Workshop on Popular Economies in South Africa
Wednesday 17th June 2009 –H705, 7th floor, Connaught House
4.30 – 5.30 Introductory Session
1. Occult economies.
DN. This can cause one to lose sight of some of the political economic setting, the value
chains, etc.
EB. I suggest that we take three topics as a framework of analysis:
1. The relational aspect,
2. The study of financial markets, micro finance, etc. (as in the work of Bill Maurer,
Caitlin Zaloom)
3. The current economic crisis, which raises questions relating to neo-liberalism, etc. It is
this area where the political economy questions will be foremost.
FM. We need to think about the World Cup, whether people are affected by this.
DK. I suggest we have a strong chapter on political economy in contemporary South
Africa. A crucial aspect of South Africa right now is financialization. This relates to the
political organisation of banks, etc, but it also shows how money, finances, new forms of
currency, play a much bigger role than ever before.
IvW. But there is a long history of this, of traders setting up, issuing loans, issuing
currencies etc. This includes the first missionaries who came to South Africa. My point is
that we should not treat neo-liberalism as something utterly new, a lot of this literature
makes no reference to history.
2. Scams
IvW. I looked at this in my PhD, people never spoke of what was happening in the
Universal Kingdom church as a scam and they did not look at where the money went.
They thought they were giving it to God. If God does not give you what he promised, you
do not go back to the church.
EB. There is a movie dealing with this called the Zeitgeist Addendum.
ND. Looking at how particular people accumulate is only one side of the picture. But
what about the case of the Z C C? Here people spend money on salt, but no one would
view this as a scam. How much do we base our assessment on the question of material
return?
3. Formalisation
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EB. See Julia Elyachar. The debate on micro finance breaks down citizenship, it makes
people more vulnerable.
4. Informality and formality.
DN. See debates in urban planning (Sue Parnell, Jo Beall, etc). There are pitched battles
between DTI - especially their Second Economy Strategy Project, involving Kate Philip,
and AIGS (the Post Gear strategy). Here we need to have a reading list.
DK. I would like to write a piece on "what is the financialization of the economy". Others
could take other topics, we could have a division of labour.
Thursday 18th June - Session 1
“The ethnographic blind spot”
Discussant:
Erik Bähre
Fraser McNeill
EB. It is because you depend on people that you externalise the violence. It is difficult to
recognise these conflicts.
FM. You are arguing that, in social anthropology there is a tendency to romanticise, to
make things look harmonious than they might be on the ground; it is uncomfortable for us
to record anything relating to violence. This relates to dependency, and this connects to
the intimacy of the ethnographic process. This is true for functionalist accounts of earlier
times, where violence gets incorporated as "functional", and in your case this is the same.
But in later ethnography, there is not much evidence of this – see Amazonian
anthropology, and Indianist work on riots in Mumbai. Your argument that violence is part
of sociality has solid grounds in existing ethnography. This recognition should stand at
the basis of an ethnographic endeavour.
Taking sides is absolutely crucial, but silences should also be respected. What if
someone does not want to speak? The blind spot can be saturated with meaning. That is,
we need to make sense of why people are not speaking about particular things. Do we
owe it to informants not to blow the whistle? All of us on this project are researching
scams. Is there some ethical guidance here?
DJ. Perhaps one must assume that people have got ways of protecting themselves.
DK. See Lars Buur on the kangaroo courts in Port Elizabeth. He talks about the way in
which a man was brought back into the community through violence. Also see Adam
Ashforth on Sex, Soweto style. The boyfriend assaulted the girlfriend, Adam Ashforth
felt very uncomfortable with all this.
EB. One is always happier attributing violence to those on the other side.
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RL. In previous writings on ROSCAs there was a very functionalist aspect. In SA, around
these exchange economies, “violence” is a new lens.
EB. It is about – re: insurance – a drive towards individualization. People will pull out of
these mutualist relationships, thus dealing with risk on their own, not in connection to
their neighbours.
MB. Aren’t you needing to go beyond this dichotomy? There are several groups you
might be connected to, and hence you’ll feel responsible towards all of these in some
way.
IvW. Violence seems to pervade everything here, is this your view of ‘culture’ – that
people cannot escape it?
EB. Yes.
LH. Anthropologists don’t always write as though they side with their informants.
RL. Not to discount the violence, but instead of asking you to “tone it down” are there not
counter-tendencies? See my work, re: Parker Shipton on the Luo. He talks of forgiveness
in relation to intimate socialities, but social ties nonetheless persist in some form, despite
acts of violence. But we need to be attentive to some other dynamic. Eg the father who
says “it’s OK to beat up my son”, and you think this is weird. There is a mechanism of
forgiveness operating within the home.
EB. This is “too optimistic”.
DJ. I connect the explanation to the twinned ideas of retribution and compensation.
DN. Where violence spills over or erupts it could be an extension of what is there all the
time. In formalized systems you don’t need overt violence (you have bureaucratized
violence). That is what formality is. How much could this be subsumed under the heading
of informality?
IvW. Erik is making a case for extreme violence in SA, but there are many other settings
which are equally so.
DJ. Yes, we do need to bear in mind the ethical questions, especially where behaviour is
regarded by informants as normative but where we might see it as normative.
But could you say a little more about the substance of your work on insurances, more than
about the “angst of the ethnographer” angle?
EB. Two things. 1. To show the extreme pressure on dependency and mutuality; from
mutual obligations that are aggravated because of these inequalities, and also the violence
that arises from these. It is difficult to manage these mutual dependencies given these
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great inequalities. These are linked to broader themes: capitalism, neoliberalism and the
like. But not as an outside force that “disrupts relations”, rather as things that work
themselves out through these social relationships, and become evident through these
relationships. By observing these, we can grasp abstract ideas about “capitalism” that
would otherwise be quite meaningless.
