Journal of Agrarian Change - 2012 - Ferguson - How To Do Things With Land A Distributive Perspective On Rural Livelihoods

bs_bs_banner
Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 13 No. 1, January 2013, pp. 166–174.
How to Do Things with Land:

A Distributive Perspective on Rural
Livelihoods in Southern Africa
JAMES FERGUSON
Discussions on land use and land reform too often reduce the land question to the agrarian
question.Yet a rich empirical literature in the region shows that producing agricultural goods
is really only one of many, many ways in which land is used, and not necessarily the most
important. This paper argues that many of the ways in which land is used (often labelled
‘social’ or ‘cultural’) are in fact best understood as part of processes of distribution that are
a vital part of many poor Southern Africans’ livelihoods. An exclusive focus on production
as the problem, and more productive agriculture as the solution, blinds us both to most of
the things that people, in fact, do with land, and to many of the most important issues facing
low-income rural people. Giving a more central place to processes of distribution may help
us to see just how much is lost if we allow distribution to be treated as an afterthought to
production – or the land question to be reduced to the agrarian question.
Keywords: land, distribution, livelihoods, Southern Africa
INTRODUCTION
As someone who has not done field research in rural areas for many years now, I do not feel
especially well qualified to comment on agrarian change in Southern Africa, especially when in
the company, as in this special issue, of superb scholars who have done much of the best recent
research on the subject. Certainly, I will not have anything new to say here on the topic of
smallholder agriculture and the many questions about its future in the context of increasing
market pressures, flawed programs for land reform and sustained political demands for more
substantial redistribution of farm land. Instead, I will focus here on a rather different issue,
which is what I see as a troubling tendency, in all of these discussions, to reduce what we might
call the land question (who has what rights to land, what do they do with it and with what
implications) to the agrarian question (how farming is, or ought to be, organized, and with
what role for peasants or other small agricultural producers). My point of departure is the banal
observation that producing agricultural goods is really only one of many, many uses for land,
and not necessarily the most important. Indeed, I want to suggest that if we can accept that
processes of distribution are as important as processes of production for understanding con-
temporary Southern African modes of life (as I argue in Ferguson forthcoming), we will be able
James Ferguson, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2034, USA. E-mail:
jgfergus@stanford.edu. James Ferguson is also Professor Extraordinaire in the Department of Sociology and Social
Anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch, and Honorary Professor in the Department of Social Anthro-
pology at the University of Cape Town.This paper was written, in part, during an Ellen Andrew Wright Fellowship
at the Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford University, whose support is gratefully acknowledged. The author is
also grateful for the support of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, and to the editors of this special issue
and two anonymous referees for their comments.
© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

14710366, 2013, 1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2012.00363.x by University Of South Africa, Wiley Online Library on [11/05/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Rural Livelihoods in Southern Africa 167
to better appreciate that a host of apparently ‘non-productive’ uses of land in fact make crucial
and undervalued contributions to enabling and sustaining a host of rural livelihoods.
My title is a nod to John Austin’s famous work in the philosophy of language, How To
Do Things with Words (1975). In the lectures that comprise that book, Austin confronted the
presumption that language’s ‘function’ is the communication or transmission of knowledge via
propositional statements representing the world, or stating facts about it (‘The cat is on the
mat’, as the philosophers like to say). From this framing follow a series of familiar questions
about language and its relation to the world: Is the statement true? How do we know? What
does it mean for language to represent or refer to ‘reality’? – and so on.Yet treating language
as having an essential vocation to represent the world or communicate information about it,
Austin argued, forecloses what should remain an open question about what people are really
doing when they do things like uttering sentences. Language, for Austin, involves a broad range
of forms of action, and representing is only one of the things that people ‘do with words’.
Often, things people say are not representations of, or claims about, the world so much as they
are interventions in it. Austin identified a whole class of ways of ‘doing things with words’ that
he termed ‘performatives’, which included persuading, convincing, scaring, inspiring, or (the
instance for which he is best remembered) completing ritual, legal or other socially significant
acts, such as issuing a legal injunction or taking an oath of office. When a man stands up in
a church, for instance, and says, ‘I take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife’, he is not
reporting on an action; he is performing it. Uttering those words, in that context, is a way of
doing (and not just saying) something – it is (in Austin’s famous phrase) a ‘speech act’. By
repeating a specific string of words, as if by uttering an efficacious magical spell, he both
completes a ritual, and inaugurates a new social and legal relationship. In performing his speech
act, the man is not talking about marrying; he is marrying.
Something analogous can be said about land. We often presume too quickly that we know
what it is for. Just as the multiple uses of language can be too quickly reduced to one (making
statements about the world), so too the multiple uses of land can be too quickly reduced to
agriculture. In this way, the land question becomes the agrarian question, and the relevant
research questions quickly become questions about productivity, efficiency, yields, inputs and
outputs, farm labour and so on. But to understand what’s going on in the Southern African
countryside today, we need to grasp a much broader range of ways in which land is used and
valued.
LAND AS A DISTRIBUTIVE RESOURCE

