Ethnographies of Power

Ahmed Veriava, Alex Loftus, Zachary Levenson, Stefan Kipfer, Bridget Kenny, Jennifer Greenburg, Michael Ekers, Jennifer A Devine, Melanie Samson, Mark Hunter, Sharad Chari

Description

Working with key concepts from theorist and human geographer Gillian Hart, this book argues for an ethnographic and geographic approach to critically engaging contemporary political-economic processes in the context of real-world struggles.

What does it mean to work with radical concepts in our time of rampant inequality, imperial-capitalist plunder, racial/sexual/class violence and ecocide? When concepts from the past seem inadequate, how do scholars and activists concerned with social change decide what concepts to work with or renew? The contributors to Ethnographies of Power address these questions head on.

Gillian Hart is a key thinker in radical political economy, geography, development studies, agrarian studies and Gramscian critique of postcolonial capitalism. In Ethnographies of Power each contributor engages her work and applies it to their own field of study.

These applied concepts include: ‘gendered labour’ practices among South African workers, reading ‘racial capitalism’ through agrarian debates, using ‘relational comparison’ in an ethnography of schooling across Durban, reworking ‘multiple socio-spatial trajectories’ in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve, critiquing the notion of South Africa’s ‘second economy’, revisiting ‘development’ processes and ‘Development’ discourses in US military contracting, reconsidering Gramsci’s ‘conjunctures’ geographically, finding divergent ‘articulations’ in Cape Town land occupations, and exploring ‘nationalism’ as central to revaluing recyclables at a Soweto landfill.

Ethnographies of Power offers an invaluable toolkit for activists and scholars engaged in sharpening their critical concepts for the social and environmental change necessary for our collective future.

List of Illustrations

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Introduction: Working Radical Concepts with Gillian Hart – Sharad Chari, Mark Hunter and Melanie Samson

Chapter 1 The Politics of ‘Gendered Labour’: Gillian Hart’s Relational ‘Conjunctures’ – Bridget Kenny

Chapter 2 Micro-foundations for ‘Racial Capitalism’: ‘Interlocking Transactions’ – Sharad Chari

Chapter 3 ‘Relational Comparison’ and Geography’s Question of Method – Mark Hunter

Chapter 4 ‘Multiple Trajectories of Globalisation’ – Jennifer Devine

Chapter 5 A Conversation with Gillian Hart about Mbeki’s ‘Second Economy’ – Ahmed Veriava

Chapter 6 ‘D/developments’ after the War on Terror – Jennifer Greenburg

Chapter 7 ‘Articulation’, ‘Translation’, ‘Populism’: Gillian Hart’s Engagements with Gramsci – Michael Ekers, Stefan Kipfer and Alex Loftus

Chapter 8 Make ‘Articulation’ Gramscian Again – Zachary Levenson

Chapter 9 What is ‘Nationalism’? Thinking Alongside Hart at a South African Landfill – Melanie Samson

Contributors

Index

Sujets

• Social Theory
• Human Geography
• Social Science
• Sociology

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 août 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776146772
• Langue: English

Extrait

ETHNOGRAPHIES OF POWER
The Wits University Press Critical Thinkers series explores field-defining concepts developed by African intellectuals whose ideas have had a far-reaching impact on scholarship and society. Through critical engagement, and treating their work as an object of study, the series demonstrates the reverberation of their intellectual labour across global arenas and to the broader public. A fundamental objective of the series is to integrate praxis and pedagogy, and to offer working concepts, theories and methodologies that enable other scholars to develop expertise in their own research fields and teaching.
ETHNOGRAPHIES OF POWER
Working radical concepts with Gillian Hart
EDITED BY Sharad Chari , Mark Hunter and Melanie Samson
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
www.witspress.co.za
Compilation © Sharad Chari, Mark Hunter and Melanie Samson 2022
Chapters © Individual contributors 2022
Published edition © Wits University Press 2022
First published 2022
http://dx.doi.org.10.18772/22022076666
978-1-77614-666-6 (Paperback)
978-1-77614-775-5 (Hardback)
978-1-77614-771-7 (Web PDF)
978-1-77614-677-2 (EPUB)
978-1-77614-683-3 (Open Access PDF)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
This book is freely available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 Creative Commons License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ).
This publication is peer reviewed following international best practice standards for academic and scholarly books.
The financial assistance of the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) towards this publication is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed and those arrived at are those of the authors and cannot necessarily be attributed to the NIHSS.