2. Writings about finance are often phrased in terms of “formal vs informal”. But I rather
look at it via changes and reconfigurings of social dependencies and care arrangements:
one can see that there is tremendous pressure on care arrangements, all forms of
solidarity, mutual dependency, sociality and the like. These pressures are insurmountable,
so people take out policies to organize these in a different way, put these into a different,
more individualized setting. There is a comparison of two neighbourhoods: in the middle
class neighbourhood of Khayalitsha area, I spoke with a nurse, she said “I bought this plot
and the first thing I did was to build a large wall, so people won’t see me”. She
complained that people put their washing to dry on the wall, but she said that even the
outside of the wall is mine. Relationships now are more like friendships, not like these
earlier mutualities and commitments, they are friendships spread across the city. This
feeds into the whole insurance thing.
RL. My PhD work was in Gugulethu – a very different setting from the two sites where
you worked. I did look at funeral insurances among women of different generations.
Some people are managing these pressures in the mutual societies. In a place like G
where all arrived at the same time, the spatial arrangements are v diff from K, bigger
plots, wider streets, more interaction between homes, this is mirrored in the social
arrangements which are more grounded. The way they hedged risk was not to go away
from the burial society, but to have multiple burial societies: one from the home region,
one from the street committee, others at different levels. This was not about abandoning
sociality, but about combining them, spreading risk across different groups. But there is
something about the groundedness of this community of older women in this specific
township: the younger ones were not able to build up this sort of communality.
EB. If I compare this to Samora Machel, when I went back, no-one lived there any more.
Those who are there don’t know where the others went, and they don’t really care.
DJ. I always thought of financial mutuals in terms of solidarity, functionality, etc. But in
some work I have done, you find some of these splitting apart quite quickly, but they
seem to reseed themselves: for each one that splits a number of new ones spring up. Also,
I notice in your explanation that people are going for the individual perspective, you see
this as a collapse of solidarity. But is it not also the case that people might just be buying
into the modernity narrative, and actually genuinely wanting a modern/rational lifestyle,
etc? Having a funeral policy with ABSA, etc … is it not a statement of aspiration?
DK. And it works better. You don’t have the schlep of collecting money from all the
members, etc.
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IvW. Also the advertising is very attractive. See the colour pamphlets, the superior kind
of advertising. Where I was, those who work in this sector are known as “the people who
dress in suits” – this is a “real job”. Your money is safer, it looks more genuine, the
pamphlets are printed in glossy paper. There was a Somali guy who was in business, he
just made colour photocopies, and people said “no – this is not glossy paper”. This is
nothing to do with individualism. Being modern can be a range of things: it can be about
being an individual who makes choices, who goes in for charity, philanthropy, reaching
out to the poor. That is what happened in the Industrial Revolution, which spawned all
these kinds of impulses. It’s not just about being the greedy, grubbing Scrooges. In
economics, we often fail to recognize this…. We think it is all about "better not to have
these dependants". We forget about the big philanthropic thing: the idea that once you
have money you have to share it.
EB. I would define modernity thus: instead of the direct chains of dependency via
kinship, there are longer chains of dependency, via the welfare state, etc. Here the
physical and social proximity of dependency is lessened. This is how Elias defines
civilisation. The consequence is that you move from social control (short chains) to self
control (long chains).
DN. To clarify: with regard to social reciprocity. When people are more firmly rooted in
modernity, they engage in philanthropy: I have a sense those acts are often engaged in
without the expectation of return: the thing on your pay cheque. It is abstract.
IvW. Yes, but you will be recognised for doing this, it can be converted into cultural
capital involved, etc. But economic lit on becoming modern, there is much functional
analysis, but in other literature this other side is stressed – the ability of looking beyond
the family – this comes out in the literature on Christianity - it is not just about rationality,
it is recognised that you have a responsibility.
DN. But the inner logic still sounds different from the “horizontal” reciprocity, from the
calculus of the immediacy - it seems much more mediated.
DJ. There is an interesting literature, in relation to Islam, about "ethical self fashioning",
and how this can generate an idea of the need to be philanthropic. Religious discourses
can spread out through communities in this much more diffuse way, obviating the
immediacy.
MB. What you are suggesting is dimension not normally explored re: embeddedness ( re
Polanyi). You might be offering a more complicated idea about mutuality. The tone of the
conversation is about individuality, building higher walls, etc. But this is a new form of
engagement. Individuation is a sort of sociality all on its own. People don’t leave
altogether, but they stay behind … these are forms of violence in a sense. It is the old
Durkheim point: individuality is a form of sociality all on its own. This could yield a
different version of embeddedness.
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EB. Friendship as a new category. In the squatter camp, this did not exist; and in the other
place I investigated, it did. This offers great freedom to develop the kinds of relationships
that are important, it allows a different kind of sociality.
MB. This might invite an ethnographic account of how people disengage with each other
over time. The wall is one, but there are others – going to the bank for insurance. These
are all forms of sociality – possibly violent ones – but ways in which economies are
embedded. There might be a lot of "work" involved in not doing the other kinds of
sociality. See recent history, see the literature on post-socialism. There is stuff about how
the way people arranged goods and trading before the Wall came down, structured the
way that this happened later. Could you turn this around, and say, along the lines of this
kind of embeddedness: to what extent do the economic activities you’re interested in
reflect the kinds of expectations that come out of these forms of sociality?
EB. There are new forms of sociality being generated (even in the older sense): for
example insurance salesmen living in the neighbourhood draw on their networks in order
to sell policies, or, when money is paid out through a policy, this often gets divided
within the family. Individualised versions play into the non-individualized ones, even in
cases where people do take out insurance.
RL. Are people mixing the two: formal and informal? This seems to be key in several of
the papers. It is not a matter of either or, but how is the mix managed?
EB. You see when people take more formal policies they tend to leave the burial
societies.
