ABSTRACT
The status and success of socio-political transition in South Africa has been inter-
rogated by Grant Farred (2004: 592) who, following Carl Schmidt’s influential
work The Nomos of the Earth (2003), examines how the narrative of ‘progress’
from a racist past to a nonracial present and future has become the critical
modality in the post-apartheid era.1 The 1994 elections signalled to the nation
and to the world at large that one regime was ending while another was set in
motion, with the caveat that economic, cultural and racial differences were to
have lasting impacts and uncertain resolutions. Many have pointed out too, that
the old fault lines of inequality and discrimination have been papered over with
other forms of social injustice and hierarchy, namely those of rich and poor
(Daniel et al. 2005). Farred argues that South Africans are living in a ‘double tem-
porality’, an evocative notion for archaeologists and ethnographers alike. This
positioning is key for those of us investigating post-apartheid shifts in the cultural
productions of history and heritage, museums and tourist locales, constructions
of nation and indigeneity, and identity and politics. ‘Post-apartheid South Africa
has produced a consciousness of the history that preceded and informs the
current conjuncture, an awareness of living with the past in the post-apartheid
present – and into the foreseeable future, for that matter’ (Farred 2004: 593).