Attention to this broader question of land’s multiple uses and meanings can help to explain why
land is valued and desired in ways that agricultural utility alone cannot. In contemporary South
Africa, for instance, smallholder agriculture, both crop farming and livestock, seems to be on the
decline, and in many places in the former ‘reserves’ it is reported that fewer fields are being
cultivated, and cultivated with less intensity, even by those who do have land rights (see, e.g.,
Aliber et al. 2005).The percentage of people farming ‘seriously’ (as they say) seems to be on the
decline, while the dreams and ambitions of poorer South Africans focus less on smallholder
farming, and more on urban living, consumer goods and the ever-elusive ‘business’. Among the
youth, we are told, few wish to cultivate the land.Yet even in the midst of this, the importance
of land, and the desire for it, seems in some ways to loom as large as ever. It may be true that
many who do have access to land are not putting it to very effective agricultural use. But many
black South Africans continue to be intensely interested in owning and having access to land.
Indeed, a widely cited opinion survey found that fully 68 per cent agreed with the statement

168 James Ferguson
‘Land must be returned to blacks in South Africa, no matter what the consequences are for the
current owners and for political stability in the country’ (cited in Kepe et al. 2008, 143) A
recent joint statement by the ANC Youth League and the Congress of Traditional Leaders of
South Africa (CONTRALESA) calls not only for the nationalization of natural resources such
as mines, but also for the ‘retention of all land to the ownership and control of the State’ so that
it can be restored to its ‘rightful owners’ (ANCYL 2011, emphasis supplied).
Similar issues arise in Zimbabwe, where a controversial land redistribution program has taken
land from white farmers and allocated it to a wide range of people, including political allies of
the regime and landless men who are described as ‘war veterans’. Many observers have
complained that the new owners of the land often ‘don’t use it properly’ and ‘aren’t (real)
farmers’. But of course, in the old regime of white ownership, white farmers commonly owned
far more land than they could cultivate – they, too, were deeply invested in owning land that
they made no (agricultural) use of. Indeed, Mavhunga (2011) has suggested that land in
Zimbabwe needs to be understood in a political and even military frame – a kind of ‘weapon’,
in his account – as much as an agricultural one.
If agriculture, then, is only one of the things that people do with land, what are some of the
others? What else do people do with land, besides cultivate crops and graze livestock on it? States
set aside land, of course, for nature conservation and national parks, for historical monuments, for
military bases and for other state needs. Corporate landowners use massive amounts of land for
purposes as various as mining and quarrying, holiday resorts, for-profit game reserves, speculative
investment and so on. The wealthy increasingly use rural estates less for agriculture than for
picturesque and relaxing weekend retreats. In a similar way, poor smallholders also have a diversity
of ways of using land.To frame the discussion, here is a short and by no means comprehensive list,
culled from the rich ethnographic literature on rural Southern African lifeways, on some of the
ways in which the region’s rural poor make use of land and land rights:1
• to live cheaply, often while retreating temporarily from expensive urban life to hunt or
forage;
• to collect firewood, medicinal and other useful plants, and other natural resources;
• to provide a home base for trading;
• to bury their dead properly, and to properly respect, remember and tend to them;2
• to bury the umbilical cords of their children;
• to anchor kinship and other social networks by providing a place of connection and return
for an interrelated group of people;
• to reward political allies through processes of allocation or sale;
• to establish continuity with the past, including, but not only, via ancestors;
• to shore up male control over women;
• to underpin the powers of traditional authorities;
• to have a place to rest and to be cared for when ill;
• and last, but certainly not least, to symbolize collective identity, belonging, pride and
liberation.
1
I emphasize that the fact that land is bound up with a range of social processes involving authority, identity,
kinship and social reproduction has been addressed by a distinguished literature across many generations now, both
in Southern Africa and in other parts of the continent. I certainly do not mean to claim any novelty in pointing
it out here. Instead, my aim is to draw some conclusions from this well-known literature for thinking about certain
uses of land (especially, as I explain below, those involving social processes of distribution) that more productionist
approaches to land may tend to pass over a bit too quickly.
2
White (2010) has recently described this durable and highly valued cluster of practices as a ‘necrocultural
complex’ that has long linked lineages to land via practices surrounding death, burial and the care of ancestors.