Project manager: Lisa Compton
Copyeditor: Alison Lockhart
Proofreader: Lee Smith
Indexer: Christopher Merrett
Cover design: Hothouse
Typeset in 11.5 point Crimson
For Gillian Hart: comrade, mentor, friend
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Working Radical Concepts with Gillian Hart
Sharad Chari , Mark Hunter and Melanie Samson
1 The Politics of Gendered Labour
Bridget Kenny
2 ‘Interlocking Transactions’: Micro-foundations for ‘Racial Capitalism’
Sharad Chari
3 Relational Comparison and Contested Educational 
Spaces in Durban
Mark Hunter
4 Multiple Trajectories of Globalisation: Deforestation 
in Guatemala’s Protected Areas
Jennifer A. Devine
5 A Conversation with Gillian Hart about Thabo Mbeki’s 
‘Second Economy’
Ahmed Veriava
6 ‘D/developments’ after the War on Terror, post 9/11
Jennifer Greenburg
7 Articulation, Translation, Populism: Gillian Hart’s 
Engagements with Antonio Gramsci
Michael Ekers , Stefan Kipfer and Alex Loftus
8 Make ‘Articulation’ Gramscian Again
Zachary Levenson
9 Grappling with ‘Nationalism’: Thinking alongside Gillian 
Hart at a South African Landfill
Melanie Samson
Contributors
Index
List of Illustrations
Figure 3.1 Durban study area
Figure 4.1 The Maya Biosphere Reserve
Figure 4.2 Forest loss in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, 2015
Acknowledgements
W e are grateful to all the authors in this book for their commitment, care and patience. Several papers were first presented at sessions in honour of Gillian Hart at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers in San Francisco. We are grateful to all participants at these sessions. Roshan Cader saw promise in this project early on, and we are grateful for her work at every stage. Warm gratitude to the Wits University Press production and marketing crew, including Kirsten Perkins, Lisa Compton, Corina van der Spoel, Veronica Klipp and, not least, Alison Lockhart for eagle-eyed line editing. Many thanks to the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences for subsidising production to make this an open access title. Finally, on behalf of all the contributors, warm thanks to Gillian Hart for living the reason to write this book and for the open invitation to walk alongside her.
Sharad Chari (Berkeley)
Mark Hunter (Durban)
Melanie Samson (Johannesburg)
Introduction | Working Radical Concepts 
with Gillian Hart
Sharad Chari , Mark Hunter and Melanie Samson
What does it mean to work with radical concepts?
We live in a time in which the forces of capital, imperialism, nationalism, racism and populism continue to connect people and places, yet also profoundly differentiate them. For successive generations of scholars engaging with these processes, extant concepts often seem too abstract or blunt to illuminate lived struggles and the ways they are bound up with race, gender, class, sexuality and other social relations. When a concept outlives its purpose in actual struggles, should it be archived for use when similar struggles might re-emerge? Alternatively, ought concepts to be reviewed and renewed with the regularity of doing the weekly laundry – and would this offer fresh insights into what might appear obvious or staid in both radical analysis and politics?
The idea of collating concepts for radical critique owes a debt to Raymond Williams’ classic, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society ([1975] 2015). Williams begins the book with a story about his return to Oxford University, after serving in the army during the Second World War, when he encountered another veteran. He recounts their shared sense of disconnection with the society they had returned to, as they both felt that people around them did not ‘speak the same language’ as they did. Williams reflects on this turn of phrase, often used between generations, classes, genders and societies. He introduces Keywords not so much as a glossary or dictionary, but rather as an exploration of ‘the problem of vocabulary’ ( Williams [1975] 2015 , xxvii). Several books have followed this cue, including those that examine South African social life, with its particular preoccupations with segregation and desegregation, among other things ( Boonzaier and Sharp 1988 ; Shepherd and Robins 2008 ). These texts provide a useful exploration of the social life of words and the profound power of the state in shaping everyday vocabularies.
Another kind of approach considers the multiplicity of theoretical traditions eclipsed by scholars’ single-minded focus on the legacies of the European Enlightenment and its imperial effects. Barbara Cassin et al.’s Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (2014) , for instance, begins with the engaging premise that there is considerable loss in the meanings of philosophical, literary and political concepts across languages and cultures. The Portuguese notion of saudade , for instance, is better expressed in the dulcet tones of Cesária Évora than in translation as ‘sadness’ or ‘sorrow’, which hold nothing of the bittersweet history of surviving slavery and colonialism in Cape Verde. Many things remain untranslatable, caught between the many differences that persist.
Ethnographies of Power takes a different journey to concepts than the above two approaches; it is directed at how scholars use radical concepts in social research in mutual relation to real-world struggles with a view towards expanding social justice. We begin this book with the suggestion that scholars, like all people, engage with the world with their bodies and minds, and attempt to work with concepts that might illuminate how they encounter seemingly unalterable forces that shape their condition. Rather than developing concepts through abstract thought processes, scholars’ labour to create radical concepts must be understood in light of Italian militant Antonio Gramsci’s attention to ‘praxis’, the inseparability of theory and practice. This focus on praxis is central to the critical ethnographic approach that the scholars in this book exemplify. In linked ways, we propose ethnographies of power as a way to learn from and advance movements for a radically different world.
As is evident in our subtitle, ‘Working Radical Concepts with Gillian Hart’, this book is also inspired by the work of Gillian Hart, who has honed a geographical approach to critical ethnography as a way to generate concepts emerging from intensive and comparative engagement with the experienced world, in solidarity with a range of radical movements. Professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States and distinguished professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, Hart is an internationally recognised key thinker across the fields of human geography, African studies, political economy and development studies. She has also been a powerful and passionate teacher who has shaped several generations of radical scholars and activists from Berkeley to Johannesburg, as well as the world over. This book honours Hart by continuing the praxis of critical ethnography as pedagogy for social change. As you read this book, you will read about how Hart produced and refined concepts through social science research. But you will also see all the contributors to this book demonstrating how they have used particular concepts, transporting them elsewhere and transforming them while putting them to work in new contexts. We intend this to be a living text and invite you to work with these concepts yourself to see how they might be used in the contexts that are important to you.
Ethnographies of Power is not a complete lexicon of radical concepts; it does not tell the reader what to think in order to be radical, nor is it a dictionary of fixed categories – such a thing cannot exist in a changing world. The important