1 00:00:00,060 --> 00:00:04,170 A term, as I think all of you know, right now, my name is Liz, 2 00:00:04,170 --> 00:00:15,360 I'm one of the convenors of the African Studies seminar this term and this week we're really excited to have William Monteith to be our presenter. 3 00:00:15,360 --> 00:00:20,700 Will is a lecturer in the Geography Department at Queen Mary University of London. 4 00:00:20,700 --> 00:00:26,100 And when I actually have quite similar research interests, although geographically a bit different, 5 00:00:26,100 --> 00:00:31,470 so we've actually been at a number of workshops and conferences together. 6 00:00:31,470 --> 00:00:36,630 And whenever I hear will give a talk, I always feel like there's not enough time. 7 00:00:36,630 --> 00:00:41,130 So I'm really excited for today because hopefully there will be enough time. So too much time. 8 00:00:41,130 --> 00:00:47,700 Maybe not too much. Yeah. Christine, thanks very much for the invitation, and thanks so much for a great audience turning out today. 9 00:00:47,700 --> 00:00:52,290 Great to be here. First time in African studies at Oxford. 10 00:00:52,290 --> 00:00:58,320 And so and also apologies for scaling back the total slightly in the kind of heady days of late September before teaching started. 11 00:00:58,320 --> 00:01:03,060 I had this idea of reading a lot more than I have managed to the last five or six weeks, 12 00:01:03,060 --> 00:01:06,180 so it's been scaled back slightly from rethinking work through racial capitalism to 13 00:01:06,180 --> 00:01:10,200 rethinking work through Ugandan marketplace and a retreating back to my case study. 14 00:01:10,200 --> 00:01:15,450 But thinking through different literatures, one of which includes strands of racial capitalism. 15 00:01:15,450 --> 00:01:19,080 So happy to talk a little bit more about that at the end, 16 00:01:19,080 --> 00:01:26,820 and the talk really is the story of my attempts to transform my Ph.D. thesis, which I completed in development. 17 00:01:26,820 --> 00:01:34,860 Studies at UEA views back into the monograph, and so it's the story of kind of trying different hats on my kind of ethnographic case study, 18 00:01:34,860 --> 00:01:40,860 if you will, and kind of with an eye to making a larger argument. 19 00:01:40,860 --> 00:01:44,550 I'm going to start with a few kind of reflections on on what it says, 20 00:01:44,550 --> 00:01:49,830 the changing world of work or some of the kind of key dynamics and tensions in the changing world of work as 21 00:01:49,830 --> 00:01:57,540 a way to open up discussion in relation to kind of new authorisations or openings for thinking about work, 22 00:01:57,540 --> 00:02:02,940 but also life beyond work interventions such as those raised by James Ferguson, for example, 23 00:02:02,940 --> 00:02:12,000 most recently in and give a man fish amongst a number of other scholars and then to move a little bit more concretely 24 00:02:12,000 --> 00:02:18,540 to the context of Kampala and my field site here in Macassar Market as a Central Market Place and in Kampala, 25 00:02:18,540 --> 00:02:20,550 Uganda. 26 00:02:20,550 --> 00:02:28,290 And to think through what this case study, what this marketplace might do, how it might help might help us rethink these kind of debates around work, 27 00:02:28,290 --> 00:02:31,770 both historically through a bit of archival work that I did, 28 00:02:31,770 --> 00:02:39,180 but also ethnographic through a year of ethnographic fieldwork in this particular marketplace. 29 00:02:39,180 --> 00:02:48,210 So to make a start? We're living in strange times in terms of what we understand to be the world of work. 30 00:02:48,210 --> 00:02:54,780 So one of the most, historically most powerful kind of representations of work or the absence of work is the unemployment rate, 31 00:02:54,780 --> 00:03:01,920 the official unemployment rate. And you could argue these kind of representations have gone a long way to form a line, 32 00:03:01,920 --> 00:03:08,100 a large part of the contemporary legitimacy if there's such a thing of the current UK and US administrations. 33 00:03:08,100 --> 00:03:15,610 It's a very powerful kind of indicators and indicators that that have been used to justify various forms of intervention. 34 00:03:15,610 --> 00:03:18,750 And in the case of Uganda, 35 00:03:18,750 --> 00:03:27,480 under this constant kind of concern and emphasis and kind of moral concern with with youth employment and youth unemployment. 36 00:03:27,480 --> 00:03:30,310 And so these kind of statistics are rather familiar. All right. 37 00:03:30,310 --> 00:03:36,960 So historically, low unemployment rates in the UK, around four percent and much larger unemployment rates in Uganda, 38 00:03:36,960 --> 00:03:43,170 which rise to two, up to about 40 percent for for the youth population. And yet at the same time, 39 00:03:43,170 --> 00:03:47,130 we know that these historically low unemployment rates in the UK conceal the fact that 40 00:03:47,130 --> 00:03:52,650 a majority of those in poverty are either in work or residing in working families. 