Everyday Livelihoods Research Articles

Enacting peasant moral community economies for sustainable livelihoods: A case of women-led cooperatives in rural Mexico

The Mexican state has promoted women’s group-based income-generating projects for nearly three decades. Although most state-supported income-generating projects discontinue after external funding ends, some continue to operate. While existing studies have highlighted several reasons for dis-/continuation, none have focused on the role of moral obligations in shaping women’s everyday livelihood practices and few have closely examined context dependent external factors. In order to provide more effective support for women’s collective efforts to strengthen sustainable livelihoods, we developed the framework peasant moral community economies. This framework draws on that of household moral economy, community economies and peasant moral economy as informed by feminist scholars’ recognition of gender as process. Through our framework we investigated how intra-group dynamics and groups’ relationships within their members’ households and communities in their own specific environments shape group operations through examination of three initially state-funded women only but now long-running women-led cooperatives in rural Hidalgo, Mexico. Data was collected through surveys, focus group discussions, and in-depth interviews with cooperative members, their families and community authorities supplemented by secondary literature review and observation. We found that context specific manifestations of reciprocity and the right to subsistence were common to both household and community arrangements. While context specific manifestations of these moral principles enabled new gendered subjectivities that contributed to gender transformations and livelihood production, we also found that the same principles reinforced female altruism and exacerbated women’s time poverty. The framework of peasant moral community economies allowed us to see how both contradictory gender transformations and time poverty provided conditions that supported the durability of the cooperatives. We conclude that support for women’s collective efforts for sustainable livelihoods may be more effective if we recognise how livelihoods are produced also outside the cooperative by paying particular attention to context specific contradictory gender and moral dimensions.

Informal Trading and a Right to the City in the Khayelitsha CBD: insights from the field

Informal trading is an everyday livelihood practice in South African cities. Although praised for its local economic development potential, in the post-Apartheid context, it often sits in tension with urban regeneration plans. This research examines the case of the Khayelitsha Central Business District (KCBD), just outside of Cape Town, built as part of the Mayor’s Urban Regeneration Program. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this research explores the material and symbolic spaces and everyday practices of street trading in the KCBD—specifically, how traders negotiate their trading practices in a context of on-going development. What we see in practice is informal traders existing in a complex space—caught somewhere between exclusionary urban regeneration projects, and waiting for the state. Concurrently, traders are inventing spaces through negotiating, quietly encroaching and self-managing in an attempt to secure livelihoods and grow businesses in the meanwhile; whilst ‘waiting’ in the long-term for physical and entrepreneurial development opportunities. By focusing on these symbolic experiences and actions of street traders in the KCBD, we can understand the often invisible, ordinary, everyday realities of the traders, through which ‘street politics’ is produced and an ‘actual’ right to the city is claimed. In this transitioning space, urban regeneration sits in tension with informal trading—a context in which these traders need to be given a voice, and where such research becomes valuable, in displaying a textured reality.

Politics, exit strategy and political settlement in Sierra Leone: a critical analysis of a laboratory experiment (1991–2015)

A glance at key indicators—in terms of growth forecast and stable elections—will project Sierra Leone as a political settlement model for a post-conflict state. Sierra Leone has been an important laboratory for UN and international donors’ interventions and thinking. However, efforts by the international donor community to decentralise power to the margins, both geographically and demographically, have failed. Instead, this focus on the institutions of governance has allowed the same elite to maintain power. Sierra Leone today shares similar socio-economic and political conditions with the Sierra Leone before the outbreak of the civil war. A detailed analysis of the country’s socio-economic trends, its political institutions and the logic and dynamics of violence show a disturbing picture. While the international community considered that an exit strategy was feasible, the political settlement remains an experiment in that it is detached from everyday life and livelihood concerns of Sierra Leoneans and reveals the structural violence behind this process.

Sarah Turner, Christine Bonnin, and Jean Michaud. Frontier Livelihoods: Hmong in the Sino-Vietnamese Borderlands

