Papers by Bernard Dubbeld
Revista de Antropologia, 2021
In the past five years, anthropologists from the global South have come to consider public cash t... more In the past five years, anthropologists from the global South have come to consider public cash transfer programs as an alternative to both work-centered policies and national development projects. These studies suggest that grants today go beyond the domain of traditional social policies and government bureaucracy and point to a new future in view of the scarcity of work. This future has become even closer with the pandemic of COVID-19, and with governments, non-governmental entities and the political left reaffirming the importance of a basic universal income. Considering these discussions, my article focuses on an income transfer program in South Africa after the Apartheid period, placing an ethnographic account in relation to the design of a 'progressive' policy of social grants. I present a longer history of salaried work in relation to rural African households and show how the emancipatory promises of cash transfer projects were read as a risk to local traditions and m...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Social Dynamics, 2020
This paper revisits some of the writing of E.P. Thompson, a British historian held to have been i... more This paper revisits some of the writing of E.P. Thompson, a British historian held to have been influential in the development of social history in South Africa. Differently to debates that seek to establish the extent of his direct influence, the paper is concerned with the concepts Thompson used, and seeks to understand his theory and method for approaching historical transformation. The paper suggests that Thompson’s reception in South African studies has generally ignored his materialism and used his concepts empirically without reckoning with some of their broad theoretical arguments. The paper then shows how Thompson’s Marxian critique resonates with the historical anthropology of Jean and John Comaroff. Yet, the paper shows, this historical anthropology has been the object of attack by social history for its alleged failure to contextualise. The paper argues that what is at stake in this Africanist debate are two understandings of context that turn on the character of the empirical in research and the place of capitalism in contemporary studies of South Africa.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Social Dynamics, 2020
This essay introduces the special issue entitled “Capital and Contemporary Critique: a Stellenbos... more This essay introduces the special issue entitled “Capital and Contemporary Critique: a Stellenbosch Seminar Series”. It situates the contributions by briefly engaging previous Marxist theorisations of South Africa and their criticisms. It argues that capitalism continues to shape contemporary social life, and requires analysis, albeit without repeating the shortcomings of older Marxist analyses.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Transformation, 2019
In contributing to a discussion of concepts for a 'preferable future' in South Africa at a time w... more In contributing to a discussion of concepts for a 'preferable future' in South Africa at a time when social life in general, and scholarly life in particular, is so thoroughly mediated by the market, this paper urges that we need to revisit the concept of capitalism. Recounting Marxist revisionism in South Africa and its limitations, in both theoretical and social terms, the paper notes that Marxism's demise has been accompanied by the decline of analyses that attempt to account for a range of social phenomena holistically. South African studies are today far more comfortable with local narratives that emphasise contingency, local variation, and agency. If such a theoretical turn is related to material decline of the working class and post-fordist capitalism, the paper suggests, through a reading of Moishe Postone, that we return to Marx to find the theoretical resources to confront the present conjuncture, and to reanimate a social theory of capitalism that aims to relate the parts of social life to the whole.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Anthropology Southern Africa, Jan 1, 2007
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This paper considers the trade in second-hand things at Milnerton Market, Cape Town. We describe ... more This paper considers the trade in second-hand things at Milnerton Market, Cape Town. We describe the labour of traders in making these worn-out objects into saleable products, detailing the displays and discussions which are integral to their valorisation. We show that Milnerton becomes imagined by traders and customers as an alternative to routine shopping at malls and boutique stores. The critical work of protecting and maintaining this alternative form of sociality is enabled by the policing of what can be sold of the market. This work of demarcation is intimately bound to racialised notions of value. In our conclusion, we bring international research on flea markets together with recent South African writings on consumption to consider how alternative trade may assert racial identity in post-apartheid South Africa.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
An essay engages Friedman's recent book on Wolpe.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Critical Historical Studies, 2015
This article considers the transformation of work for stevedores (longshoremen) in Durban between... more This article considers the transformation of work for stevedores (longshoremen) in Durban between 1974 and 1985 and its consequences for radical trade union politics. I detail the demise of “racial capitalism” in the port, with containerization requiring fewer, and differently skilled, dockworkers. I then show how radical unionist aspirations of emancipation from both capitalism and apartheid encountered limits that have become increasingly apparent in contemporary South African workplaces. Unlike approaches explaining union difficulties as matters of strategies (industrial or general unionism), tactics, or ideology (“workerism” versus “charterism”), I argue that this period in the harbor offers a lens onto the changing relationship between capitalism and apartheid, revealing the instability of the working class and implying a rethinking of the terms of an emancipatory project. While challenging Marxist sociologies and workplace historiographies in South Africa, I suggest that a different reading of Marx’s analysis of capital could inform such a project.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Acta Juridica, 2013
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Africa, 2013
This article explores how, in the village of Glendale in KwaZulu-Natal, residents and local gover... more This article explores how, in the village of Glendale in KwaZulu-Natal, residents and local government officials – including councillors and municipal technicians – ‘see’ the post-apartheid state. I show how residents of the village regard the government – despite extensive state intervention – as inadequate, complaining especially of their ‘invisible’ and ‘impersonal’ character. Indeed, for them, democracy has brought anything but ‘direct rule’. And yet, while chiefly rule is sometimes invoked as a favoured alternative, I argue that people's estrangement from democratic government is not the desire to return to ‘culture’ but rather an expression of structural difficulties central to South Africa's increasingly tenuous experiment with participatory democracy. I suggest that these difficulties are also not reducible to state failure or corruption but point towards contradictions in contemporary citizenship.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Diversities, 2014
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
International Review of Social History, 2003
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
v. 63 n. 3 (2020) by Bernard Dubbeld
Dubbeld, B. . (2021). Granting the Future? The Temporality of Cash Transfers in the South African Countryside. Revista De Antropologia, 64(2), e186648., 2021
In the past five years, anthropologistsfrom the global South have come to consider publiccash tra... more In the past five years, anthropologistsfrom the global South have come to consider publiccash transfer programs as an alternative to both work-centered policies and national development projects. These studiessuggest that grantstoday go beyond the domain of traditionalsocial policies and government bureaucracy and point to a new future in view of the scarcity of work. This future has become even closer with the pandemic of COVID-19, and with governments, non-governmental entities and the political lef t reaffirming the importance of a basic universal income. Considering these discussions, my article focuses on an income transfer program in South Africa af ter the Apartheid period, placing an ethnographic account in relation to the design of a ‘progressive’ policy of social grants. I present a longer history ofsalaried work in relation to rural African households and show how the emancipatory promises of cash transfer projects were read as a risk to local traditions and morals. In addition to thisreduction in political hopesinvested in transfers, I examine the temporal aspect ofcash transfers, as well asthe possible futuresthey evoke. By considering the futuresthat grants enable, Iconclude by suggesting that it is premature to affirm that they have overcome wage work and its attendantsociality.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Papers by Bernard Dubbeld
v. 63 n. 3 (2020) by Bernard Dubbeld