RL. I have not found that.
EB. I have – so it’s true! (all laugh) Richer people certainly do this. They engage less with
networks, burial societies.
DJ. Have you written about this?
EB. Part of this is in the paper I sent out – but not all.
DN. From previous work, I have thought of reciprocity in this way: one can be so poor
and marginalised that you will not be engaged. There is a middle tier where you can
transact, one is respectable, one can reciprocate - especially via social grants. Then you
get to a threshold - there is a high tier - where you start to extricate yourself, or people
relate to you in a more patron-client manner.
FM. The ethical issue raised by the paper remains important: how do we represent
scandal, violence, illegal activity in our work?
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DJ. Perhaps we can discuss this further since all papers cover these matters. One needs to
be aware that people have ways of protecting themselves: this is why I was unable to talk
to any “big” loansharks. In the same way, when Detlev asked whether he ought to
approach the police on behalf of informants, I thought it best that he leave this to them:
there are limits to the paternalism of the fieldworker.
DK. But there is not a strong history of consumer activism, there are low levels of
financial literacy, and if I analyse these as being results of apartheid – in a sense one’s
analysis will influence the way one responds to this. It might make me feel as though I am
being less paternalistic.
“We are celebrating our salaries”: On contingency and gambling in post-apartheid South
Africa
Ilana van Wyk
Discussant: David Neves
IvW. The perception of an individual is one that is rational, that comes from a position of
stability, where people gamble it is seen as coming from this base position. But the people
who are my informants live contingent lives, where everything is up in the air. Banks, just
like informal arrangements, also eat money (the bank charges are enormous – and people
don’t know about this.) So maybe this means looking more at “contingency” than at
“risk”, because the latter involves a very particular connection to indeterminacy. The
central point of my paper is that it is very nice to be able to spend all your money. When I
was a student and very poor, I once spent all my money on a pair of ridiculous shoes – the
nice feeling this can give you is something which people have not properly considered.
My interviews said “we celebrate our salaries” – we just blow it all.
DN. The paper does not pose many solutions, but poses interesting problems. You start
by describing the conventional wisdom on formal gambling, then look at informal
gambling and how these are grafted onto or draw from ideas of chance, there is reference
to the question of occult economies. Then more recent developments - see Finmark and
the responsible subject. This is about producing or making rational subjects, or making
traditional subjects less irrational than they are. Some of the stuff you cite, like Don Ross
and his collaboration with the philosopher David Spurat, who works on cognitive
neuroscience - genetics, neurology etc. - as means of trying to solve the problem of
problem gambling. Then you take the argument as reflecting the long shadow of Judeo
Christian ethic and how people ought to behave with resources, money etc. You also
touch on the ubiquitous concern with witchcraft, spirits etc.
FM. Your attempt at Comaroff bashing is only 50% successful. Although you are not into
millennial capitalism, you give a good argument for occult economies (with people using
muti to get the things they’d not otherwise get). How can the two be separated?
IvW. The C’s are saying people don’t understand how money works. I am saying that
people do understand how money works, but that value is not predictable. The Cs are
saying “we’re in this new age, where the workings of capital are so opaque that those on
the margins don’t understand them. I say, yes, but capitalism has always been
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unpredictable, risky. This is not a new moment. This was true even in the time of the
missionaries. They complained about how their converts were not engaging with money
from a rational point of view: they too were smearing muti on money. People in missions
were promised stuff here and now.
FM. But the promise of capitalism now is surely quite different?
IvW. Not really, Etherington talks of how people were attracted by stuff, not just by the
promise of life after death.
FM. But there is surely a greater range of things that is now promised?
IvW. No – I don’t agree. People then were using muti for the same reasons as now.
EB. See Timothy Burke who talks of how colonialism creates a new form of taste. His
idea is a bit of an exaggeration: many of the desires were already there. People often want
to embrace the new stuff. For example, van Velsen on Surinam, on the Surinamese
interior, people eagerly and quickly embraced these new things, they did not have to be
pushed upon them; there was not much pressure needed to get people to consume.
IvW. What happened with missionaries and their worries: they had a dichotomy between
spirituality and materiality. The native was depicted as closer to nature. If we take this
background into account, it is not so surprising that people want this stuff – it says more
about our expectations than it says about their desire for stuff.
DJ. Re: the continuities that you discuss, what about gambling itself? I know that there
was a strong tradition of gambling itself, in China. But in SA, how did the idea that this
was “wayward, bad” etc. get generated? Also I was interested re: my paper: do those who
own dice boards somehow generate gambling; or do gamblers cross the floor to become
gambling board owners? Are there relationalities, at a smallscale level (not that of
casinos, obviously) in a similar way to how loansharks generate borrowers? This might be
a different, shorter-term continuity, than the longer term historical ones you discuss.
IvW. I did find some archaeologists who traced back gambling boards, but it is not clear
whether this was gambling or just a leisure pursuit.
FM. People bet each other in Venda whether they could manage to steal cattle. There are
scattered references to this. [There is discussion of depiction of gambling, dice etc. in
early films of Jhb, Kimberly diamond fields, etc.]
IvW. There were rumours; there were people who “own” a dice game, using the floor: it
is said that the person who brought the dice “owns” the game, but the income does not
accrue to him. There are secret partnerships in dice games – here there is relationality.
Although there is no controlling the roll of the dice, these partnerships do allow for the
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spreading of the risk. And one will not play dice with someone unknown. So there is
definitely a relational aspect.
DJ. This sounds as though it is connected to the calculation of risk, as happens with
bookies.
EH. When you say that dice playing does not involve “risk” as an economist might
analyse it, doesn’t this just make you ask and answer different kinds of questions – “I
wont play with that person, he uses strong muti” etc - that may be just as much about
economic calculation? Perhaps the boundaries of the game have been expanded, but there
is still some sort of calculus going on.
