Browsing by Author "Neves, David"

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    The consequences of AIDS related illness and death on households in the Eastern Cape.
    (2008) Neves, David
    This paper examines the consequences of HIV/AIDS related morbidity and mortality on rural households in South Africa's Eastern Cape region. The literature suggests a range of both individual and household level factors which serve to differentiate the effects of AIDS illness and death on affected households. Furthermore the effects of HIV/AIDS are not only differentiated, they are also distributed. The social reciprocity undergirding African livelihoods both ameliorates HIV/AIDS-related livelihood shock and simultaneously serves to transmit these shocks to otherwise unaffected households. The six case studies presented demonstrate the highly differentiated consequences of HIV illness and death on households, and the extent to which these effects are significantly mediated by a range of household level factors. The consequences of HIV/AIDS are shaped by household pre-illness asset levels, care and dependency burdens and finally, the extent to which the household members either acknowledge the illness (enabling them to better engage with treatment options) or alternatively, revert to denial. The consequences of HIV/AIDS are also significantly mediated by infected individuals' household headship status and resources. In the rural Eastern Cape, the structural context of unemployment, limited prospects for agrarian production and the exclusion of prime age adults from social grants, serves to pattern vulnerability by rendering unemployed, prime-age adults relatively weak economic agents. The empirical material accordingly suggests the effects of the morbidity and mortality particularly of peripheral (i.e. non household head) and non resource contributing individuals is relatively limited (at least in the short to medium term). Within a structural context of impoverishment and economic disempowerment, HIV/AIDS therefore does not constitute a homogenous or equal shock to all affected households.
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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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    The impact of illness and death on migration back to the Eastern Cape.
    (2008) Neves, David
    This paper examines the impact of HIV/AIDS related morbidity and mortality on return migration to the rural Eastern Cape. The paper begins by discussing the interrelation between population mobility and HIV and grounds these dynamics within the structural context of underdevelopment in a former homeland region of South Africa. The changing migratory regimes of the post-apartheid era, which have seen formal male labour migration supplanted by increasingly informal and feminized migratory trajectories, between both rural-urban and intra-rural locales, are described. Five case studies are presented, and the multiplicity of factors associated with rural return migration in the face of HIV/AIDS related illness delineated. The empirical material suggests illness-induced back migration is driven not only by the search for health and succour, but also by complex amalgams of shifting entitlement and obligation. Understanding the dynamics of rural return requires attention not only to the highly variegated position that urban returnees potentially assume within receiving households, but also the effects of their return on these households. Even within the relatively limited number of case studies presented, rural returnees are variously subjects or dispensers of care, either relatively peripheral or crucially central members of receiving households. The evidence simply belies any notion of unidirectional rural return, driven by a universal set of imperatives in response to illness.