Wandering away from apartheid : A study on interracial bridging social capital in South African small-town society

Sammanfattning: Trust, cooperation and equal value. The purpose of the current study has been to present evidence of interracial bridging social capital between groups and individuals in South African small-town society. An ethnological field study has been executed by searching, observing and interviewing citizens at various meeting points in civil society where interracial interaction is taking place. The collected empirical data will be evaluated in relation to established theories regarding the importance of social capital in relation to political prospering of liberal democracies. This will be done in order to answer the question: in what way and in which spheres of South African society can evidence of bridging social capital be found? The discussion and conclusion will be dependent on to what extent bridging social capital is taking place in conjunction with interracial meetings. The research will be divided into three phases. The first phase will be presenting the idea of the research and the preparation of how it is going to be performed. The second phase demonstrates the execution of data gathering with the theories at its core. Finally, the third phase of the essay will be carried out by discussing the results and how it contributes to the existing science base (George and Bennet, 2005, p. 73). In conclusion, the study showed that bridging social capital is possible to find primarily in the spheres of education and Christian parishes close to communities where the middle and upper-class live.