IvW. Usually, in the literature about responsible gambling, they try to get people to work
out probabilities, they only look at the statistical aspects. I am showing that there is more
to this, you have to figure out that a person might suck you into the game and you might
never escape, etc. But, yes, of course there is calculation – of a different kind. And you’ll
have to work out that you need to stop gambling when you’re losing.
EB. I would not slag off economists. It is an amorphous group - it makes you vulnerable
to too many critiques.
IvW. Yes. There is a move afoot in economics - behavioural economists, people like
David ?? who won the Nobel Prize, who speak about the irrational subject, and who
acknowledge that irrationality is built into economic choice, who are moving away from
the “game theory” experiments.
EB. Yes, but…. Look at Bill Maurer’s presentation from the Rethinking Economics
conference – he says exactly the opposite. He says “I wish people would be more
inclined to calculate. Instead they rely on social networks, with the trust that generates,
they end up putting their money into offshore accounts, they lose it”. This is a refreshing
take, showing how the social can cause a lot of problems. Also see Ulrich Beck on risk
and its changing character.
IvW. But I want to move away from that. After 1979 when the US divorced from the gold
standard this introduced a new kind of economics, where value is no longer based on
gold, but tied up with trust and risk, etc. This fits with what Giddens says – “risk is
everywhere”.
EB. There is a chance from risk as produced by nature, it is now an outcome of what
humans do. These actions in turn produce new risks (for example, GM foods, mad cow
disease, etc.) [IvW Children, carseats, etc.] This creates a shift from a society structured
along the lines of class (accumulation of wealth) to risk (which is ubiquitous: one does
not know where these risks come from, where they might lead) as the focus of attention:
which then gets perceived as highly individualized rather than grounded in some social
reality. In the “class”-based society you can protect yourself, put a wall around your house
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- but this is not true in a society where “risk” is ubiquitous, there are no ways to protect
yourself against Genetic Modification. There is an individualized perceptions of risk.
IvW. But do you think this kind of thing is in evidence in Khayelitsha? Swine flu
anxieties, etc.? When Comaroffs talk of millennial capitalism, then history stops. I want
to say that risk is not completely new.
RL. I like the historical aspect, the fact that you’re wrestling with continuities. But I agree
that it is difficult to connect your theorizing of the colonial period to the contemporary
one (eg historians of slavery have also talked of risk, chance, etc. – but how do you draw
these continuities?) Likewise the question of how the individual inserts himself into the
global economy. Yes, it is good to grapple with these questions, to ask how people saw
themselves and the language they used, etc. But the problem is the paucity of the material.
One way to think about it is to get people’s own personal histories of gambling.
On the account of the old man filling out the Finmark Trust booklet, from which
you’re deducing that these booklets are too simple. But the question is, “does he
gamble?” – so, how do you connect his personal history with the gambling narrative?
Could you question such people about their gambling histories?
IVW. Yes, he plays the horses, does the lottery, played a dice game for a while; but this
became traumatic.
RL. If you want to get away from the risk/rationality/calculus discussion, one way to do
this is to use your own informants’ stories: this would give an interesting picture of
gambling over time, this would rescue you from this debate.
[DJ comment: What dawned on me when I was trying to investigate, I first thought
“everyone became indebted since 1994”, then I began to ask about specific histories of
indebtedness, and began to ask “when did your mother start to have a bank account, when
did she start to buy furniture from Bradlows?”]
RL. I do want to defend the Cs a bit: in their more historical work they do have more
nuance. They are not incapable of a more fine-grained approach.
DJ. The background to this is, as said yesterday, that ideas about economy in SA have
been strongly influenced by their work, so it is necessary for us to reflect on where we
stand in relation to it. I have nothing against it, I like the way they phrase things in bold
terms. [Here, it strikes me, one must ask whether gambling must be seen as something
specific unto itself, or whether it is seamlessly connected to the social context which
might be seen to produce it].
DN. On the question of “blowing one’s salary”, this drew my mind to relevant material in
development studies:
1. concerning “distortions in intertemporal resource allocation”, concerning the shorttermism of the poor. Part of this is about looking, not only at reciprocities, calculation,
but also at how people understand time. See Geoff Woods on poverty, he writes on the
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Faustian bargain. He is wrong, but it is a powerful idea in development studies: that time
is crucial. The poor are said to exchange short-term survival for long term sustainability.
They pull their kids out of school, trade off survival against security, don’t save anything
for their retirement, etc.
2. (Maybe this is too policy-oriented – I get asked this ..) What is the relation of debt to
savings? Getting into debt can be a way of saving. Re social protection and social grants:
policy makers ask whether old people take on more or less debt than younger ones. I’d
like to see this as a cross-cutting issue we’d examine: it is something which concerns all
the separate studies.
DJ. Is this about how people buy something on HP and thus keep some of their money
out of circulation? I have heard this said…
DN. Yes, this does curtail the redistributive claims… But also, sometime getting into debt
can be a way of proving that you are worthy of getting into more debt. Someone needs to
investigate these furniture stores. The JB group are basically banks that sell furniture on
the side, rather than furniture stores that lend money.
MB. Some thoughts. 1 On continuities, I wondered whether IVW’s focus…. The stuff
on Timothy Burke showed how forms of consumption interact with changing inequalities,
producing class structures. But surely more immediate forms of inequality will structure
future aspects. See Posel on changing forms of consumption: what you previously could
not consume has framed what freedom means in relation to consumption; has framed
what you are now able to, and will, consume, now. So continuities/discontinuities do not
have to be huge abstract things, they can be more localized, more immediate. 2 On
having few resources and on what you decide to buy – and how this relates to the
question of time, see Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. Those with few resources don’t
necessarily consume what people from outside would see as absolute necessities, but will
spend on other things that give one a meaningful life in other ways, even if you don’t
have enough food.
