after its 1948 election victory instituted the policy of apartheid. Community remains in post-apartheid South Africa, as it was under apartheid, an official category.
