Suchergebnisse

"Oppression," Maraiti and farm worker livelihoods : shifting grounds in the 1990s -- The traction of rights, the art of politics : the labor "war" at Upfumi -- The drama of politics : dissension, suffering, and violence -- Politics and precarious livelihoods during the time of Jambanja -- Conclusion: Representing labor struggles -- Appendix: Correspondence with the president's office

This paper examines some of the gendered insecurities informing some of the livelihood practices of Zimbabwean migrants in northern South Africa from 2004-2011, the period in which I carried out almost annual ethnographic research in this region. Situating these practices within wider policy shifts and changing migration patterns at the national and local scales, this paper shows the importance of attending to gendered dependencies and insecurities when analysing migrant livelihoods in southern Africa. These include those found within humanitarian organizations targeting Zimbabwean migrants in their programs and policies in the border area. These gendered insecurities, which are woven into the fabric of travel, work and accommodation for these migrant Zimbabwean women in northern South Africa, should be examined in struggles for social justice. By drawing on the lens of social critique to engender a wider sense of the social justice needs for Zimbabwean women migrants in South Africa, this essay aims to broaden the focus of activism on women migrants to also attend to gendered insecurities in their everyday economic and shelter-seeking activities.

ABSTRACTDrawing on current anthropological approaches to labour, this article examines some of the moral politics mobilized around women and artisanal mining in policy‐inflected scholarship with reference to particular gold mining zones in Tonkolili district, Sierra Leone. In so doing, the article proposes that such a focus on labour not only allows one to appreciate how sentiments concerning (im)proper behaviour infuse wider policy proposals to amend social arrangements in regard to what is called 'artisanal mining', but it also offers insight into some of the enduring moral politics helping to constitute women as 'family workers' in the actual artisanal gold mining zones. The article suggests that examining the overlapping moral politics constituting women's labour practices provides a more supple understanding of the contested economic possibilities for women in this livelihood practice.

ABSTRACTThis article examines Zimbabwean land politics and the study of rural interventions, including agrarian reform, more broadly, using the analytical framework of territorialized 'modes of belonging' and their 'cultural politics of recognition'. Modes of belonging are the routinized discourses, social practices and institutional arrangements through which people make claims for resources and rights, the ways through which they become 'incorporated' in particular places. In these spatialized forms of power and authority, particular cultural politics of recognition operate; these are the cultural styles of interaction that become privileged as proper forms of decorum and morality informing dependencies and interdependencies. The author traces a hegemonic mode of belonging identified as 'domestic government', put in place on European farms in Zimbabwe's colonial period, and shows how it was shaped by particular political and economic conjunctures in the first twenty years of Independence after 1980. Domestic government provided a conditional belonging for farm workers in terms of claims to limited resources on commercial farms while positioning them in a way that made them marginal citizens in the nation at large. This is the context for the behaviour of land‐giving authorities which have actively discriminated against farm workers during the politicized and violent land redistribution processes that began in 2000. Most former farm workers are now seeking other forms of dependencies, typically more precarious and generating fewer resources and services than they had accessed on commercial farms, with their own particular cultural politics of recognition, often tied to demonstrating support to the ruling political party.

The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe. Erica Bornstein. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. 213 pp.

Blair Rutherford rethinks mainstream media's dominant narratives about Zimbabwean land politics. How will ongoing "territorializing projects" -- land occupations that attempt to enforce ruling-party discipline on farmers & workers -- affect the politics of land & the welfare of rural Zimbabweans? Adapted from the source document.