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- Convenors:
-
Chloé Josse Durand
(French Institute for Research in Africa - Nairobi (IFRA Nairobi))
Marie-Aude Fouéré (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS))
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- Stream:
- Social Anthropology
- Location:
- Appleton Tower, Seminar Room 2.06
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 12 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Research in Africa has focused on urban rising middle classes or surviving lower classes. This panel wishes to enlighten stories of African working class(es) in a rural perspective, to initiate a collective reflection both on its subjectivity and its relationship to globalized labor struggles.
Long Abstract:
Since the 1980s, research on "classes" in Africa has focused on the rise of a middle class or the impoverishment of the lower classes, leaving aside a central theme of the 1960-1970s: the working class(es).
This can be explained by the fact that Marxist theories have been challenged in the social sciences, emphasizing instead people's agency and individual initiatives. The underdevelopment of industrialization in most African countries was not conducive either.
Since the failed structural adjustment policies, the neoliberal turn of Africa and the World Bank's injunctions, the situation of African workers has come to the fore again in academic and development circles, based on studies about mining or natural resources exploitation or on urban and domestic labor. Yet, the rural working classes are often left out.
This panel wishes to reflect upon African working classes in a rural and agrarian perspective that goes beyond previous academic case-studies by considering cash crops plantations (tea, coffee, rice, sisal, etc.) and processing factories.
« Stories of a Rural African Working Class » will initiate a collective reflection on how the working class struggles against exploitative companies and multinationals, repressive and developmental governments, and authoritarian or ambiguous trade union leaders.
Those stories will also give an insight on how rural workers engage with their subjective social status and perception of « oneself », tackling a sense of belonging (or not) to an African working class anchored in a rural context, understood here in its specificities and its relationship to globalized labor struggles.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 12 June, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
The paper aims at assessing the ways entering one of the Cameroonian plantation complexes reshapes (or not) the social perceptions among the workers. The production of difference and inclusion are scrutinized through an intersectional approach and the renewed tools of popular classes sociology.
Paper long abstract:
Cameroon is a country of large-scale plantations, several complexes being the main employers after the State. The tens of thousands who work there find themselves in an ambiguous situation, as the almost sole fraction of Cameroonian lower classes who have access to formal employment, in a geographically concentrated way moreover. This paper aims at exploring how the plantation reshapes (or not) their experience and self-perception.
To that end, we draw on the contributions of a sociology of work but also of popular classes which has renewed itself over the past two decades, paying greater attention to the making of identity outside the work-place, to endogenous classifications, but also to the forms of cultural separation from more privileged groups.
Assessing a large sample of interviews (212 employed persons, including 156 fieldworkers) and observations in the fields, factories and compounds of three enterprises (sugar, rubber and bananas), we aim at identifying different ways of entering the plantation and coping with it, most of them being temporary. If work and the labour regime shape a strong common experience - the basis of daily and sometimes more generalized confrontations -, a range of exogenous resources also draws patterns of dignities and indignities. The occupational hierarchy at work resorts to gender and ethnicity - but also workers themselves, with their own agenda. We shall also scrutinize the existence of a portion of the labour force which claims a "workers" identity: who are they, and what does this new sense of belonging reveal?
Paper short abstract:
This paper tells a story of a rural working class: smallholder vanilla farmers in Northeastern Madagascar. It provides a situated gaze into their everyday experiences as they navigate the push toward global markets and their encapsulation by everyday realities to make the market work for them.
Paper long abstract:
Social Change imposed by globalization through increased interlinks of spaces, people, ideas and goods are a common feature of modern societies. However, power remains a central element of these processes, dictating who participates, how, when, and how benefits are distributed. Using Madagascar's vanilla value chain as a case, soaring vanilla prices and the recent introduction of vertical market integration characterized by buyer-organized farmer's organizations are transforming producer's lives and their communities.
This research explores, with the use of grounded theory, the past and present socio-political processes and ambivalent role of farmer's organizations in the vanilla value chain. I ask: why are farmer self-organized farmer organizations rare in the region, despite the long history of vanilla production as an export cash crop; and how does the recent push by farmers for direct links to importers (foreign buyers) and the emergence of enterprise-organized farmer's organizations influencing farmer's position in the value chain?
The paper provides a situated gaze into the everyday experiences of smallholder vanilla farmers as they navigate the push toward global markets and their encapsulation by everyday realities to make the market work for them. The paper situates farmers as workers, but most importantly as active participants of the change process, with diverse, interest and capabilities.
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines class class dynamics agrarian societies. Why and how do people mobilise for collective claim making with regard to the modes and relations of production? Building on E.P. Thompson's concept of class, this is analysed in a study of mobilisation of cotton producers in Burkina Faso.
Paper long abstract:
This paper addresses a longstanding and prevailing question within critical agrarian studies: In how far are agrarian societies characterized by class structures? And if they are, how does the development of capitalism in agrarian settings impact on class dynamics? I will approach these questions referring to debates from critical agrarian studies, including Henry Bernstein's concept of "classes of labour". It emphasises that labour is fragmented and hierarchically and unequally structured along gender, race, ethnicity, caste, kinship, etc.; and that this potentially hampers the emergence of class consciousness and class identity. Distinct from Bernstein, I take up an understanding of class following E.P. Thompson: class is a social category that ultimately becomes important through people's all-day experiences within the relations of production, rather than a given social structure along these relations. How people experience their position within the relations of production is obviously shaped by their position in the social field in general, and by political-institutional influences (such as social policy, agrarian policy, existing social organisations and institutions, mobilisation and repression). I argue that such a phenomenological concept of class is suitable to analyse class mobilisation in agrarian settings: Why and how do people mobilise for collective claim making with regard to the modes and relations of production? I illustrate this in an empirical analysis of recent mobilisation of cotton producers in Burkina Faso.
Paper short abstract:
With six factories and around 5000 workers,Burundi tea industry is the second national economy after coffee. This paper want to understand the issues of tea labor and the worker's possibilities to negotiate or struggle for their socio-economic conditions, in poverty and authoritarian context.
Paper long abstract:
In Burundi, as the second national economy,tea has been introduced in the state's large plantations (19%) and in the peasant's smallholding.
In tea region,there is a large social demand for development and labor migration. In addition to land, labor is the main issue to the tea industry development. It is a big labor's mobilization (around 5000 workers in six factories) according to the migration movement and the all activities: plantations, forestation, roads, transport, processing factories,...
So,this paper is interested by the socio-economic, political and cultural aspects in Burundi tea working class (income, migration, legislation, gender, age, education, working and life conditions, organization, negotiation, perceptions, appropriations, social struggles,...), in public and private. If the tea industry is one of the main factors in the rural employment and wage-earning, what are the different issues or ambiguities and the possibilities of the workers to negotiate or struggle for the improvement of their living and working conditions, in the authoritarian political culture? Why the young persons (generally educated) prefer the small urban jobs (or stay at home without job), but not to work in the tea plantations? In a society where the rural activities are generally done by women, why there is more men than women in the tea labor? According to the poverty, the general unemployment and the problem of workers in the tea industry, it means that the socio-economic and cultural context and perceptions are not favorable to the voluntary and popular commitment of rural and life labor.