Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Work, Factionalism, and Citizenship in South Africa

University Of Virginia Main Campus, Charlottesville VA

Investigators

Abstract

University of Virginia graduate student, Jason Hickel, supervised by Dr. Ira Bashkow, will undertake anthropological research on the relationship between labor organizing, local culture, and citizenship, through a case study of the sugar industry in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He will focus his investigation on longstanding factional conflict between unions aligned with a national political party and independent unions comprised of rural Zulu migrants. Research methods will include surveys, interviews, and archival investigations. Hickel will explore the history of these two forms of unionism in the sugar industry and trace their development and differentiation since the legalization of African unionism in 1979. Using participant observation methodologies, he will examine links between migrant political attitudes and their lived experience of a labor system that requires them to move repeatedly between industrial workplaces and their natal homesteads in rural hinterlands. As an anthropologist, he also will examine homestead-based rituals that involve exchange and sacrifice, healing rites performed by diviners and prophets, and gift economies supported by wage remissions, to determine the relationship between cultural notions of the social good in home communities and the political consciousness of migrants as workers and citizens. This research will advance understanding of the relationship between work, culture, and labor politics by focusing on the culturally particular values that underwrite worker consciousness in this South African case. Elucidating the factors that lead Zulu migrants to reject affiliation with the liberal-democratic platform of the political unions in favor of their own independent unions, will help to illuminate more general causes of labor variability and conflict. Thus, the research will contribute to social science theory that can aid efforts to promote more peaceful industrial relations, and help develop more culturally appropriate strategies for interacting with rural workers internationally. The research also will contribute to the education of a social scientist.