What follows from this? First, the injunction, that familiar calling card of anthropological
critique: slow down! What people do with land is very complex, and not at all obvious. Let us
not be too quick to suppose that we understand what is going on.When we see untilled fields,
let us not be so quick to say that the land is ‘unused’. When we see a smallholding, let us be
careful about dismissing it as ‘not viable’ when we have not yet asked ‘Viable for what?’ (On the
contentious concept of ‘viability’, cf. Cousins and Scoones 2010).
Yet I think attention to the full range of ways in which people do things with land can take
us beyond this familiar anthropological cautionary principle to give due attention to certain
specific processes that tend to be rendered secondary or trivial if we are too quick to turn from
the question of land to the question of agricultural production. Among these processes, I focus
here on those involving questions of distribution. Poor people often do use land to make their
livelihoods. But the mechanisms that turn land into livelihood are as much social as they are
technical, and may turn less on producing goods than on accessing sources of cash and other
support from others. Often, that is, land leads to livelihood via processes not of production, but
of distribution.
My contribution here is positioned within a wider perspective on distribution that I discuss
more fully elsewhere (Ferguson forthcoming).That perspective begins with some very elemen-
tal observations about the role of distribution in society. It is common to suppose that, in some
basic sense, people make their livelihoods by producing valued goods and services. That has
never been an adequate account – in no modern industrial society does the number of people
directly engaged in productive labour come close to accounting for the entire population. But
recent developments in the world make the common-sense linkage of livelihood with pro-
duction less adequate than ever. More and more of the things in the world are produced, at very
high levels of efficiency, by smaller numbers of people who specialize in making them. A huge
proportion of the entire world’s mass-market manufactured goods, for instance, are made in just
one country (China), just as the global trade in wheat is dominated by a few big, super-efficient
producers (e.g. Canada). And more and more, whole regions and populations are finding
themselves excluded from this sort of production. At the same time, such people are increasingly
engaged in tasks the fundamental purpose of which is not to produce goods at all, but to
engineer distributions of goods by accessing streams of income and wealth that are produced
elsewhere.
There is a long history of such distributive practices in Africa, one that Bayart (2000) has
linked to a long-standing political economic pattern whereby political authority has stemmed
from success in tapping into externally directed streams of value, what he has termed ‘African
extraversion’. And a massive body of ethnographic evidence from anthropologists of Southern
Africa, assembled across the past century, documents a remarkable elaboration of mechanisms of
distribution, thanks to which sources of wealth and streams of income are divided into smaller
and smaller slivers as they work their way across social relations of kinship, clientage, allegiance
and solidarity. These practices of distribution have changed in form over time, and we know
them by a wide variety of names: remittances, kin-based sharing, political clientage,‘corruption’
and so on. But they are visible, and even prominent, in any detailed social study that attends to
the micro-social level, where we find that those with access to incomes inevitably encounter a
wide range of social claims on that income – claims that may be honoured or scorned, to be
sure, but in any case cannot be easily ignored. As one university-trained activist in Namibia
recently told me: ‘I have three children. I pay school fees for eight. Every Namibian with a
decent job will tell you the same story.’
Elsewhere (Ferguson forthcoming), I have sought to characterize such practices as involving
a kind of ‘distributive labour’, where distribution is understood to occur only because a great

