Abstract
This chapter problematizes the practice of the giving of scholarships as a form of a gift by drawing on Mauss’s (The gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. Routledge, London, 1969) notion that gifts are not as simple as they may appear as they are constructed around relationships of reciprocity, where to give is to expect to receive. Thus, the complexity and multilayered aspect of the awarding of a scholarship is considered, with an introduction of the notion of a “gift economy.” The chapter introduces the three key role players in the scholarship process, namely the donor foundations, the elite school, and the students who were awarded the scholarship, and provides an overview of each concerning the process that takes place. Included is a discussion on how Bourdieu’s toolkit will be used within the unique terrain of education in elite schools in South Africa to understand the scholarship students’ experiences, as well as an overview of the key Bourdieusian concepts that will be used to analyze and discuss the scholarship students’ experiences in the elite school context. The chapter further provides a discussion on the design of the research that informed this study.
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Notes
- 1.
The other two initiatives of this foundation focus on child and adolescent psychiatry and mental health, and the construction of a primary school that provides access to quality educational facilities to children from a local township.
- 2.
A discussion on elite educational institutions is provided in more detail in this chapter
- 3.
As defined by apartheid’s Group Areas Act of 1950, which divided South Africa’s urban spaces along racial lines.
- 4.
A house system is a traditional feature of schools that originated in England, whereby the school is divided into subunits called “houses,” and each student is allocated to one of these houses at the time of enrollment.
- 5.
The term township in the South African context refers to a geographical area that is often underdeveloped and found on the periphery of towns and cities. During the apartheid era townships were racially segregated and reserved for non-white population groups. The term “township” in the post-apartheid context usually refers to a low-income area that is characterized by a mix of working-class inhabitants.
- 6.
“Coconut” is a colloquial term, usually used in a disparaging manner by black South Africans to describe someone who thinks, acts, and speaks like a “white person” (white on the inside), even though their skin (on the outside) is black (McKinney, 2017).
- 7.
As discussed in some detail in the Introduction to this book.
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Wallace, J., Feldman, J. (2022). The Gift of a Scholarship. In: Scholarship Students in Elite South African Schools. Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education, vol 16. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7536-3_2
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