Engaging with social cohesion as an ethnographer: opportunities and pitfalls of a participatory audiovisual method

Résumé 0

This paper is a first-person reflection on social cohesion as a question mark that lingers in the mind of anyone living in, working and engaging with South African society nowadays: how can such a highly fragmented society start suturing its multifaceted divides? My point is not to offer a well-rounded definition of social cohesion, nor to debate its political uses. I mobilise the idea of social cohesion as an open-ended question that brings more discomfort than certainty. To me, social cohesion is both unreachable and unescapable. It is unreachable because social divisions are intergenerational and intersectional, they are too deep to be easily resolved in a trendy keyword. But social cohesion is also unescapable because it remains a necessary horizon that somehow guides my research. What sense would it have to document social divisions, collective doubts or individual angers if it was not with the hope of contributing to minimize them?