Abstract
Abstract: This article raises questions about heuristic and political effects of normalizing sociological identities, and space through discussing gendered identities on commercial farms in Hurungwe District, Zimbabwe. It discusses how various of men and women farm workers cannot be read off their but must be situated within jural identities that have emerged within specific legal space of commercial farms. Through approaching farm workers this way, it is suggested that academic studies and political interventions can better understand jural identities and power relations involved on commercial farms and in our own representations.IntroductionUnder rubric of postcolonial, social scientists and cultural theorists are trying to go inherited heuristic approaches, ontologies and epistemologies that have characterized their disciplines in order to more strategically challenge hierarchical social orderings. In anthropology, such critical attention has helped to destabilize field of knowledge built around culture (Abu-Lughod, 1991, 1993; D. Scott, 1992; Thomas, 1994), while in feminist studies a similar disordering has been carried out on women, sex and gender (Butler, 1990; Haraway, 1989; Mohanty, 1983; J. Scott, 1992; Yanagisako and Delaney, 1995). The hope is that by de-hitching analyses from presumed certainties guaranteed by disciplinary foundations (e.g., everyone belongs to a unified culture or gender), analyst can deploy criticisms strategically rather than embedding them within grand theories, teleological histories or programmatic politics (Faris, 1992, 1996).I try to follow this current trend in this article by building on important academic work that has investigated role of in construction of laws and regulations in Southern Africa. I do so by going beyond problematic tendencies in this literature of normalizing sociological identities, and space. Most of these works presume constant (ahistorical and prediscursive) interests for sociological categories of gender, race and class, and characterize the state and its laws as a somewhat transparent carrier of these interests. Such analyses indeed assume pregiven interests for men and women and use them as a norm to explain and criticize regulations and social responses they evoke. Moreover, this form of analysis tends to portray implementation of laws and regulations as a geographically uniform process, assuming nation (or colony) at large as its normative scale of analysis; a portrayal which glosses over how different sites become distinctive legal spaces in (inter)national and local regulatory practices. Following work of some current feminist and anthropological theorists (e.g., Butler and Scott, 1992; Hirsch and Lazarus-Black, 1994; Manicom, 1992), I aim to move beyond these tendencies to a necessary consideration of ways in which gendered, racial, class and spatial identities produced in and non-state laws and practices -- power plays of jural identities -- have shaped relations and interests of groups.After sketching out a critical overview of this literature, I discuss commercial farms in Zimbabwe as a distinct jural space which I call government. In so doing, I indicate how jural identities of this site make it difficult to presume that there are unified amongst African women farm workers. To introduce some attributes of this government, I provide an ethnographic depiction of a trial for adultery that occurred on a farm in Hurungwe District in northwestern Zimbabwe. I give a historical outline of this legal space which, in turn, brings me to briefly examine how current arrangement of domestic government contributes to different for married women than for single women. I conclude with brief comments on problem of uncritically casting sociological categories such as into normative political identities. …
Published Version
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