Livelihoods: Hmong in Sino-Vietnamese Borderlands Sarah Turner, Christine Bonnin, and Jean Michaud Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2015, 223p.By choosing to work on of one ethnic group, on both sides of international Sino-Vietnamese border, this study focuses on how these people make and negotiate decisions in their complicated geographic, socioeconomic, and political contexts. The study provides a vivid description of a myriad of activities in everyday lives of Hmong on fringes as they make their living in sectors of agriculture, livestock transactions, distilled alcohol, cardamom, and textile trade. These have been shaped by various integrations and negotiations between their own background of environment, culture, local knowledge, and identities, and agents and institutions of state.In first two chapters, Upland Alternative: An Introduction and Frontier Dynamics: Borders and Hmong, authors clarify borderlands as a third space and suggest a theoretical framework to approach and facilitate a more comprehensive insight into how Hmong people are making a living and trying to maintain their cultures and identity (p. 15). This third space is area on both sides of Sino-Vietnamese border, Yunnan in China and upland northern Vietnam, which has been attracting a range of development schemes and policies issued on both sides in name of speeding up economic development of this undeveloped region. Tracing other associated political reasons, authors view these state efforts as part of an internal colonization scheme (p. 27) that has an effect, direct or indirect, on Hmong decision making. On other hand, using a bottom-up approach, authors offer a locally adapted, nuanced analysis of livelihoods (p. 7) with Hmong people passively acting as a local agency to navigate, rework, contest and appropriate specific facets of identity, modernity, market integration, and nation-state building as they go about creating resilient life-worlds and everyday livelihood (p. 7).Chapter 3, Borderland Livelihoods: Everyday Decisions and Agrarian Change, focuses on most important activity of Hmong on both sides of Sino-Vietnamese border, agricultural sector. This sector has changed a lot under effect of state development schemes, especially through sedentarization programs that aim to reduce use of slash and burn methods-a traditional agricultural practice among Hmong-in favor of intensification agriculture, even though this agrarian change significantly affects Hmong lives and livelihoods. Hybrid seeds were introduced and quickly adopted in this area thanks to their heterosis as well as pressure on limited land and concerns over food security. This unavoidable situation placed Hmong people in a vulnerable financial situation: due to additional costs of buying new seeds every planting season, fertilizers, pesticides, and investing in more stable irrigation, they are more dependent on government's subsidies and development programs. However, local people still maintain their old practice of swidden agriculture in some places where governments cannot exercise control; they persist in planting traditional rice on available land and try to avoid over-reliance on state by buying seed from private traders rather than waiting for subsidized bureaus. These active responses on part of Hmong people are the best, most resilient tactic (p. 58) and forms of everyday covert resistance and small acts of reinterpretation that take place in context of a marginalized group (p. …

Livelihoods as Relational Im/mobilities: Exploring the Everyday Practices of Young Female Sex Workers in Ethiopia

Age is now considered alongside other differentiating categories for exploring mobility experiences, yet little work has emerged conceptualizing the im/mobilities of marginalized young people living in particularly difficult circumstances. This article, therefore, explores the relational im/mobilities of young female sex workers in Ethiopia aged between fourteen- and nineteen-years-old to understand how their livelihoods are shaped by the connections between their relations with others, im/mobilities, and survival in everyday life. The article draws on detailed narratives and participatory mobility mapping with sixty young sex workers in two locations in Ethiopia. Conceptually this article moves beyond sedentary and nomadic conceptions of mobility to what Jensen (2009) termed critical mobility thinking, where lives do not just happen in static enclaves or nomadic wanderings but are connected through multiple communities of interest and across time and space. Through these processes, everyday livelihoods are shaped and experienced. Further, drawing on Massey's (2005) relational geographical theory, where sociotemporal practices constitute places in a complex web of flows, the article reveals that young sex workers' critical im/mobilities are relational: Their livelihoods and identities are shaped within and between places based on their ability to move or not. The article reveals that these relational im/mobilities are important for securing work, protection, and accessing services, both within and between places and across a variety of sex work livelihoods. The article concludes by demonstrating that consideration of livelihoods as relational and mobile is central for the development of appropriate interventions.

Overview of groundwater for emergency use and human security

Water resources and their management are critical to human security and are essential for achieving sustainable development (UN-Water 2013). According to UNDP (1994), human security is a people-centered concept and implies safety from both chronic and sudden threats or disruptions. Human security is composed of seven pillars: economic, food, health, environmental, personal, political, and community security (UNDP 1994), but other dimensions have since been suggested such as livelihood or energy security (O’Brian and Leichenko 2007), and further developments of the human security concept have been proposed (e.g., Barnett et al. 2010; O’Brian and Leichenko 2007; these two papers also include references to groundwater resources, although these are not a central discussion point). Most of the preceding dimensions depend on having access to sufficient freshwater of adequate quality. In many arid and semi-arid regions, groundwater resources represent the main source or an essential supplement to other sources of available freshwater and thus play an important role for everyday livelihoods and human security (e.g., Burke and Moench 2000; UNESCO 1999; UNESCO-WWAP 2003). Groundwater can play an equally important role in environmental disaster-related emergencies (Vrba and Verhagen 2011).