170 James Ferguson
many people are working very hard at making sure that it happens. There is a specific kind of
labour, that is to say, involved in making distributive claims and, even more importantly, in
creating the conditions of possibility for such claims to be effective. In this perspective, it is
important to recognize this labour, and to acknowledge that it produces valuable and important
social effects, rather than dismissing it as mere ‘parasitism’. Equally, it is important to attend to
the specific institutions and cultural forms through which processes of distribution take place,
and not to suppose that these specificities simply follow mechanically or automatically from a
given system of production.
In this distributive perspective, state policies of social assistance take on a special salience,
especially since, across most of Southern Africa, more and more households have come to rely
on state transfers. More broadly, we see the emergence of new kinds of politics centred on
distribution, evident both in new forms of populism (which often include demands for land,
as I noted at the start), and in the grey workings of systems of social assistance and service
delivery to rights-bearing citizens. Crucially, the key demands in these new forms of politics are
less focused on labour – the claim of the working masses to the fruits of their labour – and
more on an idea of what I term ‘a rightful share’, where the rightfulness of the share is
reckoned to derive from something other than participation in the production process – often
on a kind of membership or ownership-claim based on citizenship, indigeneity or ethnicity (cf.
Comaroff and Comaroff 2009).
AFTER MIGRANT LABOUR: USING LAND TO REINVENT CIRCUITS

OF DISTRIBUTION
Starting with this broad interest in processes of distribution, then, the question I would like to
ask about how Southern African people ‘do things with land’ is this: What role do rights of
ownership or access to small landholdings play in the wider economy of distribution? The most
familiar regional dynamic, historically, has been a relation of interdependence between wage
earners and their dependents. This relation has been central to my own work. In my first
research in the region, in highland Lesotho, I encountered an apparently rural people whose
basic livelihood in fact derived from industrial employment that was geographically located
hundreds of miles away, in South Africa’s gold mines (Ferguson 1990).Villages of what appeared
to be peasant farmers were in fact, as Murray (1981, 19) memorably put it, a proletariat that
‘scratches about on the land’. But the scratching about was all the same crucial to maintaining
livelihoods – not so much because it produced a viable agricultural income (in most cases it did
not), but because it established the rural homestead as a viable rural base, to which labour
migrants would plan to return. A relation of dependence, and mutual obligation, between
migrant mineworkers and their rurally based wives and kin, was the centre of both the social
and the economic system.
In later research on the Zambian Copperbelt (Ferguson 1999), I found that a key issue for
urban mineworkers was how they would manage their retirement. With high and rising costs
of urban living, and meagre employment options after leaving the mines, retiring to ‘home’
villages was very much on the agenda, even for workers who did not relish the idea of rural
life. But ‘going home’ meant, first, having a rural ‘home’ and, second, being welcome to ‘return’
there. Relations with rural relations were often tense and conflictual, and those who had not
adequately attended to the needs and demands of kin ‘at home’ during their working years
could encounter social rejection and even violence in their own time of vulnerability and need.
Even those who had kept close relations with a home community encountered distributive
demands that they regarded as overwhelming, and a common strategy was to plan one’s return

