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Paper short abstract:

Connections between rural and urban Chad are growing, leading to the commodification of what used to be common resources. This is impacting labour conditions and the citizenship rights of rural workers. Development policies aimed at empowering rural workers in the market reinforce these dynamics.

Paper long abstract:

Chad is at the centre of turbulent transformations. While much attention is being paid to social instability, violent rebellions, and the climatic transformations that are impacting the country, working conditions in rural areas have only been marginally explored. The growing commodification of land and the dependence of rural workers on markets are impacting working conditions, building on the precarity already created by demographic growth and climate change. Access to basic resources such as water and land becomes more competitive in rural areas, while the growing urban centres attract seasonal migration without offering stable incomes. Building on a year of fieldwork in the province of Guéra and various visits to N’Djamena, this paper explores the efforts of development aid to “empower” rural workers through various strategies (horticulture, cereal storage, transhumance paths, capacity-building, etc.) and the trajectories of these actors in their seasonal migration to urban centres, mainly Guéra’s capital Mongo and Chad’s capital N’Djamena. The paper argues that urban and rural contexts are intertwined today and that most interventions aimed at empowering rural workers by reinforcing their capacities to act on the market – mainly aimed at urban consumption – are contributing to the commodification of goods and resources generally shared in common in rural areas. This might temporarily increase their revenues, but it makes their access to common goods as citizens more difficult. By increasing competition and commodifying goods, these policies are simultaneously creating precarious workers and vulnerable citizens in a growingly strong urban-rural nexus.

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This study delves into the work of local rural brokers, representing the dynamic form of work and economic activity in the pastoral area.

Paper long abstract:

In the last decade, Ethiopia’s Oromia Regional State has implemented a large-scale irrigation project on the land inhabited by the Karrayu pastoralist group in the upper Awash Valley. The project was farmed as lifesaving, transformative, and unique in terms of shifting the dominant approach of development by dispossession to development through incorporating the local population. Numerous studies have shown that large-scale agricultural investment invites new actors and capital, altering production relationships and influencing labour organisations and working conditions. While many have emphasised the importance of large-scale investments made by private and international firms and external actors in transforming the production and labour landscape, local actors and their agencies have gotten less attention. At this junction, this study sheds light on local brokers, a very crucial yet rarely studied subject, as economic entities and actors facilitating capitalist production and resulting labour exploitation.

By taking the mentioned large-scale irrigation as its central arena for inquiry, this study delves into the work of local rural brokers, representing the dynamic form of work and economic activity in the pastoral area. Using an ethnographic approach, it examines how the brokers networked and operated in local reality as an emerging type of informal economic activity and how their actions, in turn, reinforced the expansion of capitalist production and labour commodification in the project area.

Keywords: Ethiopia, Pastoralists, Karrayu, Broker

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Paper short abstract:

This contribution examines the role of professional motorcycle taxi associations in eastern DRC in transforming the profession from an stopgap activity into a ‘proper job’. It discusses strategies, their results as well as structural, economic and political challenges.

Paper long abstract:

Being a motorcycle taxi driver or ‘motard’ is a widespread form of work in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Motards are present in urban as well as rural settings and serve as linkages between both spheres. Many riders are men between 18 and 35 and originate from a precarious background although students, graduates and skilled workers are also not uncommon. Their profession is however widely perceived as a temporary stop-gap, work “in between jobs” or even a “dead end” (Oldenburg 2019). This paper examines the role of professional associations in transforming motorcycle taxi driving from an unanchored stopgap activity into a ‘proper job’ (Ferguson & Li 2018) as well as structural, economic and political challenges. Recently, motorcycle taxi associations have multiplied and spread across eastern DRC, not least due to mandatory membership policies. Existing associations however differ greatly in size, geographical extend and the services they offer. Some are limited to a role as registrars of professionals and provide only limited assistance in negotiating with police and state institutions. In contrast, other associations have developed extensive welfare and social security schemes or provide their members with professional trainings both within the motorcycle taxi sector and beyond it. Thereby, they embed their members into long-term projects that contradict the reputation of their work as temporary and aim at transforming being a motard into an economically sustainable and socially accepted profession. Furthermore, associations attempt to win political and social recognition for a group that is often described as unruly outlaws.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores distinct temporal experiences of "killing time" and "owning time" at the rural-urban nexus, highlighting the nuanced view needed when discussing boredom in the supposedly modern periphery.

