Economies of Care and the Politics of Return: Sustaining Life among Injivas and Their Families in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe

This dissertation is an ethnographic investigation of how Zimbabwe’s prolonged politico-economic crisis and concomitant mass migrations to South Africa have shaped intimate and bureaucratic care relations and practices, primarily in Bulawayo, the country’s second largest city. The focus of the study is on low- income Zimbabweans who have migrated to South Africa, locally referred to with the historically and morally loaded term injiva, and who return to Bulawayo at different stages of a life-cycle. Employing rich ethnographic materials, the thesis examines the ways that relations and practices of care are co- constituted to sustain the continuity of social and material life-worlds under circumstances of dislocation and crisis. The study further examines how the ideals and experiences of belonging, as both citizenship and kinship, are reshaped and co-constituted under dire conditions, in a context where the state is also experienced as a source of fear and suffering and kinship as an arena of tension and conflict. The thesis addresses the institutions, subjectivities, categories, and conceptualizations of care that have grown out of Zimbabwe’s crisis-driven displacement and the informalization of economies. It explores how the image of a caring state is maintained through the everyday workings of frontline welfare functionaries, while also highlighting contemporary mobility dynamics, and the care relations and practices of ordinary citizens as they respond to multiple crises and to governmental measures.
The study draws on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two periods (August- September 2016 and August 2018-March 2019) with both male and female injivas who resided or had formerly resided in South Africa. The ethnography also encompasses the injivas’ families, state and non-state authorities, and the formal and informal bureaucrats that injivas encountered, representing the domains of migration management, cross-border mobility, child and community care, education, and family law. In addition, the study utilizes media and archival resources, as well as state documents and reports. By empirically investigating how injivas claim access to identity documents, remittances, custodial and maintenance rights, and welfare assistance, the study reveals the workings of and challenges embedded in maintaining a life-sustaining web of care. In doing so, it brings together and contributes to anthropological discussions on migration, kinship, the state, documentary practices, law, and development.
The complex processes by which life-worlds are sustained are problematized through the notion of economies of care. This concept, it is argued, captures the mechanisms, organizations, ideas, and ideals in which people’s life-maintaining acts are embedded. Economies of care are not limited to monetary, income-generating processes but also, following Marxist and feminist anthropological critique, invoke the social, moral, bureaucratic, legal, and religious resources through which people sustain, repair, and reconstruct social networks and their individual and collective life-worlds. Indeed, the study shows how economies of care encompass not only the terrain of kinship, where domestic care for children, the sick, and the dead is processed, but also political and bureaucratic practices shaped by humanitarian, developmental, and global child welfare institutions and ideologies. The thesis specifically reveals ways that state and NGO categorizations and conceptualizations of care influence people’s claim-making behaviour, and – conversely – how religious, cultural, and kin- related ideas of care influence the work of state agents. The analysis thus demonstrates how the concept of economies of care allows a multiplicity of overlapping relations, interactions, categorizations, and rationalities to come to light, offering a novel perspective on resilience and survival.