Sex, gender and marriage in the timber plantations of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa: a minor otherwise

Abstract

In this article, I describe the practice of a “game” of marriage between women labourers in the timber plantations of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, called umshado wokudlala. I describe the ritualised game in order to follow the ways in which kin terms operated in daily usage among the labourers. Umshado wokudlala shows how a form of “play” opens out and re-imagines possibilities for organising care, intimacy and relatedness under conditions of late capitalism. I suggest that the use of kin terms in this “game” indexes shifting material conditions for mutuality, intimacy and relatedness, and thus reveals the qualities of kinship, sex and gender as systems of signs tethered to the material conditions that make possible language-in-use. If anthropology understands kin terms to be laminated onto systems of gender, kinship and sex, it is because it is the dominant mode through which it understands life. I have sought to show that the modalities of comprehending obligation, relatedness and reproduction undergo a degree of “torsion” in the practices and utterances of the game’s participants, and that securing their meanings and referents is a much trickier affair than many accounts of marriage would have us believe.