to the village for the middle of the night, in hopes of avoiding a kind of public inventory of
one’s goods that would provide the basis for later distributive demands. Relations of generosity
and sharing were in some sense obligatory for those anticipating a return to rural life, and rural
communities, quite literally, lived on such distributive relations.
Nor was this just a matter of Lesotho and Zambia. Across the region, the literature shows us
that broad access to wage labour created streams of income that were rapidly channelled, via
social processes of distribution, into a multitude of ramifying capillaries that spread it (unequally,
to be sure) across geographical and social space. Through such processes, the resource streams
embodied in wages, modest as they were, fed the needs not only of workers, but of countless
dependents of those workers – and, indeed, the dependents of those dependents.
So far, so familiar. But a sharp decline in demand for low-skilled and manual labour across
the region means that access to wages is today no longer such a dominant route to income for
poor rural people in the region (for South Africa, see Seekings and Nattrass 2005). Instead,
other sources of income, especially social grants and the loosely structured improvisations of the
‘informal economy’, loom increasingly large. Under such conditions, Lesotho can no longer
really be termed a labour reserve, since there is so little demand for the labour that it still holds
‘in reserve’. But relations of distribution, rooted in practices of sharing and dependence,
continue to be crucial, as Turner has recently argued (Turner 2005). And while young men can
no longer access migrant wage labour in the way that they did in the past, new streams of
income have appeared, albeit usually much smaller. Women, for instance, have gotten some
unstable, low-wage employment in a fragile, on-again, off-again textile industry. And old people
now get pension grants even if they are much smaller than in other Southern African states
with more elaborate social protection systems, such as Namibia, Botswana and South Africa.
Here, as elsewhere in the region, ageing grandmothers no longer have much reason to think
about how to make claims on the earning power of their sons and grandsons, since young men
have so largely lost that power. Instead, relations of dependence are reversed, as it is now young
men who are likely to be dependent on others. Indeed, as du Toit and Neves (2009) have shown
for South Africa, both social transfers and most forms of informal enterprise are bound up very
tightly with social networks and the petty reciprocities that make them work. For this reason,
it is increasingly the case that successful livelihood strategies for the rural poor hinge crucially
on the distributive dynamics associated with these networks.
Visions of unlimited generosity on the part of African ‘extended families’ were always
overdone, and the claims that poor people can make on their kin are nowadays probably even
more restricted than in the past – generally directed at a tighter cluster of relatives, and
increasingly concentrated on the maternal side, as Harper and Seekings (2010) have shown in
a recent Cape Town study. But such distributive claims continue to be of vital importance to
day-to-day survival strategies, especially among the poorest. As recent surveys of giving practices
in South Africa show, ‘giving is more common among the poor than the rich’; not only is
poverty not a deterrent to giving, but ‘giving within poor communities is crucial to their very
survival’ (Habib and Maharaj 2008, 26, 38). Indeed, the entire ethnographic record in the region
can be read as a kind of documentation of the key role of distribution in poor communities.
This suggests the importance of being able to draw on the income and wealth of better-
resourced others, and – what must come first – of achieving the sort of social standing that
would enable one to make claims on those others. ‘Dependence’ – that bogey of moralizing
social policy – can in this respect be understood, in Bayart’s felicitous phrase, ‘as a mode of
action’, and even as an achievement (Bayart 2000, 218; cf. Ferguson forthcoming). For while
‘dependency’ is obsessively decried as a ‘problem’ or a ‘trap’ in social policy discourse, an
ethnographic view suggests that it is really only via relations of ‘dependence’ that most of the