3. Look at behavioural economics, which show how people don’t always maximize: they
assess situations in terms of fairness, morality, and the like. A sense of justice can be
important re: this popular economies stuff.
RL. The people who gamble: how are they situated in families/family economies? Who
within the family gambles? How does this connect to other aspects of domestic
economies?
IvW. I came across this with the UKCG; people would take the whole lot and gamble
with it. This does produce tensions, but was also seen as “normal”.
RL. How are these shocks absorbed over time? These losses might be considered big,
small – how do people respond? Are profits only used for certain things?
IvW. People do not think “I have this pot of money” over time, or “I have a plan”. This
was frustrating.
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“ ‘Fong Kong’ Finance”
Discussant:
Detlev Krige
Erik Bahre
Detlev on Radebe. Finance has shifted. There is a new proliferation of informal schemes
and scams. Kin networks are crucial in recruiting people. This makes it harder to say
“no”, since to do so would be to cast doubt on the integrity of your relatives: to suspect
them of scamming.
The multi-level marketing is a new phenomenon, among Afrikaners in Pentecostal
Churches. These are legal, there are websites, facebook groups, etc, and one person will
belong to a number of these. There is a new language (agents, networks, etc.) it comes
from the US. In Soweto, at a school, a principle forced students to recruit others to his
school: in order to qualify to sit for your finals you must “recruit”.
J and JL Comaroff’s work on this is actually useful: I disagree with some of the
labels but the processes they describe do happen.
Banks are creating confusion and preying on people’s low levels of financial
literacy. People keep their documents and receipts for many years (this is NB) – including
“fake” real (or real fake) documentation.
A lot of the hype plays on the failure of the government to actually empower
people. Nedbank says “money must work for you”. Shoprite now has a “money market”.
This again creates confusion. I am arguing that there may have been a time when these
categories were more separate, but now they are much less so.
EB. Verdery on a pyramid scheme in Romania. Smith’s book on Nigeria, which might
offer good insights. Nyamnjoh’s PhD on Cameroon.
You convey shock at what has happened but you need to go beyond this: this
might be your own shock. You need to reconsider this, analyse and explain it. What is the
“why” question? Focus on one particular aspect – the argument will then push itself.
You use a lot of journalistic sources, it would be good to incorporate your
interviews. It might be that journalists are trying to “sell” a story, thus sensationalize it,
and they might overemphasise the extent of Radebe’s support, etc.
I see these as anomalies. But maybe this is the financial world. It might seem to be
an anomaly, because we can interview these kinds of people, where we cannot interview
Madoff. You need to contextualize this more.
DJ. The way township people have started to “play the poverty card”: reminds me of how
the “research/audit” culture produces people as “the new middle class” and how they
multiply contest and or confirm these categories (as in your Leipzig paper). Also
interesting how the “networks” that are the basis of your research strategy also become
the “networks” that are the recruitment basis of the MLM people.
The idea of “only spending in cash” suggests a reluctance to be “banked” – ie to
remain in the informal economy, beyond taxation. I have encountered a number of people
who had bank accounts but who no longer use them.
“They dismissed claims he was a criminal, and demanded a return of their
investment so that they could support their families”; this is reminiscent of the rhetoric on
“hardworking families” in the UK’s New Labour speak. Interesting how criminality was
12
here justified with reference to such a heartwarming set of moral ideas. .. …and by
referring to the familiar ideas of “black economic empowerment”, and “stokvel”.
It strikes me that the “pyramid” model applies as well to other kinds of “collecting
people”/trickle-down-redistributive models: did Radebe become a role model with
reference to his consumption of commodities: is this the reason why people were so
inclined to “invest”? Is it because they saw him not as a shark stealing from them, but
rather as someone whose success as a man of status was worth emulating -“this is what
we could be”?
The close connection to Bible church/pastor is interesting – see the huge
prevalence of pastors who “scam” people.
How far is this – very future-oriented – scheme millennial in character? Cf
Comaroffs “millennial capitalism”. And is it also symbolic of broader national concerns:
Cf "Mbeki, bring back Miracle 2000, our money."?
“There were fears that investment certificates of R50 apiece were being
fraudulently sold long after the registration process had closed” – this is remarkably
similar to what happened in the land reform process in SA.
“offered prizes of fully furnished houses in exclusive suburbs or BMW cars:
"We're going to build you houses, millionaires - not RDP houses - and they will even
have food and cutlery when you move in. The only thing you would have to do is cook
for us". – interesting to note how, in the current “credit crunch” climate, such promises,
even after delivery, can prove elusive, see the number of houses and cars repossessed.
One of the overriding themes emerging from my research is how pervasive and
omnipresent the prominence of “chance” has become in the lives of South Africans – how
does this differ from Ilana’s vision of the same issue?
DK. I hope to do extensive life-histories with some of these women, to answer “why?”,
“what is new?” “is it shocking?” and “is it South African?” Also – re: histories of
gambling. Middle-class people said that these schemes were kinds of gambling, where
working-class people did not.
What about speculation? For example, fahfee, or stokvels that have competitions,
or that encourage speculation. The history of this could include cattle raiding. So it is
more “what makes this kind of speculation better”?
EB. See my paper on the shrinking job market.
DK. Fahfee is no longer leisure, it is now work.
IvW. My mother is into this, she sold software on “Y2K”, she was taught that this is “a
creative way of marketing”. You can buy posting lists of defaulters, etc. You can send
emails to stupid people, targeting them.
DK. One needs to be clearer on the regulatory architecture. The legal angle is “is there an
underlying product?” The Y2K might be “legal”, so to describe a company in these terms
might be a problem. Also, we need to look at “below the line” strategies by the big
companies. This is distasteful, but it is legitimate.
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Wrt banks: the Competition Commission is doing an enquiry into bank changes.