41 00:03:52,650 --> 00:03:57,720 And at the same time, these comparatively much larger unemployment rates in Uganda, 42 00:03:57,720 --> 00:04:02,820 the kind of representations of crisis, if you like, of moral concern, 43 00:04:02,820 --> 00:04:06,120 conceal the fact that according to other representations, 44 00:04:06,120 --> 00:04:12,600 Uganda was declared the most entrepreneurialism in the world recently by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. 45 00:04:12,600 --> 00:04:21,090 So how might we make sense of these kind of changing landscapes of work and geographical differentiation was the kind of broader story here, 46 00:04:21,090 --> 00:04:23,880 and there are different prongs to this. I mean, one of which is is, of course, 47 00:04:23,880 --> 00:04:31,650 the inability of the increased inability to wage employment and increase the relevance of wage deployment in most people's lives. 48 00:04:31,650 --> 00:04:36,930 The redundancy, therefore, of conventional measures such as the commercial unemployment employment rate, 49 00:04:36,930 --> 00:04:40,620 which in the UK includes people who are working two hours a week as an Uber driver, 50 00:04:40,620 --> 00:04:45,840 for example, to capture the realities of people's diverse working lives. 51 00:04:45,840 --> 00:04:52,740 And thirdly, the increased reliance on alternative and additional activities and exchanges to provide for people's basic needs. 52 00:04:52,740 --> 00:05:00,140 So we're saying if you like a destabilisation of the last 10, 20 years of conventional ideas of work and what it is to work. 53 00:05:00,140 --> 00:05:05,000 And at the same time, we're seeing the opening up of alternative scenarios and alternative theoretical space 54 00:05:05,000 --> 00:05:09,740 for thinking about how income identity and security might be woven together differently, 55 00:05:09,740 --> 00:05:16,230 whether for the better or for the worse. And it's in this kind of theoretical space that we see the arguments, 56 00:05:16,230 --> 00:05:21,470 the more recent contributions of people such as Ferguson arguing that across much of the world, 57 00:05:21,470 --> 00:05:25,610 people today lack access both to land and to waste employment. 58 00:05:25,610 --> 00:05:30,200 And these people form an increasingly prominent part of a social and political reality. Equally important, 59 00:05:30,200 --> 00:05:34,190 those occupying such ill defined and precarious social locations are both 60 00:05:34,190 --> 00:05:38,360 pioneering new modes of livelihood and making new kinds of political demands, 61 00:05:38,360 --> 00:05:41,210 right? So these kind of shifts, 62 00:05:41,210 --> 00:05:50,580 these kind of transformations needn't be the source of the kind of forms of condemnation and crisis that they often are often associated with. 63 00:05:50,580 --> 00:05:57,420 And then there's also the seeds of an alternative way of thinking about work within this kind of current scenario current crisis. 64 00:05:57,420 --> 00:05:58,250 At the same time, 65 00:05:58,250 --> 00:06:05,360 some of the barriers to thinking in different ways around work are the kind of theoretical baggage that we bring with us into this conversation. 66 00:06:05,360 --> 00:06:13,730 Right? And so scholars like Ferguson and Franco by Chelsea and from African contexts argue that this this idea of wage labour, 67 00:06:13,730 --> 00:06:19,880 of the reduction of work to wage labour and the wage relation remains hegemonic in the social sciences, 68 00:06:19,880 --> 00:06:29,300 reproducing what he calls a politics of labour nostalgia or an inability to kind of move beyond this kind of narrow conceptualisation of work. 69 00:06:29,300 --> 00:06:33,020 And so Ferguson Aliev argued more recently that there's a need for a profound analytical, 70 00:06:33,020 --> 00:06:43,010 deep centring of wage and salaried employment as a presumed norm Portillo's and a consequent reorientation of our empirical research protocols. 71 00:06:43,010 --> 00:06:50,090 So the challenge if you were, if you like, is to produce a reading which we might consider to be more politically useful, right? 72 00:06:50,090 --> 00:06:55,800 That is to say, if we suspend this idea of waste employment or suspend the singular idea of workers wages, 73 00:06:55,800 --> 00:07:02,600 employment, what alternative types of social political economic projects might come into view right beyond, 74 00:07:02,600 --> 00:07:06,770 for example, the trade union movement beyond, for example, 75 00:07:06,770 --> 00:07:15,070 the ILO's decent work agenda might what alternative types of projects might start to surface and come onto the horizon? 76 00:07:15,070 --> 00:07:22,660 So some broader questions raised, if you like, within this kind of uncertain world of work and this kind of new if you like theoretical terrain, 77 00:07:22,660 --> 00:07:30,640 how might we reclaim work from the confines of wage labour and more specifically thinking about the context of Uganda? 