Browsing by Author "Du Toit, Andries"

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    Chronic and structural poverty in South Africa: challenges for action and research?
    (2005) Du Toit, Andries
    Ten years after liberation, the persistence of poverty is one of the most important and urgent problems facing South Africa. This paper reflects on some of the findings of research undertaken as part of PLAAS's participation in the work of the Chronic Poverty Research Centre, situates it within the broader literature on poverty in South Africa, and considers some emergent challenges.? Though PLAAS's survey, being only the first wave of a panel study, does not yet cast light on short term poverty dynamics, it illuminates key aspects of the structural conditions that underpin poverty that last for a long time: the close interactions between asset poverty, employment vulnerability and subjection to unequal social power relations. Coming to grips with these dynamics requires going beyond the limitations of conventional "sustainable livelihoods" analyses and functionalist analyses of South African labour markets. The paper argues for a re-engagement with the traditions of critical sociology, anthropology and the theoretical traditions that allow a closer exploration of the political economy of chronic poverty at micro and macro levels.
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    The dynamics of household formation and composition in the rural Eastern Cape.
    (2008) Neves, David; Du Toit, Andries
    Focusing on a specific impoverished region of rural Eastern Cape, this paper examines the dynamics of household formation and composition within postapartheid migratory networks. While the fluidity, contingency and spatially extended nature of African households is generally understood, the paper focuses on the social relationships that both buttress and flow from these qualities. In conceptualising the notion of the household, the paper also suggests the rubric of the ‘household’ can be a powerful, cultural narrative for constituting practices of domesticity. Five detailed case studies are presented and the dynamics of household-making explicated in terms of three distinct levels of analysis. The first is the overarching macro-structural context which includes kinship practices, cultural mores, rural governance and the changing political economy of South Africa’s former homelands. The paper argues that the altered material base of rural livelihoods in the last two decades has seen traditional patterns of male circular migration and trajectories of household formation eclipsed by large numbers of economically marginalised workseekers who precariously churn between both urban-rural and within rural areas. These changes have undercut the prospects for traditional forms of household formation and reconfigured the nature of the contemporary conjugal contract.
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    Forgotten by the highway: Globalisation, adverse incorporation and chronic poverty in a commercial farming district
    (2005) Du Toit, Andries
    The paper highlights the key insights arising from a household livelihood survey conducted in Ceres as part of the Chronic Poverty Research Centre’s work in South Africa. It argues that conventional livelihoods analysis needs to be informed by a much more sophisticated awareness of the local and global socioeconomic factors that mediate and shape the strategies that are available in local contexts. The livelihoods of the marginalised rural poor in Ceres, for instance, have to be understood against the background of complex shifts and realignments in global agro-food networks and the implications for local labour market restructuring. This analysis casts doubt on the appropriateness of attempts to frame poverty in South Africa in terms of social exclusion and the lack of integration into the ‘First World’ economy. Rather than social exclusion, poverty in Ceres needs to be understood in terms of adverse incorporation.
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    The National Committee for Liberation ("ARM"), 1960-1964 : sabotage and the question of the ideological subject
    (1991) Du Toit, Andries; Du Toit, Andries
    Subject Matter: The dissertation gives an account of the history of the National Committee for Liberation (NCL), an anti-apartheid sabotage organisation that existed between 1960 and 1964. The study is aimed both at narrating its growth and development in the context of South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, and explaining its strategic and political choices. In particular, the reasons for its isolation from the broader muggle against Apartheid and its inability to transcend this isolation are investigated. Sources: Discussion of the context of the NCL's development depended on secondary historical works by scholars such as Tom Lodge, Paul Rich, C.J. Driver and Janet Robertson as well as archival sources. The analysis of liberal discourse in the 1950s and 1960s also drew heavily on primary sources such as the liberal journals Contact, Africa South and The New African. Secondary sources were also used for the discussion of the NCL's strategy in the context of the development of a theory of revolutionary guerrilla warfare after the Second World War: here the work of Robert Taber, John Bowyer Bell, Kenneth Grundy and Edward Feit was central. The history of the NCL itself was reconstructed from trial records, newspapers and personal interviews. Archival sources such as The Karis-Carter collection, the Hoover Institute microfilm collection of South African political documents, the Paton Papers, the Ernie Wentzel papers were also extensively used. Methodology: The discussion of the discourse of liberal NCL members depended on a post-structuralist theory of subjectivity. The conceptual underpinnings of the thesis were provided by on the work of Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Michel Pecheux, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and Slavoj Zizek. Pechcux's elaboration of the Althusserian concept of interpellation formed the basis of a discourse analysis of NCL texts. In the interviews, some use was also made of techniques of ethnographic interviewing developed by qualitative sociologists such as James Spradley. Conclusions: The analysis focused on the way NCL discourse constructed NCL members as "ordinary persons", a subject-position which implied a radical opposition between political struggle and ideological commitment. The NCL's strategic difficulties were related to the contradictions this discourse, related to metropolitan political traditions that valorised civil society, manifested in the context of post-Sharpeville South Africa. These contradictions were explored in terms of the Lacanian notion of the "ideological fantasy". The dissertation thus closes with a consideration, both of the importance of the ideological traditions identified in the analysis of NCL discourse, and the methodological importance of non-reductive conceptualisations of political identity and ideology.