ABSTRACT
The concept of “cultural difference” in American sociology, which evolved out of the practical needs of transforming industrial and agrarian labor relations in the period following emancipation, captured the hearts and minds of the first generation of South African sociologists. South African sociology was able to benefit from fact that by 1920 academic sociologists, rather than professionals in the field of “charities and corrections”, had been granted “authority regarding social problems and modes of intervention” and were now recognized “trainers, credentialers, and theoretical unifiers for much more numerous groups of ‘practical’ sociologists”. A genealogy of the concepts “cultural traits” and “cultural adaptation” as they appear in South African and American sociology makes clear that they originated in state-sponsored and state-sanctioned program to institutionalize racist division of labor. South African sociologists found Broadus Mitchell and other scholars who dealt with the American South useful because they offered an account of the rise of plantation societies that made the plantation a cultural.
