Browsing by Author "Spyropoulos, John"

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    The experience of money and the domestic moral economy of a group of young adults in Khayelitsha and their transition to adulthood
    (2022) Spyropoulos, John; Posel, Deborah; Seekings, Jeremy
    This thesis is a qualitative study of patterns of earning, sharing and spending among a cohort of young South African men and women, aged 25 to 35, in Khayelitsha, a mainly poor, Black African residential area of Cape Town. As less skilled ‘youth,' they are rarely able to sustain regular employment and therefore remain intermittently dependent on household income and resident in or near their parents' homes; they may have children but are not married. This thesis interprets how their low wage irregular employment and spending patterns affect relationships of mutuality and the dynamics of redistribution in their households. The thesis then considers how these phenomena change with their transition to ‘adulthood,' which occurred in the context of the COVID19 pandemic. The young adults experience a state of ‘locked in' material and existential depletion while balancing their aspirations, reflected in urgent and often conspicuous consumption, with their obligations in a context of chronic economic stress. As older adults, they progress from an economically dependent status to a mainly precarious adult status in their household where the matrix of domestic obligations and entitlements overwhelm youthful, aspirational spending. The thesis advances our understanding of the lived experience of money of ‘township youth' – as young adults – and then, as they progress into adulthood, of adult decision-making, in their domestic domain. The thesis unpacks and explains this experience in relation to the notion of a ‘domestic moral economy' produced at the nexus of economic and social cultural factors. Here responses of young adults to labour market conditions and consumerism impact on and are in turn impacted by social relations in the household. These responses introduced and embedded in both domestic relations and their social lives among peers and friends, demonstrate the inseparability of external capitalist relation of production from historically instituted social relations in the wider South African moral economy.