78 00:07:30,640 --> 00:07:37,960 How might we research and represents? This is social scientists sitting here in the UK alternative modes of cooperation, 79 00:07:37,960 --> 00:07:46,950 production and self provisioning in Africa without normalising exploitative and degrading conditions at work. 80 00:07:46,950 --> 00:07:56,010 And so some of the kind of points of departure here, I find some of the kind of people I find useful for thinking through this puzzle. 81 00:07:56,010 --> 00:08:02,670 First of all, an emphasis in Bombay and on this kind of scholarship on the importance of historic sizing, the wage relation in Africa, 82 00:08:02,670 --> 00:08:10,920 both as a form of violence and a techniques of governance that takes on different forms in different African context. 83 00:08:10,920 --> 00:08:16,980 Secondly, to quote the work, more recent work of measurement and kind of the emphasis of this coming out of much 84 00:08:16,980 --> 00:08:21,060 of the work in urban ethnography by reckoning with lived practises and living 85 00:08:21,060 --> 00:08:25,530 alternative to wage labour and examining the integrity of potential of new relations 86 00:08:25,530 --> 00:08:30,270 for nurturing what she terms social being through the material activities of living, 87 00:08:30,270 --> 00:08:38,700 going back to Marx and then thinking with Fanon about kind of reinterpreting the so-called lumpen proletariat, 88 00:08:38,700 --> 00:08:47,430 the importance of taking seriously the demands and the transformative potential of people located in the so-called marginal socioeconomic positions. 89 00:08:47,430 --> 00:08:54,270 People kind of parenting alternative modes of life and livelihood. 90 00:08:54,270 --> 00:08:56,940 And so what might be some of the stumbling blocks, I think, 91 00:08:56,940 --> 00:09:03,600 was the conversation that's happening between some of these kind of more radical if you like ways of thinking about work and some of 92 00:09:03,600 --> 00:09:12,990 the more conventional and dominant ways in which scholars have historically thought about work and thinking urban African contexts. 93 00:09:12,990 --> 00:09:21,990 Well, I think I can think of three dominant ways in the current kind of landscape that work is thought about in much of urban Africa in particular. 94 00:09:21,990 --> 00:09:26,790 And these are the kind of categories of informal entrepreneurialism surpluses. 95 00:09:26,790 --> 00:09:34,170 I do have informal work, entrepreneurialism or entrepreneurship and surplus workers surplus populations. 96 00:09:34,170 --> 00:09:38,400 The first of these debates is a very familiar one at this point. So informal work, 97 00:09:38,400 --> 00:09:47,880 which dates back to the work of the ILO key thought in the early 1970s as being economic activity unregistered or minimally registered with the state. 98 00:09:47,880 --> 00:09:56,880 All right. A discourse or a category that was central to the kind of just a of state models of development in the 1970s, 99 00:09:56,880 --> 00:10:06,840 and one which really reaffirms the state as the institution responsible for providing structure, security and protection and work. 100 00:10:06,840 --> 00:10:13,980 And so well, this has been helpful in many ways for notably for thinking bit more critically about the role of, 101 00:10:13,980 --> 00:10:17,790 for example, women and their relationships to the economy more broadly. 102 00:10:17,790 --> 00:10:21,510 It's been critiqued, first of all, for conjuring this dualistic idea of the economy, 103 00:10:21,510 --> 00:10:28,350 of the form of the informal and kind of missing the connexions between different segments of economic activity. 104 00:10:28,350 --> 00:10:31,290 But perhaps more significantly, for for this kind of question, 105 00:10:31,290 --> 00:10:37,080 the question I'm asking today for the fact that it renders deviant entire sectors of economic activity, 106 00:10:37,080 --> 00:10:48,830 social and economic activity that have long constituted what Janet McAfee is termed the real or the popular economy in many of an African context. 107 00:10:48,830 --> 00:11:00,380 Secondly, and more recently, there's a new a discourse kind of 20 or so years, going back to the 1980s on African workers being entrepreneurialism, 108 00:11:00,380 --> 00:11:05,900 which dates back really to the the World Bank and other kind of powerful 109 00:11:05,900 --> 00:11:10,640 developing institutions rebranding if you like the informal sector in the 1980s. 110 00:11:10,640 --> 00:11:24,980 And instead of saying exploitation instead of saying segregation instead of saying and marginalisation starting to see economic activity as being, 111 00:11:24,980 --> 00:11:32,930 uh, kind of starting to see these activities as volunteers crisis only to see economic activities as being deliberately separate from the state. 112 00:11:32,930 --> 00:11:39,980 Ratifying the market and particularly consumption as the institution responsible for generating and regulating work. 113 00:11:39,980 --> 00:11:46,430 Central to a switch towards market led developments from the 1990s as we know and critiqued extensively, 114 00:11:46,430 --> 00:11:52,130 particularly more recent literature and work by Catherine Dolan on on the Entrepreneurial South for seeking 115 00:11:52,130 --> 00:12:00,680 individual solutions to socially produced troubles and equating failure economic failure with individual deficiency. 