These products are designed to be incommensurable, you can never compare A with B.
Standard Bank has 1000 different products, there are special deals with investment
groups, etc. There is deliberately engineered complexity.
On multi-level marketing. There is a social history of the first product, in the
1950s, a technically superior product, Tupperware, which was sold via gendered
networks.
MB. I enjoyed how your paper described the way one has to recruit people (ie this is
socially embedded). But it sounds as though as long as you recruit people, you’ll be able
to control the outcome. This seems more like “what you can do here” and a wider set of
uncertainties (including the uncertainty of the state).
DK. People have become aware of this as being illegal. There is a difference between
recruiting networks and fake investment companies. There are conflicting accounts,
Radebe had 5 or 6 different schemes, collectively known as “Miracle 2000”.
MB. The implications include that of betting on time (ie when will the police come?) vs
other factors. Your paper is connected to Ilana’s, the Christian basis for economics.
Radebe is alluding to “the fall” and to “scarcity”, but things don’t have to be like this. Is
this about the politicized character of SA post-1994?
FM. 1. There are two conflicting notions of luck/chance in these 2 papers.
2. Financial literacy. In Venda, old women are hugely financially literate in a number of
ways. They may just not know this particular world. What about orality? Also, knowledge
equates to practice.
EH. 1 Even when people found out about him, his fans were still there to support him:
it’s not just about being illiterate. [DJ. This sounds a bit like Zuma’s fans supporting him
outside the courtroom – they were celebrating the way he had trounced the law].
2. I liked Radebe’s flirtation with party politics. The idea that the parties have “let us
down” shows that the financial network is making inroads into an area associated with
political accountability. The question this raises, is, can economic systems replace
democratic politics? It connects to the literature on how economistic technocratic
language takes over from morality/accountability.
RL. Sindiwe Magona’s “Push-push”, a short story on the pyramid scheme. On
Tupperware, see Helena Broadbridge’s work on white working class (Summer Greens in
Cape Town).
On the production of receipts, this connects to the apartheid state; people kept
documents faithfully to prove they’d been somewhere for 20 years. This keeping of
receipts is ingrained.
Also, re: the advertisements. Confusion is created by bringing in US managementspeak. Maybe the adverts have to be familiar. Re: insurance, these companies used to just
sell policies. Then they looked at the informal market, and so the formal market began to
emulate it, to introduce something that looked a lot more like the burial society. It’s not
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just that people are stupid/confused, there is a conscious recruitment being used which
taps into existing things.
Overview:
Erik Bahre
These papers are about apparent anomalies. These are not usually “economy” (which is
about production, consumption). But they reveal central things:
1
insecurity of value, which is core. You don’t know what you’ll get in return. The
demand/supply equilibrium is no longer true. So, this behaviour if not as exceptional as it
seems.
2
how do these spheres produce new inequalities? “Inclusion” is a rhetoric but it
often promotes the opposite - banks/insurance/etc. reproduce harsh inequalities
3. Ethics
There is a danger of portraying the poor as stupid.
[DK. The flipside is that they save the greatest proportion of the income. ]
Most of the research is among relatively poor people, so this seems to generate a
problematic image. Rather, let’s circumvent this, let’s show how a lot of it is generated by
the character of the economy – and the credit crunch.
- often, some of these are not even registered, the insurance company can actually be
causing the problem rather than solving it. When the problem arises, clients cannot go
anywhere. The regulatory framework is quite far removed from what actually happens.
There is a danger of saying “the problems are caused by the fly-by-nights”. It’s
costly, agents go to funeral parlours and collect money, but when there is a problem, they
don’t pay up.
RL. There was a 3 generation involvement:
Older generation: would add on extra societies but not let go of the old ones (very loyal).
Younger generation: changing residential profiles, they’d emulate their mothers but were
more inclined to mix and match. It is about perceiving involvement, as well as about
monetary returns. Older generation was concerned to be seen as people who participate;
were more embedded in subjectivity. The younger ones were saying “let’s try this”,
experimenting.
EB. I found a group set up to try to “teach our daughters” how to do a ASCA, but more
often women complain that their daughters are financially irresponsible.
RL. In Cape Town coffin makers are part of funeral parlours, several will club together to
rent a warehouse where the coffins will be on display. See the film called The Incredible
Mr Khotso.
Session 2
“From Gogos to Gravediggers: paying for funerals and reading rumours
in post-apartheid Venda”
Fraser G. McNeill
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Discussant:
Detlev Krige
There is another bit of Mda: the two funerals meet each other: a rich and a poor. The rich
ones give way in the end. A nice moment which points to the growing inequality. The
BEE tenders, with their Hummers, and the new pathways to accumulation. This points to
social differentiation, cf Smith on Nigerian funerals. There is a new set of symbols
around wealth. Policies: were these people inside or outside the graveyard? Raises
question re: your discomfort, people making money out of death. But what does money
mean? Cf Bloch/Parry. In Merina, men can leave money for their wives after having sex,
its not problematic for money to enter what would seem “intimate relationships”. (But I
have problems with his cultural argument). In Soweto it is not the job of the gravedigger
to close the grave.
FM. Yes, people put handfuls in, but after that the gravedigger fills in the rest.
DK. Is there a separate section of graveyard for children? The mobile units following
pension agents – this says so much. How white Afrikaners formerly ran these societies,
but now it is businessmen. In my work on fahfee, it was thought that you need an outsider
in order for something to really work well, this is a critique on how “other blacks cannot
be trusted”. These rumours might be linked to the fact that it’s no longer outsiders but
insiders who have taken this up: so death has been “taken back” and these rumours reflect
the fact that these Vendas/BEE people have done “get rich quick” and this is suspicious
behaviour. There is jealousy involved too. These funeral parlours are largely funded by
these BEE contracts.
