ABSTRACT
South African rugby culture as it is lived can be considered an example of Paul Connerton's incorporated social memory – embodied actions, habits and gestures that, together, help forge complex sites of social memory. From the mega-event of a World Cup to the social custom of a beer and braai (barbecue), South African rugby culture is sustained through a myriad of seemingly peripheral, often under-considered cultural habits, from the corporeal minutiae of the group chant to coy product advertising references or creative representation. In urging South Africans to 'act together', Nelson Mandela's call for a series of performances that would make a 'new world' showed an understanding of the repeated, embodied, enacted nature of identity. If contemporary South Africans can unite around any one collective social experience some twenty-one years into democracy, it surely must be anxiety about and obsession with the spectacle of the body.