172 James Ferguson
population survives at all. Dependence, in this respect, is not the name of the problem; it is the
name of the solution.
Giving central attention to social processes of distribution helps us understand that social
grants are not simply payments to individuals who are thus enabled to use small amounts of
cash to meet their needs. Instead, those who are able to access resources as dependents of the
state are themselves the source of income for others who we might term ‘sub-dependents’.While
cities in Southern Africa have long been defined as the place of work, rural settlements have
historically served as refuges for the supposedly ‘non-productive’: the old, the sick, the disabled,
young children and so on. But nowadays it is precisely the ‘non-productive’ who, as state
dependents, are likely to be key sources of income.To have a piece of land where grandma can
stay, today often means having access to grandma’s pension money. If children are sent to the
countryside to be cared for, the child-care grant probably goes with them. The truly destitute
household, on the other hand, is the one with neither children nor old people, nor disabled
members, and therefore no eligibility for state distribution.
Anxieties that poor women (and particularly teenagers) will have children simply for the
income do not appear to be well founded (both overall fertility and rates of teenage child-
bearing have decreased since the introduction of the Child Support Grant; Macleod and Tracey
2009, 24). And economists’ warnings that disability grants may perversely incentivize such
things as contracting HIV tend to rest more on second-hand anecdotes than convincing data.
But while such worries may be ill founded, they are a response to a very real, and rather
startling, new fact, which is that conditions formerly associated with losing a steady income –
illness, old age, disability, needing to care for small children – are now more likely to appear as
the only plausible way of obtaining one in the first place.
Trading is another key source of resources for poor households in today’s ‘informalized’
economies, and the links between these sorts of activities and holding land are not well
understood. But clearly, there is more going on than the sort of ‘farm to market’ trade that an
observer looking at the land through agrarian spectacles might expect. As du Toit and Neves
(2009) have shown, informal retail trade is a shoestring operation, operating on the margins of the
huge supermarket chains that have now spread across the region.And in pursuing such trade, the
small but regular payments provided by social grants are often key.The month’s pension money,
for instance, may provide a trip to the supermarket and a small bag of ‘essentials’ that can later be
sold slowly over time in one’s own neighbourhood. The effect of this, of course is principally
distributive, in that it involves not creating new goods and services for the market, but taking a
fairly static retail trade, and chopping it into smaller and smaller slivers. And this, what we might
think of as an urban pattern, seems increasingly to be at work in the countryside too, even when
it comes to trading in agricultural goods and foodstuffs. A vision of rural smallholders as farmers
would lead us to look for small producers bringing their produce to town to sell it. No doubt
there are many contexts within which this happens, but more characteristic of the times is a very
different scenario, in which the smallholder packs up money (not crops) for the trip to town, and
where cash – obtained via circuits of distribution rather than agricultural production – is
transmuted into food via the magic of the supermarket. Landholding here helps put food on the
plate not by growing it, but by providing a support base for the non-agricultural distributive
activities that end up enabling a trip to the supermarket.
Another key role often played by a rural home base is that of providing a place where people
can access care and social support in case of illness. In a context in which HIV has imposed
devastating suffering across the entire region, it is crucial to recognize the contribution that
rural communities have made to performing the vital but unwaged work of caring, nursing and
support. It is not only wealth that is ‘distributed’ across social bonds; so too is suffering, and the

social relationships that cluster around small landholdings clearly do valuable work in respond-
ing to, and in some measure mitigating, that suffering. In enabling the rural community,
landholding simultaneously enables an impressively effective apparatus of mutuality and care.
This, too, is one of the things that Southern Africans ‘do’ with land.
Grimly related to this, of course, is the relation between landholding and the funeral
economy. Given how important funerals are to local political economies in the age of AIDS, it
is remarkable that we do not have a better ethnographic understanding of the issues they raise.
But it seems clear that the rural base that landholding provides may allow it to serve as a kind
of collection point, both for bodies, living and dead, and for streams of money. One recent study
(Case et al. 2008) found that households spend the equivalent of a year’s income on an adult’s
funeral. Where does it go? It is evident that important distributive dynamics occur at funerals,
even if we do not as yet have a very complete picture of what they are and how they work.
CONCLUSION
Lest I be misunderstood, let me be clear: smallholder agriculture is surely an important part of
the answer to the question of what Southern African people do with land, and there is no
intention here to suggest that agricultural production, even on the smallest plots and even in
the most agriculturally challenged regions, is non-existent or insignificant. I insist only that the
myriad other uses of land that I have mentioned here are not just a sideshow either.
Neither do I mean to suggest that the reliance on non-agricultural uses of land should be
understood as some sort of pathology – as if the point is just that Southern Africa’s farming
sector is so badly organized that people are reduced to using land only for parking pensioned
grannies and burying dead people. On the contrary, I would suggest that, under the region’s
rather severe physical and economic conditions – which often make farming precarious at best,
and at worst an out-and-out loss-making proposition) – using land in ways that are principally
distributive rather than productive may well amount to making the best possible use of it.
The world, after all, produces plenty of stuff. Southern Africa’s rural poor are, frankly, not
adding much to that pile. But they are working hard to do something arguably much more
important: to help make sure that at least some of it gets distributed to those who need it most.
Public policy and scholarship alike should value, and seek to facilitate, that work. An exclusive
focus on production as the problem, and more productive agriculture as the solution, blinds us
to both most of the things that people, in fact, do with land, and to many of the most important
issues facing low-income Southern Africans. Giving a more central place to processes of
distribution, on the other hand, may help us to see just how much is lost if we allow
distribution to be treated as an afterthought to production – or the land question to be reduced
to the agrarian question.
REFERENCES
Aliber, M., C. de Swardt, A. du Toit, T. Mbhele and T. Mthethwa, 2005. Trends and Policy Challenges in the Rural
Economy: Four Provincial Case Studies. Cape Town: HSRC Press.
ANCYL, 2011. ANC Youth League and CONTRALESA joint media statement, 20 October.
Austin, J., 1975. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bayart, J.-F., 2000. ‘Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion’. African Affairs, 99: 217–67.
Case, A., A. Garrib, A. Menendea and A. Olgiati, 2008. Paying the Piper: The High Cost of Funerals in South Africa.
NBER Working Paper No. 14456, National Bureau of Economic Research, Washington, DC.
Comaroff, J.L., and J. Comaroff, 2009. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Cousins, B., and I. Scoones, 2010. ‘Contested Paradigms of “Viability” in Redistributive Land Reform: Perspectives
from Southern Africa’. Journal of Peasant Studies, 37 (1): 31–66.