IvW. 1. In Durban, there is a whole industry, people would throw cement on the grave,
partly to prevent council from flipping graves, and re-using the space.
2. Witchcraft: ants from the grave mound were considered very powerful, they are used
for bad witchcraft.
RL. Background – how did you come to this topic? You’re saying funeral entrepreneurs
are bloodsuckers, you’re hypothesizing that this connects to a problem with the handling
of death. It’s not necessarily the case that handling of the dead should create a stigma. Is
this recent, does it have to do with ideas of illness/HIV Aids?
FM. Publically expressed “knowledge” shows that one has experience of/connection to it.
RL. Refrigeration allows people to come back and see the body again, you see how the
embalmer did it, you comment – and you can become more and more acquainted. People
have more time to engage with the body. There is not an “easy trajectory” towards
alienation.
DJ. Are you planning to look at other kinds of enrichment, including the BEE tender
process?
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RL. The importance of positioning is key: how do these people see themselves in relation
to other careers – to other outcomes? It is good to speak to these entrepreneurs … “the
only reason I succeed is because I work night and day, I get my whole family to work,
you’re always on call”, etc. They see themselves as very hardworking people, “we
deserve every bit of the money we make” They don’t see themselves as bloodsucking
parasites.
FM. I expect this, but I also need to ask what people say.
[NB the Hummer parked next to the Joshua Doore].
DN. 1 Maybe reference others’ beliefs. On maggots, there is a big trope about “Nguni
worms”.
2 Funeral parlours. The market is 2-tiered:
a) small to medium and
b) franchise. (Avbob with 1000 plus branches). There are long historical ties to Afrikaner
capital. We need to work out what these guys are. There are those that buy people, and
those that buy people and collect premiums (you have to be a registered financial service
provider – there have been efforts made to regulate and formalize this), by the Financial
Services Board, the National Treasury and the DTI. There are ones that are regulated and
that are underwritten by bigger companies – they send the payments on, but get caught in
the middle. The undertaker has to send everything on – but does not receive it all. They
keep funding their insurance cover – it is a monthly loss.
DN. There is a range of “white brand” services, you use someone else’s licence, it is
underwritten by someone else.
Policies: were these people inside or outside the graveyard? This raises questions about
your discomfort, people making money out of death. But what does money mean (see
Bloch and Parry).
“Understanding ‘economic agency’ in the context of informal self-employment”
David Neves (with Andries du Toit)
Discussant: Deborah James
DN. How people prioritize the way to act. The literature on entrepreneurs is Bill Gatesoriented. The “global entrepreneur monitor” shows how SA is defective. The big mistake
in SA is to say “there are no self-employed” even though there are.
There are howlers: “SA lacks an entrepreneurial mindset”.
The key to our method is to show the hidden transfers, hence it is key to
understand the household context. The synergies between the hardware stores: why two
hardware stores? See K Mart: ccannibalisation of your own sales, this drives out
competitors. Nokwanele: a choreography of labour within the family. Nowethu: my
children have become nurses, the point is to get them out and upwards. A liquor licence is
not really a liquor licence. Here it is about “not understanding”. Nokhaya: sewing by a
taxi rank.
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The multiplicity of objectives: are people “eating stock or selling the contents of their
kitchen cupboard”?
DJ. This is invaluable stuff, in that it ranges across two sites, and picks out quite a
number of not-necessarily-connected cases, thus exploring (and yielding) some kind of
“representative” range. Disadvantages: there is no sense of how these cases interconnect:
the impression one gets is of a series of completely discrete individuals (ie the method
might be yielding results! – as in Detlev’s case but rather differently). On 8.3.1 “The role
of connection / disconnection with the ‘formal economy’ generally” It seems it is not necessary to be linked with the “formal economy” per se – several
examples documented here “seem to have been able to survive as businesses in spite of
[perhaps even because of?] their supposed ‘disconnection’ with the formal economy,
because they developed other strengths”. Perhaps it is necessary to see the two as
constitutive of each other, rather than separated by a definite line. But (see Max’s paper
on a South Africa border farm) perhaps one needs to point to the fact that somewhere
there is a key connection … this might be in the realm of “household” rather than
“enterprise”.
On 8.4.5 “Labour capacity in the household”. When people drew on non-market
labour, or depended on unremunerated care chains to facilitate the employment (Zenzi’s
child fetched from crèche by the neighbour’s children or her husband while she is selling
polony).” - this revisits the old debate about “reproduction” or “unpaid/domestic labour”.
But does it say any more about it? There was much denial of people being “employees”,
they were rather thought of as “helpers”: this stresses an ethos of morality and reciprocity.
But does this amount to “super-exploitation” in a setting of extra-outsourced capitalism?
On the key importance of credit/debt to informal sector enterprise, but the need to finely
balance these in order to keep the whole operation going, it is worth reminding oneself of
Keith Hart’s original and seminal article. interestingly, while they refer to the need to
acquire credit, often by informal means, they do not refer to (1) whether these same
people have got other kinds of credit, for example via moneylenders – or banks. There is
no reference here to banks or banking at all; (2) the quite predominant reluctance,
especially in the urban case studies, to offer credit. This suggests something perhaps en
route to a slightly more businesslike, less personalized and reciprocal, attitude to credit.
There is also no reference to the practice, documented in the Financial Diaries project, of
people getting credit from storekeepers. This is not only about buying groceries now and
paying for them later. It is also a matter of borrowing money. (In one case, the borrower
ceased her practice of buying groceries on credit until she had paid back her “money
only” loan to the shopkeeper).
Given that this is a report on work already done, what do you plan to do by way of follow
up? Longitudinal study? What about other aspects of “informality” in the lives of these
people? What about close observation? Might this yield information about how these
kinds of informalities are embedded in other kinds (eg re: household expenditure, etc. – I
noticed one case where the woman was going to invest the proceeds in her RCA, and I
have found a type of club in the Lowveld called sesebesebe where clothes sellers who buy
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in Durban and sell locally invest their takings. Also the “daily stokvel” in Soweto which
gets rid of the problem of having to bank/store one’s proceeds.)