Animal performativity: Exploring the lives of donkeys in Botswana

Donkeys provide affordable and accessible means of transport, draught power and food security for smallholder farmers in and around Maun, Botswana. Their role and welfare is often compromised by people's extensive use of and inability to care for their animals given their individual or broader circumstances. Our paper explores the lives of donkeys and donkey-human relations in Botswana. We apply a feminist posthumanist iteration of performativity to illustrate and explain who the donkey is, what they experience, and the context within and through which these performances are constituted. Methodologically we merge tools from animal welfare science with social science to unearth donkey physical and emotional states of being, as well as the ways in which humans use, care for, and value donkeys in this particular context. Our findings reveal donkey subjectivities (experiences) characterized by relative drudgery, hardship, and compromised physical and emotional welfare; donkey subjects (identities) grounded in their marginalized status within government and everyday livelihood realms; and donkey spatiality (contextual factors) emerging from their performances as working animals, lesser than cattle, and pathways out of poverty. Contributions of our work include empirical insights on donkey-human relations, theoretical exploration of animal performativity, and methodological innovation investigating the lives of animals.

‘Plant Biotechnology’ Representation and Resistance: A Study of Plant Breeding Community in Bihar, India

The present study, from a sociology of science and technology perspective, captures the transformation in plant biotechnology that has emerged with the advent of new agricultural technology, and how it is conceived of and practiced by the community of plant breeders in selected scientific institutions under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (icar) and the State Agricultural University (sau) setups located in an agriculturally backward state like Bihar. Focusing on a galaxy of scientists engaged in plant science research in Bihar, the present study captures the responses from plant breeders on the questions surrounding genetically modified crops, intellectual property rights and other contentious issues related to new agricultural technology, especially plant biotechnology. An attempt is also made to explore the nature of scientific collaboration taking place in plant breeding and the motivations of such collaborative practices. The purpose of this study is to understand how plant breeding in Bihar is experientially constituted and politically negotiated along the contours and at the boundaries of national and international development operations, policies, extension agents, and the everyday lives, livelihoods, and aspirations of farmers.

The role of the informal trade in medicinal plants in sustaining livelihoods: a case study of the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality, Eastern Cape

The commercialisation of natural resources such as medicinal plants is a method that is increasingly being used by poor people in developing countries, as a means of generating an income. Increasing economic hardship and lack of employment opportunities in the formal sector of the economy in South Africa have led many urban dwellers to seek alternative ways of meeting their everyday livelihood needs. However, although the contribution of the trade in medicinal plants to subsistence economies has been widely recognised in a number of countries, few studies have examined the significance of the medicinal plant trade to the livelihoods of poor and marginalised people. In this study, the medicinal plant traders who operated in the informal sector of the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality were interviewed to investigate the role of the trade in sustaining their livelihoods. The findings of the research indicate that although the income from the trade was modest, it contributed substantially to the total household income of the traders and the medicinal plant trade offered other non-financial benefits as well. Without the income generated from the medicinal plant trade, many traders and their families would be destitute and thus the trade is vital to the well-being of these people.

Accelerating Entrepreneurship in Africa

Africa over the past decade, the troubling reality remains that the everyday livelihoods of Africans have not kept pace with macroeconomic growth, and per-capita GDPs on the continent persistently lag behind the rest of the world. We submit that entrepreneurship can address this stubborn income gap in Africa if—and only if—it is able to evolve beyond its current state of necessity-based informality into one that is vibrant and robust enough to promote sustained economic growth and generate long-term, viable livelihoods across the continent. To gain understanding of the state of entrepreneurship in Africa, Omidyar Network launched the Accelerating Entrepreneurship in Africa Initiative in 2012. To execute this multiphase research project, we partnered with Monitor Deloitte South Africa (formerly Monitor Group). We set out together to identify the challenges facing African entrepreneurs and to pinpoint the most trenchant barriers inhibiting high-impact entrepreneurship. The first phase of the initiative began with a survey of 582 entrepreneurs in six sub-Saharan African countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Tanzania. The survey was augmented by 72 in-depth interviews and then benchmarked against 19 global peers. The survey focused on four critical aspects of entrepreneurial environments: Entrepreneurship assets: financing, skills and talent, and infrastructure Business support: government programs and incubators Policy accelerators: legislation and administrative burdens Motivation and mindset: legitimacy, attitudes, and culture The initiative’s second phase brought together business, government, and thought leaders to analyze the survey findings and to examine the state of entrepreneurship in Africa more closely. The sessions were held in October 2012 at the inaugural Entrepreneurship in Africa Summit in Accra, Ghana. Convened by Omidyar Network in collaboration with the African Leadership Network and Monitor Deloitte South Africa, the summit drew more than 300 relevant leaders from both private and public sectors to participate in a solutions-driven dialogue on fostering high-impact entrepreneurship across the continent. This article pres-