116 00:12:00,680 --> 00:12:07,370 So people in places like Noncancer Market are now seen as the kind of individually responsible for the development of Uganda, 117 00:12:07,370 --> 00:12:12,590 individually responsible for contributing to the national gross product of Uganda. 118 00:12:12,590 --> 00:12:19,460 And so we see a new kind of model of a kind of development intervention in the work space, 119 00:12:19,460 --> 00:12:27,090 which is all about kind of rethinking people in marketplaces as as entrepreneurs and as job creators. 120 00:12:27,090 --> 00:12:33,390 And then thirdly, a categorisation of of African work and African workers, 121 00:12:33,390 --> 00:12:39,660 a surplus derived from from particularly more structuralist and kind of different 122 00:12:39,660 --> 00:12:46,770 strands of Marxist thinking on on economic activity in urban Africa today. 123 00:12:46,770 --> 00:12:54,000 So surplus work being understood as economic activities that are undervalued or undervalued by capitalist processes of accumulation. 124 00:12:54,000 --> 00:13:00,200 Central to what Gibson graham term capitalist centric theory and intervention. 125 00:13:00,200 --> 00:13:07,140 Right. And so the tendency here and the critique here is that the by kind of this constant emphasis 126 00:13:07,140 --> 00:13:12,270 on notions of waste and expandability and surplus become a kind of total housing framework, 127 00:13:12,270 --> 00:13:15,960 right? Suggesting as Captain Miller. And then you could widely, amongst others, 128 00:13:15,960 --> 00:13:20,520 have said as if to suggest that those not employed in wage labour or those subsisting outside of 129 00:13:20,520 --> 00:13:25,680 wage labour are somehow not engaged in any other productive activities or efforts in their lives. 130 00:13:25,680 --> 00:13:35,880 So the tendency here within this, this scholarship in this framework to reduce the complexities of work to the use value of capitalism. 131 00:13:35,880 --> 00:13:40,530 So we're thinking across these kind of three genres, these three kind of categories, 132 00:13:40,530 --> 00:13:47,620 if you like for thinking three way, what are the kind of values, the kind of general picture that's emerging here? 133 00:13:47,620 --> 00:13:54,390 Well, overall, these conceptualisation will centre a relatively narrow understanding of work as non-domestic paid, 134 00:13:54,390 --> 00:13:59,520 institutionalised market based employment. It's worth emphasising in historical terms. 135 00:13:59,520 --> 00:14:02,700 This is, of course, a relatively new idea of work rights. 136 00:14:02,700 --> 00:14:12,910 It's still a relatively new and novel idea of work dating back to the project of European industrialisation and its export through colonialism. 137 00:14:12,910 --> 00:14:19,150 And what this idea of work excludes is all kind of much of the anthropological 138 00:14:19,150 --> 00:14:23,290 scholarship on how socio economic life takes place in places like Uganda, 139 00:14:23,290 --> 00:14:28,150 right? So it excludes the dimensions of the reciprocal, the immediate and the degree of gratuitous, 140 00:14:28,150 --> 00:14:34,810 which are all pushed out of the economic sphere altogether, kind of evacuated from the economic sphere and excluded from a official statistics. 141 00:14:34,810 --> 00:14:45,140 Right. So we see a kind of tying down within these concepts of a relatively narrow idea of work and what it means to work. 142 00:14:45,140 --> 00:14:49,550 And Ferguson and Fred Cooper have argued that that underpinning this kind of tendency to revert 143 00:14:49,550 --> 00:14:55,910 to this is rather narrow conceptual work is a broader myth of proletarian ization in Africa. 144 00:14:55,910 --> 00:15:04,280 Right? So keepers argue that labour history is too wedded to the meta narrative opponent of proletarian ization, 145 00:15:04,280 --> 00:15:11,570 which treats this as a universal trend, right? Beginning in Europe and rolling out over the African continent. 146 00:15:11,570 --> 00:15:18,530 And yet we know that the number of people who fit into the category of the wage worker in post-colonial Africa did not grow as expected, 147 00:15:18,530 --> 00:15:23,870 and instead it was the category of it was the kind of alternate category you cite and variously known as customary labour, 148 00:15:23,870 --> 00:15:32,900 informal labour, precarious labour, surplus labour, etc., etc. but expanded and were colonial administrations reproduced the particular discourse 149 00:15:32,900 --> 00:15:38,480 of work to define and enforce these categories and associated ideas of private property, 150 00:15:38,480 --> 00:15:44,840 labour, time and discipline. Africans were trying to give such categories their own meanings and to seek alternatives 151 00:15:44,840 --> 00:15:49,150 to wage labour in responding to their growing interest in and commodities. 