Bétail, perles et pièces de monnaie : L’équivalence et les transformations de la monnaie dans les territoires coloniaux d’Afrique du Sud

Cet essai porte sur les mécanismes qui permettent les échanges équitables entre différents ordres de valeur, dans la production de la société et de l’histoire. Alors que les équivalences entre monnaies, la normalisation et la conversion sont présentes dans la plupart des théories sur l’argent et la marchandisation, leur nature en tant que processus social n’a pas été suffisamment étudiée, surtout dans la construction du caractère universalisant des idéologies et des régimes politiques et économiques modernes. Notre analyse examine la confrontation des différents régimes de valeur à l’occasion de la rencontre entre les Tswana d’Afrique du Sud et les colonisateurs européens, ainsi que les conflits et la médiation complexe auxquels ce processus a donné lieu. Le bétail, les pièces de monnaie et les contrats, qui avaient la possibilité à la fois de renforcer et de nier les différences, ont rapidement été investis de qualités magiques. Mais les peuples colonisés étaient également sensibles à la faculté de ces monnaies de faciliter ou d’empêcher la convertibilité, et connaissaient les formes d’abstraction et d’incorporation qu’ils impliquaient. C’est pourquoi, en Afrique du Sud et ailleurs, ces monnaies ont souvent servi de moyen de contestation de la valeur autour de laquelle les luttes coloniales se sont jouées.This essay explores the mechanisms that render equitable and negotiable different orders of value – in the production of society and history. While equilibration, standardization and conversion are implicated in most theories of money and commodi?cation, their nature as social processes has not been adequately speci?ed, above all in the construction of universalizing ideologies and modernist political and economic regimes. We examine the ways in which different regimes of value, brought up against one another in the encounter between the southern Tswana peoples and European colonizers, became the subject of both con?ict and complex mediation. Cows, coin and contracts – which had the capacity to construct and negate difference – soon were invested here with magical qualities. But colonized peoples were also sensitive to the capacity of such currencies to enable or impede convertibility and to the forms of abstraction and incorporation they permit. Which is why, in South Africa and elsewhere, those currencies often became metonymic of the contestations of value on which colonial struggles, tout court, were played out.Este ensayo aborda los mecanismos que posibilitan los intercambios justos entre diferentes órdenes de valor, en la producción de la sociedad y de la historia. Aunque las equivalencias entre monedas, la normalización y la conversión están presentes en la mayor parte de las teorías del dinero y de la mercancía, su naturaleza en tanto que procesos sociales no ha sido suficientemente estudiada, sobre todo en la construcción del carácter universalizante de las ideologías y de los regímenes políticos y económicos modernos. Nuestro artículo examina la manera en que diferentes regímenes de valor han estado en oposición en las relaciones entre los Tswana de África del Sur y los colonizadores europeos, así como los conflictos y la mediación compleja que este proceso ha hecho surgir. El ganado, la moneda y los contratos, que tenían la posibilidad tanto de intensificar como de negar las diferencias, han sido rápidamente investidos de cualidades mágicas. Pero los pueblos colonizados también eran sensibles a la capacidad de esas monedas para facilitar o impedir la convertibilidad y conocían las formas de abstracción y de incorporación que posibilitaban. Por eso, en África del Sur como en otras partes, esas monedas han sido con mucha frecuencia los medios para refutar el valor en torno del cual se han realizado las luchas coloniales

Naturalizando la nación: aliens, apocalipsis y el estado postcolonial

Este ensayo examina la situación del estado-nación postcolonial a través del prisma de la catástrofe medio ambiental: cómo las plantas «invasoras» pueden llegar a ser un apremiante problema político y lo que esto puede revelar acerca de las cambiantes relaciones entre ciudadanos, comunidad y soberanía nacional bajo condiciones neo-liberales. Siguiendo estas cuestiones en relación al caso de la «nueva» Sudáfrica, planteamos tres características claves de las políticas postcoloniales en una era del laissez-faire: la refiguración del sujeto-ciudadano, la crisis de las fronteras de soberanía y la despolitización de la política. Bajo tales condiciones los «invasores» -tanto plantas como personas- terminan encarnando básicas contradicciones de frontera y pertenencia; la naturaleza extraña (alien-natura) proporciona un lenguage para proclamar nuevas formas de discriminación en plena cultura del «post-racismo» y los derechos civiles.This paper examines the predicament of the postcolonial nation-state through the prism of environmental catastrophe: how is it that plant “invaders” can become an urgent political issue, and what might this reveal of the shifting relations among citizenship, community, and national sovereignty under neo-liberal conditions? Pursuing these questions in relation to a case from the “new” South Africa, we posit three key features of postcolonial polities in an era of laissez-faire: the refiguration of the subject-citizen, the crisis of sovereign borders, and the depoliticization of politics. Under such conditions, aliens ˆ both plants and people ˆ come to embody core contradictions of boundedness and belonging; and alien-nature provides a language for voicing new forms of discrimination amidst a culture of “post-racism” and civil rights

