Abstract:
To what extent can ethnic boundaries be transcended in interethnic interactions? We are tackling
this question in reference to Namibia, a post-apartheid society marked by a legacy of ethnic and
racial divisions. Relying on discourse as a source of data, we identify the strategies employed by
Namibians in a range of interview data and semi-experimental interethnic interactions for either
accentuating or attenuating interethnic boundaries. We identify these strategies at the levels of
ethnic categorization, language choice/variation and the management of speaker turns, and place
them in the perspective of the participants’ perspectives on ethnic Others. Our findings suggest
that ethnic categories are salient in our data, although they do not exclude identification with
superordinate categories in specific contexts. Our findings also show that patterns of
categorization are reflected in language choice and turn management in the interactional context.