152 00:15:49,150 --> 00:15:59,720 Pierogies and Ferguson earlier this year has talked about the proletariat as a kind of inappropriate metaphor in the context of South Africa. 153 00:15:59,720 --> 00:16:05,510 So historically, a very particular category used to analyse political economic forms of 19th century Europe, 154 00:16:05,510 --> 00:16:12,350 which now struggles to find traction in the contemporary context in urban South Africa and struggles to kind of 155 00:16:12,350 --> 00:16:19,850 get to grips with and to describe the kind of diversity of kind of forms of life and labour that take place. 156 00:16:19,850 --> 00:16:22,790 For example, in South African cities. Right. 157 00:16:22,790 --> 00:16:28,910 So this is to say that there's a kind of meta narrative here that underpins a lot of the conversations that discourses around work in Africa, 158 00:16:28,910 --> 00:16:36,380 which conceals more than it reveals about the realities of working life. 159 00:16:36,380 --> 00:16:45,290 So where might we look for for kind of the seeds of alternative ideas of alternative kind of theories, oceans of work for kind of pluralism? 160 00:16:45,290 --> 00:16:56,390 If you like the conceptual apparatus that we have to describe evolving forms of work and livelihood in rapidly urbanising contexts such as component. 161 00:16:56,390 --> 00:17:04,910 Ferguson has an offer of offers up this idea of distributive labour, the work of surviving by accessing or making claims on the resources of others. 162 00:17:04,910 --> 00:17:06,680 Right. 163 00:17:06,680 --> 00:17:15,890 This is the idea that rather than production, most livelihood activities in contemporary southern African cities conform to ideas of distribution. 164 00:17:15,890 --> 00:17:20,690 Right. We're living in a distributed economy rather than a productive economy. 165 00:17:20,690 --> 00:17:25,670 And secondly, Julia Alisha's idea of putting labour right for the work, 166 00:17:25,670 --> 00:17:32,900 not of of producing value in the forms of capital for commodities, for sale on on capitalist market. 167 00:17:32,900 --> 00:17:37,760 But the work of creating and maintaining social channels through which information and resources can flow, 168 00:17:37,760 --> 00:17:46,670 which he argues has been fundamental to the historical survival, particularly of women, in this case in Cairo. 169 00:17:46,670 --> 00:17:57,440 And then if we think about the kind of proliferation of studies emerging within urban ethnography and in Africa, 170 00:17:57,440 --> 00:18:01,460 we see an emphasis on a much broader suddenly all kind of conceptual range of vocabulary becomes much broader. 171 00:18:01,460 --> 00:18:07,160 Right. So as emphasis on February IDs hustle, zigzag and make it right. 172 00:18:07,160 --> 00:18:14,600 And this literature, this kind of ethnographic literature emerging from from the kind of prolonged engagement with African 173 00:18:14,600 --> 00:18:20,930 cities places emphasis rather on the wage relation on ideas of occupations straddling occupations, 174 00:18:20,930 --> 00:18:28,670 simultaneously occupying multiple occupations of improvisation and experimentation 175 00:18:28,670 --> 00:18:34,010 of skills acquired outside of formal education of kin and social relations. 176 00:18:34,010 --> 00:18:39,650 And again, going back to Ferguson and on kind of systems of reciprocation and redistribution. 177 00:18:39,650 --> 00:18:46,460 And so this decision was really kind of playing with these kind of taken for granted delineations between work time and leisure time, 178 00:18:46,460 --> 00:18:50,540 between work and leisure and between work and life. Right. 179 00:18:50,540 --> 00:18:51,830 And so scholars like Tammany, 180 00:18:51,830 --> 00:19:00,230 some own kind of conceptualise these kind of activities are forms of life work right straddling these kind of taken for granted 181 00:19:00,230 --> 00:19:12,020 divisions that date back to categories derived from the historical experiences of industrial countries in Western Europe. 182 00:19:12,020 --> 00:19:13,640 Furthermore, we might think about. 183 00:19:13,640 --> 00:19:19,520 So we put this kind of a broader kind of conceptual apparatus, if you like to think through some of these questions, 184 00:19:19,520 --> 00:19:27,290 some of these puzzles we might think about what are the conventional sites in which work has been studied in Africa? 185 00:19:27,290 --> 00:19:35,870 Right. So we might think back to historical ethnographic work on proliferation of anthropological studies of the copper belt, 186 00:19:35,870 --> 00:19:42,110 for example, and in Zambia, and then thinking about to a lesser extent. 187 00:19:42,110 --> 00:19:49,820 But the kind of proliferation of more Orthodox Marxist concerns with the factory as the space in which working subjectivities are produced, 188 00:19:49,820 --> 00:19:57,740 in which work is studied. And then as a result of the interventions of second major second wave feminism, we might think about the household. 