Finally, can you say more about how you conceptualise “economic agency” – I am not
sure the diagram necessarily illuminates!
DN. On the connection to the formal economy: only one sector has no connection, that of
African traditional medicines. But everything else does come from, and relies on
backward linkages to, this sector. Grants/wages: yes, these are important in the work of
informal traders – or they’ll provide a complementary advantage. These can provide startup or operating capital. On policy – the Minister said “I no longer want any unintended
consequences!” But the policy process is so mediated. The work was done for the Office
of the Presidency. We have contributed to the reframing of the terms of the debates.
EB. This is written for a different kind of audience. Maybe you could go back to
informants, follow up on a smaller number. For example, look at life histories, at what
makes people move in and out of entrepreneurship. For example, what has been the effect
of the intrusion of entrepreneurs from other parts of Africa?
DN. I spoke to Somalis, you find them in the Transkei. But I thought this would make it
even more complex. I thought of looking at medium to successful ones, and asking what
makes them so.
IvW. I worked with crafts traders in Maputaland. All sell exactly the same things, even
stack the fruit and display it in the same way. Why?
EB. Sometimes there is an entrepreneur behind the sellers.
DN. Part of this is about not giving in to competition: not selling the fruit for R1 cheaper.
IvW. But this is about something more than just social pressure.
DN. There are 20 basic things people do to make money. They all do it the same way.
They take the same market, and constantly split and redivide it. Why are some – other –
enterprises unthinkable?
MB. 1. you talk of “intertwined” yet you still speak of a “realm”; what happens if you
drop this “realm”? Spatially the formal and the informal are not separated.
2. How does something count as a business? What about in the compound where I did
fieldwork, you can shave people’s hair. Is this a “business”?
3. Agency. Do you mean “efficacy” or “success”?
DN. How people understand themselves.
MB. See James Laidlaw, interested in the anthropology of ethics. “Agency” is an
amalgam of efficacy and responsibility/blame.
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DK. Is it possible for you to develop a critical focus on the policy-oriented world in
which you work? One consequence of this financial crisis is that “the state” must come
back in, so to talk about the policy world would be one way to talk about “the state” once
more. It creates through these experts a set of discourses that citizens start using.. eg
Radebe starts to use “BEE” as a term.
DN. They don’t think of what they do as “work” or of those they employ as “workers” –
rather they draw on registers of reciprocity.
EB. See David Mosse on Cultivating Development, on the repetition and similarity. There
is an “if you do the right thing”, “I want to start a business” or whatever. It is more form
than content. A lot of the secret is to “make yourself visible to the state”, as with Leslie
Bank on “development entrepreneurs”. They are astute, and organized. They have
networks.
DN. This is not about “adding value”, it is about “going through the motions”.
EH. On whether people aspire: some nurses were disgruntled and aspired to make money
from clothes selling. But you did say that self-employment is always aimed at
transcending self-employment. Do people want their children to transcend this, to go
further? There is ambiguity here.
DK. There are status considerations. Under apartheid, status was linked to occupation.
But now it is more connected to your ability to consume. This upsets people.
DJ. It’s about smaller relationalities, and smaller practices.
IvW. My research assistant watched Isidingo. In that programme it was not “you might
build up from small beginnings” but “get a brilliant job and become super-rich”.
DN. It’s often just social reproduction, not seen as “work”.
IvW. Lots did not think going to market would alter their chances of getting “more
money”. There was no relation between “poverty” and the imagination of what this can
do.
RL. How about the ways people speak? As a historian, you can usually go back to stuff
again and again. The voices don’t come out here very much. You might just go back to
the material you had. The voices don’t come out here very strongly. You might go back to
the material you had and see whether this affects things: are there particular ways of
speaking about this?
“Making Money from Nothing”
Discussant:
Deborah James
Ilana van Wyk
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IvW. What kind of economics do we try to write against? We have not included new
developments.
FM. On the monopoly of violence.
EB. My experience in Cape Town. People emphasized how dangerous loan sharks were –
“don’t think you can mess with me”. To operate in this world you have to instill fear,
have connections to gangs, there must be a plausible threat.
DJ. There is a range of loansharks, only some operate in this manner.
MB. Re consumption – what of domesticity/respectability? The relation between a
respectable home and its idea of a couple (on the one hand) and the debt that is necessary
to achieve this?
DN. There is work on the transition between shacks and RDP houses, in Cape Town and
Soweto. See Helen Meintjes in the Journal of Material Culture. There are moral panics
around exorbitant consumption. But we have shown that you need a cellphone in order to
enter into the necessary networks – the cellphone is the new ID document.
RL. There is historical literature on respectability and how it relates to domesticity. I
agree with Posel, it was those council homes that needed to be filled, this is not new. See
my JSAS article on home renovations, and how this connects to …. Also in the Journal of
Women’s History, on electricity and on informal types of fuel use – this takes on Helen
Meintjes but looks backwards. Monica Wilson and the Mayers dealt with these things,
also Etherington. Also, on lobola, see two studies. Susan Reynolds-Whyte on funerals
and illness, shows how illness can interrupt the finalizing of the marriage, how the
transaction must be finalized, a man must marry a corpse and then bury it. Parker
Shipton’s Entrustment, on the Luo. When someone dies, their lineage representative
comes, the person comes to the funeral, the lineae is aware and takes this on. They can
forgive the debt or ask it to be taken on. Do kin lend to each other? My research assistant
is in Parliament, and faces a dilemma: her uncle asked for R20,000, he wants to set up a
spaza business with her as the lender. In settings where there are families with increasing
class heterogeneity, what is happening?
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