The Frightened Land: Land, landscape and Politics in South Africa in the Twentieth century

摘要

The South African artist Rodney Place has argued that the stringent discipline of Calvinism was probably born of having to deal, on a daily basis, with threatening natural phenomena- initially erecting dykes against the North Sea and then taming the ‘vast and alien African interior' into which the Voortrekkers trekked from the 1830s. The task of maintaining this cohesion as Volk against potentially erasing forces has, he argues, required new adversaries, even where these have been more contrived than real.