189 00:19:57,740 --> 00:20:03,920 And then more recently, through racial capitalism, we're being encouraged to think through the plantation and the prison as spaces of 190 00:20:03,920 --> 00:20:09,290 work spaces through which working subject tenancies are produced and manufactured. 191 00:20:09,290 --> 00:20:16,130 And each of these sites involves its own form of socialisation, discipline and subject formation. 192 00:20:16,130 --> 00:20:23,420 And so my own site is it is a slightly different site. So a different, slightly different site in which to think through some of these questions. 193 00:20:23,420 --> 00:20:33,120 That is the site of the marketplace, as I've as I've mentioned, which of course has a long history and a long kind of literature in African studies. 194 00:20:33,120 --> 00:20:42,860 All right. So for many years, people have been conducting research on the significance of African marketplaces as sites of communication of trade, 195 00:20:42,860 --> 00:20:48,440 particularly into kind of cultural and international trade politics in relation to the 196 00:20:48,440 --> 00:20:54,620 more recent debates on urban regeneration and development of sites of performance, 197 00:20:54,620 --> 00:20:57,720 and also as transgressive spaces for gender roles in relations. Right? 198 00:20:57,720 --> 00:21:02,780 The very rich literature on markets and these kind of ways over less attention being paid to the role 199 00:21:02,780 --> 00:21:08,840 of markets and particularly transgressive potential of markets in relation to the study of work. 200 00:21:08,840 --> 00:21:15,320 Right. What is it about a marketplace? What does a marketplace do to preconceived ideas of work, right? 201 00:21:15,320 --> 00:21:22,470 How might a marketplace make us rethink and reconceptualize dominant ways of thinking through work and labour, right? 202 00:21:22,470 --> 00:21:24,260 Those are interesting places to ask these questions. 203 00:21:24,260 --> 00:21:31,920 Insofar as they are, they've almost become directly associated with the emergence of the types of categories in populations described earlier. 204 00:21:31,920 --> 00:21:41,210 Right? So the population in so the market was constructed by the British colonial administration for around 300 people. 205 00:21:41,210 --> 00:21:44,990 And today the infrastructure is the physical infrastructure is very much the same 206 00:21:44,990 --> 00:21:48,560 for those of you haven't been in the space of kind of 300 400 metres squared. 207 00:21:48,560 --> 00:21:53,300 You can kind of see this image here. And so this very same space in this very same infrastructure today provides a 208 00:21:53,300 --> 00:21:58,220 livelihood for over 10000 people from across Uganda and the broader region. 209 00:21:58,220 --> 00:22:07,730 So interesting to think about in the context of this so-called explosion or emergence of of of people seeking a livelihood outside of wage labour. 210 00:22:07,730 --> 00:22:15,860 What are the ways in which they are making a living and making sense of what they're doing in spaces like Coursera, right? 211 00:22:15,860 --> 00:22:22,310 So how is work been historically kind of categorised, imagined and performed in these kind of spaces, right? 212 00:22:22,310 --> 00:22:29,630 To what extent is this thinking about Mark work through the marketplace and settle the single story of wage employment? 213 00:22:29,630 --> 00:22:35,330 And what alternative visions of work might it bring into view, as I'm attracted also to to mix own, 214 00:22:35,330 --> 00:22:41,090 I'd get this idea of the marketplace as a space that as long provided a context for witnessing how social and 215 00:22:41,090 --> 00:22:48,860 economic realities get done as examples of collective self-management that unsettle the dominance of any one story. 216 00:22:48,860 --> 00:22:54,380 This is why governments see markets as dangerous places for the long association between markets 217 00:22:54,380 --> 00:23:05,010 and the transgressive as spaces that are beyond the kind of direct regulation of the state. 218 00:23:05,010 --> 00:23:22,980 So I'm going to sketch out now thinking historically through these questions in relation to the particular case of Macassar Market. 219 00:23:22,980 --> 00:23:28,890 So a brief sketch of apologies for those of you familiar with the literature on Buganda and beyond, of course, 220 00:23:28,890 --> 00:23:34,800 one of the most largest symmetrical annual Central African kingdoms at the end of the 19th century. 221 00:23:34,800 --> 00:23:41,130 This is coming through Holly Hansen's work through the archive on the pre-colonial and the kingdom. 222 00:23:41,130 --> 00:23:45,450 So Hanson argues that the basic ecological unit in the region was the hill surrounded by banana gardens, 223 00:23:45,450 --> 00:23:50,250 which form the basis of Canada economy, sociology and nutrition clerkship. 224 00:23:50,250 --> 00:23:54,240 She argues that the primary marker of identity and solidarity and political accountability 225 00:23:54,240 --> 00:23:58,980 provided through a kind of decentralised networks of chiefs which connect the Newbery, 226 00:23:58,980 --> 00:24:06,810 the Gunda Palace with the provinces beyond right elibiary. 