Paper long abstract:

In a village in the Zambezi region of Namibia, I met several young men who told me they were just "killing time" while waiting to "get a job". They had studied in the city, but had only returned to their "home village" because life was cheap there and waiting was affordable. They were typically easy to identify, as it was important for them to maintain a certain habitus that marked them as "urbanites", based on fashion and consumption. But I also met another group of young men who sometimes talked about "killing time". But, as I argue, their notion of "killing time" was of a structurally different quality. Their "boredom" was rather situational than existential and it was rather an impulse than a blockade for new activity. These young men had actively chosen "village life" over "city life", owned land and ran businesses. They killed time that they considered their own, waiting for the next customer, for example, sometimes resulting in new ideas for their business.

In this paper I draw out different temporal phenomenologies of "killing time" associated with different kinds of work at the rural-urban nexus. I show that a nuanced view is important when talking about the experience of boredom in the supposedly rural periphery of a globalised modernity with unequal access to the "jobs" that promise citizenship in globalised capitalism.

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Paper short abstract:

Negotiated around a social contract of benevolence and marginality, contemporary gleaning simultaneously confirms and decenters socio-economic hierarchies and invokes the possibilities of life entwined in-, yet transgressing racialised and gendered dispossession and ruination under late Capitalism.

Paper long abstract:

Gleaning describes the right of the subaltern to the remainder and the obligation of the dominant to produce and/or allow access to the remainder under the premise of marginality. This paper introduces gleaning trans-culturally and focuses on two examples from the Sine-Saloum Delta, Senegal. The first inquires how gleaning for molluscs safeguards deltaic waters as a female sphere by appeasing ancestral guardian spirits and evoking a longstanding female subalternity and norms of benevolence and mutual aid. This also obscures the profitability of gleaning. At the same time, gleaning allows women to eschew labour relations introduced e.g. by NGO projects. The second example inquires how deltaic deck hands gleaned molluscs from the bycatch of industrial trawlers. By performing the marginality of this bycatch while redescribing its value and exchanging it along female networks, they realised their own gains from it, renegotiated ownership and possession as well as labour, and turned trawlers from capitalist- into peri-capitalist sites (pointing into the opposite direction of salvage accumulation). Gleaning as what I term a ‘minor tactic’ thus creates distinct, if entwined niches of 'freedom' within conditions of 'unfreedom', that is, hierarchical socio-economic relations and their dynamics of dispossession and ruination. It is a fragile practice characterized by indeterminacy and limits requiring close attention to changing environmental and socio-economic contexts. It simultaneously confirms and decenters hierarchical relations across the rural-urban nexus, while figuring as a larger promise that questions the establishment of property and value and the character of work/labour and its alienation from the environment.

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Paper short abstract:

I examine the strategies by which migrant artisanal gold miners in Madagascar cultivate belonging, as well as attendant consequences. I argue that miners' "enskilment"--embodied, socially-embedded learning-in-practice--makes life meaningful while also serving as an "affective subsidy" for capital.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how rural laborers in migrant-dominated extractive landscapes conceptualize and cultivate belonging, as well as the consequences for local societies and economies. Drawing on ethnographic evidence from the goldfields of Betsiaka in Madagascar’s far north and leveraging the concept of “enskilment,” I explore how artisanal miners come to feel “at home in their bodies and in the presence of others,” both under and above ground. In analyzing enskilment in Betsiaka, I draw on three terms miners use to describe their dispositions towards mining labor and the social world of the diggings: zatra (accustomed), mahay (skilled or knowledgeable), and tamana (at home). By stressing how they are accustomed to difficult work and discomforting conditions; their mining skill and knowledge of geology, custom, taboos, and lore; and their feeling at home in the diggings, migrant miners assert claims, valorize their labor, and craft novel identities. Beyond driving a perceptible transformation in rural sociality, I contend that cultivating belonging via enskilment facilitates ongoing mobility and “flexible extraction” (hence forms of capitalist expansion), as laborers acquire necessary knowledge, skills, and connections, as well as an abiding confidence that the displacement of the latest bust will give way to opportunity and community forged in the crucible of the next boom. It thus simultaneously makes life meaningful for miners, shielding them from destitution and generating (non)economic forms of value, even freedom—while also serving as an affective subsidy for capital, as exploitation, accumulation, and forms of unfreedom persist and proliferate.