Ethnicity, livelihoods, masculinity, and health among Luo men in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya

BackgroundPrevious research suggests that ethnic self-identity has little consequence for objective health outcomes compared to the structural dimensions of ethnicity.MethodsUsing qualitative data, we investigated perceptions of ethnicity in relation to health among Luo men in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya.ResultsWhile recognizing the complicated cultural origin of poor health, responding Luo men stressed on gender and everyday livelihood situations as being more critical for their health than Luo customs. Recognition of the structural causes of ill-health among the men overlapped with lay notions derived from particular expressions of Luo culture in urban slum contexts. To some extent, respondents regarded the performance of their sense of ethnic identity as protective, though they also admitted to the health-damaging repercussions of some of the ways they enacted aspects of Luo culture.ConclusionEthnic beliefs that link particular enactments of local customs with health outcomes may motivate the performance of cultural identity in ways that can produce critical health outcomes.

Ethnography, Agency, and Materiality: Anthropological Perspectives on Rice Development in East Timor

Rice in contemporary East Timor is multivalent, with a rich historical legacy. In the current postcolonial context, rice agriculture and the value of rice as both a consumption good and a development objective remain a priority. Government-sponsored rice production is framed variously as “food security” for the poor and as a key objective of “agricultural modernization” for a new class of dynamic farmers in a progressive market-oriented food production sector. In this article we present a comparative study of two rice development projects in East Timor that promote enhanced yields and production of irrigated rice through improved seed germplasm and other technologies of development. The Tapo-Memo scheme and the initiative known as “Seeds of Life” illustrate contrasting engagements with technoscientific development. We adopt three intersecting anthropological perspectives: sociocultural anthropology, the anthropology of development, and applied development anthropology. From the former we know rice as a set of cultural practices. The anthropology of development critiques and analyzes rice development in the light of existing farmer practices and technosocial relations. And applied anthropology seeks to act instrumentally to improve rice development interventions. The novelty of the article is to mix these perspectives while recognizing the methodological, interpretative, and subdisciplinary differences that separate them. We incorporate the analytical tool of the “boundary object” to examine how rice agency is experientially constituted and politically negotiated along the contours and at the boundaries of international development operations, national policy, extension agents, and the everyday lives, livelihoods, and aspirations of farmers.

The translocal street: Shop signs and local multi-culture along the Walworth Road, south London

► Expressions of ’situated mobilities’ are explored through the visual medium of communication; specifically the shop front displays on a south London street. ► Streets in local neighbourhoods can be understood not simply as bounded territories but sites where mobile identities are materialised and embodied. ► A production of a translocal visuality can be grounded in and therefor analysed through the subtle and complex ways that individuals actually make places and spaces in the city. Although this paper highlights translocal visuality, the diverse ways in which individuals and groups actually engage or disengage with one another, should necessarily complemented by ethnographic research. In this paper, we look at the different ways that visual signscapes along an inner London street produces particular types of translocal connections to different spaces and places that are physically distanciated yet symbolically proximate. We are particularly interested in examining these signscapes for the ways that they evoke particular connections between migrant entrepreneurs and a diverse clientele, between the colonial pasts and postcolonial presents, between the ordinary and the global city, and between everyday livelihoods and economic exchanges. We suggest that these signscapes are translocal since they evoke material and embodied links between the street and its neighbourhoods, while at the same time connecting the street to a wider spatial network of routes/roots which the migrant entrepreneurs have taken to establish their livelihoods on the street. Thus the Walworth Road, a place where a multiplicity of connections are made between different places through these signs, becomes the node or location of particular types of mobility and migration undertaken by migrants and their clients. It becomes a translocal street as it situates mobile actors and identities within the physical and social forms of economic exchange, shop front displays and signage. The local ‘multi-culture’ on this street is made and remade through these particular connections which are material, embodied, everyday and ordinary.