174 James Ferguson
du Toit, A., and D. Neves, 2009. Trading on a Grant: Integrating Formal and Informal Social Protection in Post-Apartheid
Migrant Networks. Working Paper No. 3, Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), University of the
Western Cape, South Africa.
Ferguson, J., 1990. The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Ferguson, J., 1999. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Ferguson, J., forthcoming. Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution. Book manuscript. University
of Chicago Press.
Habib, A., and B. Maharaj, 2008. Giving and Solidarity: Resource Flows for Poverty Alleviation and Development in South
Africa. Pretoria: HSRC Press.
Harper, S., and J. Seekings, 2010. Claims on and Obligations to Kin in Cape Town, South Africa. CSSR Working Paper
No. 272, Centre for Social Science Research, University of Cape Town.
Kepe, T., R. Hall and B. Cousins, 2008. Land. In New South African Keywords, eds N. Shepard and S. Robbins. Athens,
OH: Ohio University Press.
Macleod, C., and T. Tracey, 2009. Review of South African Research and Interventions in the Development of a Policy Strategy
on Teen-Aged Pregnancy. Grahamstown, South Africa: Rhodes University/Republic of South Africa, Department of
Health/World Health Organization, March.
Mavhunga, C., 2011. ‘A Plundering Tiger with Its Deadly Cubs? The USSR and China as Weapons in the
Engineering of a “Zimbabwean Nation”, 1945–2009’. In Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the
Global Cold War, ed. G. Hecht, 231–66. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Murray, C., 1981. Families Divided: The Impact of Migrant Labour in Lesotho. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Seekings, J., and N. Nattrass, 2005. Class, Race, and Inequality in South Africa. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Turner, S.J., 2005. Livelihoods and Sharing:Trends in a Lesotho Village, 1976–2004. Research Report No. 22, Program for
Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), University of the Western Cape, South Africa.
White, H., 2010. ‘Outside the Dwelling of Culture: Estrangement and Difference in Postcolonial Zululand’. Anthro-
pological Quarterly, 83 (3): 497–518.

Journal of Agrarian Change - 2012 - Ferguson - How To Do Things With Land A Distributive Perspective On Rural Livelihoods

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Journal of Agrarian Change - 2012 - Ferguson - How To Do Things With Land A Distributive Perspective On Rural Livelihoods

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

bs_bs_banner

Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 13 No. 1, January 2013, pp. 166–174.

How to Do Things with Land:

© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

LAND AS A DISTRIBUTIVE RESOURCE

© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

AFTER MIGRANT LABOUR: USING LAND TO REINVENT CIRCUITS

© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

You might also like