Migrant African women: tales of agency and belonging

This paper explores issues of belonging and agency among asylum seekers and refugee women of African origin in the UK. It discusses the ways these women engendered resistance in their everyday life to destitution, lack of cultural recognition, and gender inequality through the foundation of their own non-governmental organization, African Women’s Empowerment Forum, AWEF, a collective ‘home’ space. The focus of this account is on migrant women’s agency and self-determination for the exercise of choice to be active actors in society. It points to what might be an important phenomenon on how local grassroots movements are challenging the invisibility of asylum seekers’ and refugees’ lives and expanding the notion of politics to embrace a wider notion of community politics with solidarity. AWEF is the embodiment of a social space that resonates the ‘in-between’ experience of migrant life providing stability to the women members regarding political and community identification

Constitutional Ethnography: An Introduction

Constitutional ethnography is the study of the central legal elements of polities using methods that are capable of recovering the lived detail of the politico-legal landscape. This article provides an introduction to this sort of study by contrasting constitutional ethnography with multivariate analysis and with nationalist constitutional analysis. The article advocates not a universal one-size-fits-all theory or an elegant model that abstracts away the distinctive, but instead outlines an approach that can identify a set of repertoires found in real cases. Learning the set of repertoires that constitutional ethnography reveals, one can see more deeply into particular cases. Constitutional ethnography has as its goal, then, not prediction but comprehension, not explained variation but thematization

Rumours, sects and rallies : the ethnic politics of recent Hmong Millenarian movements in Vietnam’s highlands

Contrary to modernist assumptions, millenarianism has not died out but continues to influence the politics of many marginalised groups in upland Southeast Asia, including the Hmong. This article summarises and analyses post-World War II Hmong millenarian activity in Vietnam, focusing on three case studies from the 1980s onwards, within the political backdrop of ongoing government suspicions of ethnic separatism and foreign interference. Far from being isolated or peripheral, Hmong millenarian rumours and movements interact with overseas diasporas, human rights agencies and international religious networks to influence state responses, sometimes in unexpected ways

Navigating and negotiating ethnographies of urban hustle in Nairobi slums

This paper reflects on doing and writing ethnography on the urban margins, where uncertainty and provisionality mark the everyday city. The discussion is situated within a postcolonial approach to ethnographies of ‘hustle’ in Nairobi slums, critically reflecting on methodological choices made to facilitate the licence to linger in intimate and interstitial spaces of neighbourhoods often closed off to visitors. The paper argues that while urban ethnography is foundational to postcolonial scholarship on African cities, it is also vexed with tensions between ethnographic experience of the provisional and uncertain lived reality in which ethnographers seek to embed themselves for periods of time, and the ethnographic representation that emerges in the form of ethnographic authorship. The paper engages with the methodological tactic of engaging in waste work as an ‘apprentice researcher’; and with the theoretical choice of deploying the very vocabularies and expressions of struggle of interlocutors living and working in the ‘slums’ of Nairobi

Un/making difference through performance and mediation in contemporary Africa

This special issue of the Journal of African Cultural Studies grew out of a panel we organized at the European Conference on African Studies in Lisbon in June 2013. Our starting point was the observation of a massive revival of cultural and religious identities across the African continent, stretching from post-apartheid South Africa to Islamist groups in parts of West Africa. In the early twenty-first century, Africa appears to be witnessing a historical moment characterized by a resurgence of a politics of difference that, regardless of the heterogeneous forms in which it materializes, shares an uncanny ability to produce and sustain identities based on a politics of difference

Un/making difference through performance and mediation in contemporary Africa

This special issue of the Journal of African Cultural Studies grew out of a panel we organized at the European Conference on African Studies in Lisbon in June 2013. Our starting point was the observation of a massive revival of cultural and religious identities across the African continent, stretching from post-apartheid South Africa to Islamist groups in parts of West Africa. In the early twenty-first century, Africa appears to be witnessing a historical moment characterized by a resurgence of a politics of difference that, regardless of the heterogeneous forms in which it materializes, shares an uncanny ability to produce and sustain identities based on a politics of difference