Abstract
Documents are central to the infrastructure through which formal workforces are constituted. They thus offer a privileged vantage point onto how formality is asserted and experienced as real. On the Zimbabwean–South African border, where formality is a plural and uneven patchwork of “formalizations,” thousands of migrants are employed on export-oriented commercial farms. Connections between state institutions and workplaces are regulatory spotlights. More complex than employee protection or domination, or than window-dressing fiction, they make workers by recognizing them as different from “border jumpers.” Workers make their own use of spotlights. Documents become stepping- stones, as migrants broker conversions toward more durable forms of worker identity. They navigate the constellation of fixed points that documents represent, bringing coherence to fragmentary encounters. Spotlights and stepping-stones lie at the point where formal regulation and livelihood plans constitute one another, and thereby establish the shared ground for negotiating the “reality” of a wage economy.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 305-324 |
Number of pages | 20 |
Journal | HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory |
Volume | 7 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Dec 2017 |
Keywords
- Zimbabwe
- South Africa,
- real economy
- farm labor
- formality
- documents
- marginality