The self in self-interest: land, labour and temporalities in Malawi's agrarian change

Abstract

This article examines agricultural labour contracts and household-based production in Dedza District, Malawi. Deepening impoverishment seemingly creates conditions for profound social changes. In agriculture, small-scale contracts rather than big work parties mobilise the bulk of ‘extra-domestic’ labour. Although labourers are paid in cash or in kind, they are most often the recruiter's relatives or affines. The pattern fits, therefore, uneasily with the ideas of labour as a commodity and persons as mutually independent individuals. Claims about changing values must be accompanied by careful analyses of personhood. Among Dedza villagers the notion of the self in the idioms of morality discloses social relations as the origins of a person's interests. By recruiting labour, wealthy villagers make their valued relationships visible. These observations caution against viewing ‘agrarian change’ as a uniform and teleological process in which the buying and selling of labour necessarily entail individualism. As an example of how, in any case, moral sentiments are historical phenomena the article examines the predicament of landless refugees in Dedza District. Under conditions of social and material alienation, agricultural labour contracts became exploitation.