'Christmas time' and the struggles for the household in the countryside: rethinking the cultural geography of migrant labour in South Africa
Ngwane, Z.
Journal of Southern African Studies 29(3): 681-699
2003
ISSN/ISBN: 0305-7070 DOI: 10.2307/3557437Document Number: 521889
This paper suggests a rethinking of the cultural geography of migrant labour in South African studies. While most literature on migrant cultures has tended to focus on the experiences and activities of migrants in their urban environment, this paper shifts the focus to the countryside, for example, by looking at the notion of 'Christmas time' when local migrant workers would be home for the holidays. This paper uses 'Christmas time' heuristically to talk about struggles over the household at the rural enclave of Cancele (Eastern Cape Province) along three lines: discursive, material and performative. The discursive aspect was largely shaped by, inter alia, exotic accounts by migrants about the outside world and their place in it. The material aspect turned on the symbolic and economic value accruing with the commodities and techniques with which migrants overwhelmed the village during Christmas time. The performative aspect implicated both the discursive and material aspects in a domain of normative performance dominated by feasting and household strengthening rituals. The effect of this discursive and material encounters was to alter, if only temporarily and incompletely, the normative contours of the local cosmogony, distending the horizons of people's self-imagination beyond the ideological parameters of their local universe.