The self in self-interest: land, labour and temporalities in Malawi's agrarian change
- 1 January 1999
- journal article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in Africa
- Vol. 69 (1), 139-159
- https://doi.org/10.2307/1161080
Abstract
This article examines agricultural labour contracts and household-based production in Dedza District, Malawi. Deepening impoverishment seemingly creates conditions for profound social changes. In agriculture, small-scale contracts rather than big work parties mobilise the bulk of ‘extra-domestic’ labour. Although labourers are paid in cash or in kind, they are most often the recruiter's relatives or affines. The pattern fits, therefore, uneasily with the ideas of labour as a commodity and persons as mutually independent individuals. Claims about changing values must be accompanied by careful analyses of personhood. Among Dedza villagers the notion of the self in the idioms of morality discloses social relations as the origins of a person's interests. By recruiting labour, wealthy villagers make their valued relationships visible. These observations caution against viewing ‘agrarian change’ as a uniform and teleological process in which the buying and selling of labour necessarily entail individualism. As an example of how, in any case, moral sentiments are historical phenomena the article examines the predicament of landless refugees in Dedza District. Under conditions of social and material alienation, agricultural labour contracts became exploitation.Keywords
This publication has 31 references indexed in Scilit:
- Waiting for the Portuguese: Nostalgia, exploitation and the meaning of land in the Malawi‐Mozambique BorderlandJournal of Contemporary African Studies, 1996
- The Malawi Government and South African Labour Recruiters, 1974–92The Journal of Modern African Studies, 1996
- Who's for work? The management of labour in the process of accumulation in three Adja villages, BeninAfrica, 1995
- Land and Culture in Tropical Africa: Soils, Symbols, and the Metaphysics of the MundaneAnnual Review of Anthropology, 1994
- Tenacious women: clinging tobanjahousehold production in the face of changing gender relations in MalawiJournal of Southern African Studies, 1993
- The ‘House’ and Zulu Political Structure in the Nineteenth CenturyThe Journal of African History, 1993
- Small change: individual farm work and collective life in a western Nigerian savanna town, 1969–88Africa, 1992
- The Multiplication of Labor: Historical Methods in the Study of Gender and Agricultural Change in Modern Africa [and Comments and Reply]Current Anthropology, 1988
- The Yao VillageBritish Journal of Sociology, 1957
- The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies.American Sociological Review, 1956