National Identification in Pre-Industrial Communities: Peasant Participation in the November Uprising in the Kingdom of Poland, 1830‒1831

National identification in pre-industrial communities: peasant participation in the November Uprising in the Kingdom of Poland, 1830-1831 This article aims to discover to what extent the illiterate peasantry could be seen as having national consciousness before the advent of economic and social modernization. Exploring the behaviour and attitudes of the Polish peasants during the November Uprising of the Kingdom of Poland against Russia in 1830-1831, it challenges the prevalent scholarly notion that pre-industrial peasants had little knowledge of and even more limited affection for any community outside their villages, while their participation in wars was generally dependant on coercion by the local elites and impending threats to their immediate neighbourhoods. This article therefore asks how the Polish peasants responded to the war against Russia and what might have motivated their responses. It analyses how far the peasants knew and used the elite vocabulary of fighting for the fatherland and for the nation and to what extent they felt a sense of ownership of such a national cause. In answering these questions, this article draws on a wide variety of sources. Perhaps the most important of them are hitherto neglected archival materials from Warsaw, Cracow and Poznań. They show various forms of peasant self-expression during the conflict of 1831, such as signing the oath of loyalty to the nation, volunteering to fight in the Uprising, donating goods for the war effort and writing petitions to the Polish authorities. Such materials are enriched by investigations into the memoirs of nobles, military reports and newspaper accounts, which contain a wealth of information about peasant responses to the Polish-Russian War. Finally, an invaluable source are the memoirs of former peasants themselves, which present firsthand insights into the perception of the nation by the lowest strata of the population. While this variety of sources poses a range of challenges, such as the exceptional character of the peasant memoirs and the unreliable nature of those written by the elite, they nonetheless present a relatively coherent picture of peasant attitudes. This article argues that many peasants easily identified themselves with the Polish nation, as they willingly contributed to the Uprising by volunteering to the army, conducting reconnaissance duties and providing supplies. They also largely understood that the nation was a community to which they belonged. Many villagers easily adopted the elite rhetoric of a unified national community, which is seen particularly clearly in their enthusiasm for singing the future national anthem “Poland is not dead yet.” Others demonstrated their sense of ownership of the national cause by putting their own interpretations on the Uprising, for example, defining it as an opportunity to demonstrate that it were the peasants, not the lords, who truly loved Poland. While there was obviously a number of cases of resistance of peasants to the burdens imposed by the Uprising, such occurrences usually indicated concerns with everyday livelihood rather than indifference to or lack of knowledge about the nation. This article cannot and does not intend to show that all villagers were committed national patriots. What it discovers, however, is that many illiterate peasants could define themselves as belonging to a community they called the nation and that lack of modernization, with its mass education, industrialization and print capitalism, did not create inherent obstacles for the existence of such national self-identifications among the masses.

Aqueducts in the Hellenic area during the Roman period

Since their very beginnings, organized societies have been concerned with the preservation and improvement of their environment and natural resources as these were the basis of their wellbeing and survival. In pursuing this goal, many civilizations have constructed admirable technical and infrastructural works. To most of us, however, the society that stands out for its particular preoccupation and special widespread achievements in this field is the Roman Empire which actively demonstrated great interest for its cities and the providing for their everyday basic livelihood needs. The creation of most urban centres was combined with the construction of aqueducts, water supply and wastewater systems. During the Roman occupation period (200 BC–300 AD) of the Hellenic world, many cities within the region expanded and new urban centres were created. Substantial steps were taken to upgrade the urban landscape and to improve their living conditions. This was connected with water supply and wastewater systems, comprising aqueducts, water towers and underground pipe systems. The investigation of the criteria that determined engineers' design choices for aqueducts, methods and processes of construction, techniques and materials used - as these are revealed through the archaeological excavations and relics - testify to the environmental approach and the maintenance perception of the Roman period.

Researching and Writing about Poverty in Slovakia

The paper gives some insights into the state of research and public debate abot poverty in Slovakia. It suggests that the idea of personal responsibility and the diminution of the state, and the practical need to rduce the public expenditures frame the public debate and the research orientation substantially, and that there is the tendency both of the poor families and politicians to avoid the discussion about everyday livelihood troubles of those living on social support. The author introduces some findings of the family history research History of Poverty in Slovakia that was the part of the international project designed and co-ordinated by Julia Szalai to present survival strategies of poor households and discusses the outcomes of their tendency to veil their poverty and include themselves by trying to pretend major consumption standards.

Global Environmental Change and Global Inequality

Global environmental change (GEC) carries serious implications for developing countries and for North/South relations. The article argues that global inequalities need to be understood against the background of structural adjustment and indebtedness that characterized the 1980s. Environmental policy priorities are largely concerned with livelihood sustainability in the South, rather than the longer-term risks usually associated with GEC. However, the `global' agenda of climate change, biodiversity loss and deforestation is intimately linked to the everyday livelihood concerns of poor people in developing countries. Looked at from the perspective of the South there are serious difficulties in agreeing to take measures to reduce atmospheric emissions when the `problem' was not one of their making. The authors conclude that, for this reason alone, a real global contract will need to address underlying `development' issues, principally poverty, before the global concerns of the North can be successfully met.