227 00:24:06,810 --> 00:24:09,840 So the capital of the beyond the region moved on the ascension of each different 228 00:24:09,840 --> 00:24:17,160 king and settling in modern day Kampala towards the end of the 19th century, 229 00:24:17,160 --> 00:24:24,740 right? And so this would this would work have made sense in particular Uganda, right? 230 00:24:24,740 --> 00:24:29,520 What is an engagement with the kind of archive? What is an engagement with the historical that Trump began to do? 231 00:24:29,520 --> 00:24:40,260 I'm talking specialisations of work. So to the began to there was an emphasis on on on ties of reciprocal obligation to create Connexions, 232 00:24:40,260 --> 00:24:46,470 to incorporate strangers and to vanquish competitors, in Hansen's words. So rather than through market exchange goods, 233 00:24:46,470 --> 00:24:54,550 we provided for gift exchange and chiefs responsible for feeding their followers who would withdraw allegiance if they felt mistreated. 234 00:24:54,550 --> 00:25:02,370 And that is to say it rather than a market economy. This is a gift economy in which is a great emphasis going back into the Anthropocene 235 00:25:02,370 --> 00:25:07,950 literature on accumulating wealth in people rather than wealth in material goods. 236 00:25:07,950 --> 00:25:12,660 And so China shows this kind of brought this thesis up to date by arguing that in contemporary Buganda, 237 00:25:12,660 --> 00:25:24,880 strategies of self making continue to involve creating and using networks which are often hierarchical to secure support, which is often material. 238 00:25:24,880 --> 00:25:33,400 And so this was a space in which, as we shall see, kind of one day conception of a marketplace didn't make a lot of sense. 239 00:25:33,400 --> 00:25:39,880 Right? And indeed, you can read the kind of history of the tensions and the arguments and debates that were taking place in the archive. 240 00:25:39,880 --> 00:25:47,470 Through the archive, I should say about the arrival of the kind of and the emergence of the first marketplaces in Buganda, 241 00:25:47,470 --> 00:25:55,150 which interestingly were were promoted initially by not by the clan administration, but by the Catholic missionaries. 242 00:25:55,150 --> 00:26:00,820 So in the pre-colonial era, markets in the Great Lakes were restricted, predominate for borders and no man's land between different kingdoms. 243 00:26:00,820 --> 00:26:04,480 Right. So no need for kind of market exchange within the kingdom itself. 244 00:26:04,480 --> 00:26:11,980 Right. Insofar as goods are provided for these kind of disaggregated networks of chiefs and gift exchange. 245 00:26:11,980 --> 00:26:17,230 And so as Catholic missionaries, that made the case for a new market in 1881. 246 00:26:17,230 --> 00:26:22,780 And so this is from appliances theory. The king asked me the other day as to how he could enrich this country. 247 00:26:22,780 --> 00:26:28,810 I gave him a few items of information. First, let there be a market not where the king can sell is surplus supplies, 248 00:26:28,810 --> 00:26:34,760 but a market for the people where the peasants can buy and sell, make profit and get supplies. 249 00:26:34,760 --> 00:26:41,710 Right? And so in matters kind of analysis of these kind of interactions was this is a way of concealing the reliance. 250 00:26:41,710 --> 00:26:43,840 The increased reliance on the Catholic Church, 251 00:26:43,840 --> 00:26:50,560 on the monarchy for its survival in the book and the reason for its ability to get supplies and reproduce itself. 252 00:26:50,560 --> 00:26:57,790 And so a marketplace along these lines was very much seen to be in the interests of the Catholic Church. 253 00:26:57,790 --> 00:27:05,660 Interesting also for kind of thinking about what kind of challenging this kind of idea of the market as this kind of great secular institution, 254 00:27:05,660 --> 00:27:08,890 right in the context of began. 255 00:27:08,890 --> 00:27:17,560 And so the Kabaka opens the first market in the Kabuga in eighteen eighty two and names it the child buys for himself a painting to this 256 00:27:17,560 --> 00:27:26,440 kind of popular idea of the market for the people and meadowlark is that the people responded at the time by criticising the Kabaka, 257 00:27:26,440 --> 00:27:32,320 right? By calling the Kabaka a selfish on account of the fact that they were now expected to purchase 258 00:27:32,320 --> 00:27:39,940 goods like cattle from his marketplace for cash and for exchange of other commodities, 259 00:27:39,940 --> 00:27:43,300 rather than through other forms of exchange and by the free gift exchange, 260 00:27:43,300 --> 00:27:49,260 most notably, which is historically form the basis of acquiring cattle in the Kingdom. 261 00:27:49,260 --> 00:28:00,440 And we then see the entry of of British colonial rule in 1990, led by Frederick Lugard, enshrined in the 1800s Buganda Agreement, 262 00:28:00,440 --> 00:28:06,230 which divides British from Buganda land and accompanied by a range of land reforms and poll taxes, 263 00:28:06,230 --> 00:28:13,100 which Hansen argues forced people in the region to engage in activities outside of Canada. 