The portrayal of other groups of people than our own often run the risk of depicting the individuals in these groups in a simplified way. We often view ourselves as complex beings, with several defining memberships connected to our person. These memberships can be as students, siblings, religious, political, friends, and musicians, to name but a few. This definition is not always as certain in our portrayal of others, more foreign to our everyday life. The supporters of the opposing football team or voters of the rivalling political party might just be defined by these confining identities. Examples of this phenomenon are legion in human history, whether it is nazi Germany’s propaganda that dehumanized the Jewish population or Apartheid’s definition of worth through skin colour. The understanding of how this style of simplified portrayal dehumanizes the portrayed subject is important to teach in our schools. The power of our choice of definition of the people around us needs to be taught to students. The first step towards giving students an understanding of the subject is to show them solid examples of this in history. The focus of this study is therefore to analyse letters from Swedish missionaries in South Africa and how they portrayed the South African population during the official introduction of Apartheid. Amartya Sen’s theorem of identity and violence has been used as a tool during the analysis to achieve this goal. The results showed that many of the missionaries changed their portrayal of the black population during the investigation period, 1945–1951, from a simplified to a diverse description. Their depiction of the white population, however, stayed relatively the same during the entire period.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hj-61737 |
| Date | January 2023 |
| Creators | Wennerlund, Anton |
| Publisher | Jönköping University, HLK, Ämnesforskning |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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