ABSTRACT
In post-apartheid South Africa, progressive new legislation sanctioned a religious pluralism that put all new faiths and practices on an equal footing with established religions. Over the author's three decades of research on the lives of South African white people – especially those identifying as Afrikaners – there have been remarkable changes in their religious lives, as both new and old faiths have related to the social changes taking place in South Africa, either by creating new practices and traditions and developing their own processes of racial and social mediation, or by drawing new boundaries or reintroducing old racial boundaries in new guises. This introductory chapter presents religious mediation as a process that takes place between social entities, through which new thoughts, practices, and ideas transfer from one domain to another, with all domains involved eventually changing. An overview of the author's field research in Stellenbosch and the Greater Cape Town area is provided, giving the context for her examination of how religious transformation and moral boundaries have been mediated among the Afrikaners, and how inherited cultural categories and boundaries have influenced ideas of how to be a “proper” moral white person in the new South Africa.
