Distributive Labor and Survivalist Improvisation: Productionist Thinking and the Misrecognition of the Urban Poor

Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Room MC 5-100, Time: 12:30 -- 2:00 pm

Speaker:   James Ferguson, Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Stanford University

Professor Ferguson’s research has been conducted in Lesotho and Zambia, and has engaged a broad range of theoretical and ethnographic issues. A central theme running through it has been a concern with the political, broadly conceived, and with the relation between specific social and cultural processes and the abstract narratives of “development” and “modernization” through which such processes have so often been known and understood. Ferguson's most recent book, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, was published by Duke University Press in 2006. The essays that make up the book address a range of specific topics, ranging from structural adjustment, the crisis of the state, and the emergence of new forms of government-via-NGO, to the question of the changing social meaning of "modernity" for colonial and postcolonial urban Africans. They converge, however, around the question of "Africa" as a place in a wider categorical ordering of the world, and they use this question as a way to think about such large-scale issues as globalization, modernity, worldwide inequality, and social justice.

He is also the author of Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life in the Zambian Copperbelt (1999), and the Anti-Politics Machine: "Development", Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (1990), and co-author of Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science (1997), co-editor of Culture, Power Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (1997).

In today’s world, huge numbers of people (the majority, in fact, in many African cities) are neither wage laborers nor peasants, and are notoriously difficult to classify in conventional class terms.  Our intellectual failure here is marked by the widespread use of such unrevealing (and unsociological) labels as “the lumpen”, “the youth”, “the informal sector”, or “the second economy” to describe the masses of people who survive through improvised and opportunistic urban practices.  What analysis we have managed to produce of such forms of life tends to rely on unexamined productionist assumptions, whether this is a matter of styling shack-dwellers as holders of “capital” and purveyors of “microenterprises” (as those on the right would have it), or understanding petty street hawkers as “workers” awaiting organization into unions (as some on the left would prefer).  This paper argues that it is time to place processes of distribution, rather than production, at the center of our analytic frame, and that doing so may give novel insights into the forms of labor in which many supposedly “unemployed” people are engaged.

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