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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Everyday Life and the Political Economy of Displacement on the Mozambique-South Africa Borderland
| Panel |
37. Political Economies of Displacement in Southern Africa
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| Paper ID | 459 |
| Author(s) |
Rodgers, Graeme
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | This paper examines the social and economic reconstruction of everyday life amongst Mozambican refugees in South Africa. It highlights the significant contribution that local cultural and social practices made towards shaping the political and economic conditions of refuge, migration and transnationalism, as these developed across the Mozambique-South Africa borderland in the post-war, post-apartheid period. Contrary to dominant assumptions in the literature on forced migration, these practices made little reference to international discourses on refugee protection and development, but were rather embedded more directly in a locally intelligible historical politics of race, ethnicity, gender, modernity and belonging. Specifically, the paper reveals how the poetics and possibilities of cattle ownership, access to land, struggles over employment, ancestor worship and fear of the occult generated forms of social capital and currency, as well as patterns of exchange that shaped economic life in significant ways on this border region. More generally, this case study leads me to argue that a more careful analytical regard for the social and cultural intimacies of everyday life is essential to understanding a political economy of displacement in the context of globalisation |
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