264 00:28:13,100 --> 00:28:17,170 Outside of the realm of kind of Ganda notions of production. 265 00:28:17,170 --> 00:28:21,740 Right. So compelling the indigenous population to engage in different forms of labour. 266 00:28:21,740 --> 00:28:24,440 And this is set out. 267 00:28:24,440 --> 00:28:34,640 I think most effectively and in the the agreement itself, which you can now read a as part of the release of the restricted archive, 268 00:28:34,640 --> 00:28:40,430 I believe that was released in relation to the Maamoun settlement two or three years ago. 269 00:28:40,430 --> 00:28:48,730 And so you can now read the original form of the correspondence between the British colonial administration 270 00:28:48,730 --> 00:28:55,610 and what would become the British colony administration and the began the chiefs from nineteen hundreds. 271 00:28:55,610 --> 00:29:03,260 And so what I find most interesting about these kinds of documents is a very kind of affecting critique of the idea, 272 00:29:03,260 --> 00:29:09,680 the very idea of a market of a of a market, but also the idea of a of wage labour. 273 00:29:09,680 --> 00:29:16,280 Right. And so we see here on one point two in their response to the Jackson, the British administration, 274 00:29:16,280 --> 00:29:21,740 we agree to the annual hot tax of one shilling hut, which is a reasonable tax. 275 00:29:21,740 --> 00:29:31,310 We would, however, ask you how invalids and old men and women are to obtain means for this tax when 276 00:29:31,310 --> 00:29:34,730 they do not have access to the wages for employment and have access to work. 277 00:29:34,730 --> 00:29:40,880 So as an immediate concern with with kind of how categories of person that don't conform this kind of racialized, 278 00:29:40,880 --> 00:29:45,470 the idea of the male wage worker to conform, 279 00:29:45,470 --> 00:29:54,020 to comply simply to exist within the idea of the market economy, put forward in the correspondence of the British administration. 280 00:29:54,020 --> 00:30:00,410 And the letter ends by saying many of our neighbours have regularly warned us that the Europeans will possess our country, 281 00:30:00,410 --> 00:30:07,580 but we protested against what they said. We pointed out to them that they could see for themselves that the Europeans, although powerful, 282 00:30:07,580 --> 00:30:17,250 respect our customs for the sake of our friendly relations and our neighbours will defeat us in this contention of us. 283 00:30:17,250 --> 00:30:24,720 And so Jackson's response to that concerns was to argue that if the result of the proposed changes to make 284 00:30:24,720 --> 00:30:29,880 idle men do a certain amount of work in return for the privilege of existing in this beautiful world, 285 00:30:29,880 --> 00:30:37,080 it will be a very good thing for Uganda. Her Majesty the Queen is the hardest working woman in her dominions, 286 00:30:37,080 --> 00:30:42,240 so a real ratification of the value of wage employment here based on a racialised idea of the male wage worker. 287 00:30:42,240 --> 00:30:44,580 And I think most importantly, 288 00:30:44,580 --> 00:30:57,060 it's often messed with in these kind of conceptualisation is the simultaneous distancing and criminalisation even of all other forms of work, right? 289 00:30:57,060 --> 00:31:06,210 So rather than conforming to other forms of work, people are the people in Uganda become labelled as idle men, idleness and criminals. 290 00:31:06,210 --> 00:31:10,230 And also interesting going back to Mbemba is thinking about the role of the wage relation, 291 00:31:10,230 --> 00:31:17,520 the role of race in employment and the justification of it not in economic terms, but in kind of disciplinary terms, right? 292 00:31:17,520 --> 00:31:21,240 Which is emphasised continually through these kind of correspondences in the archives. 293 00:31:21,240 --> 00:31:26,460 So Jackson's successor argued that I have no hesitation that this tax will prove to be the making of the country, 294 00:31:26,460 --> 00:31:31,030 not because of the revenue it brings in, but because of the habits of work it insulates. 295 00:31:31,030 --> 00:31:40,910 Right? It's this idea of disciplining bodies with the aim of making better use of them in relation to the colonial market economy. 296 00:31:40,910 --> 00:31:47,000 And so we start to see the proliferation of diverse livelihood activities around this time. 297 00:31:47,000 --> 00:31:52,220 The first market on on McKaiser is current site was present in 1995, 298 00:31:52,220 --> 00:31:57,890 is an account from a contemporary member of the market who's talking about his 299 00:31:57,890 --> 00:32:01,910 father and his grandfather and their engagement in early markets and component. 300 00:32:01,910 --> 00:32:05,450 So these are the Indians established a small market here where they could get onions and spices. 301 00:32:05,450 --> 00:32:09,740 It was not a local food like cassava and so on, because that was for our indigenous people. 302 00:32:09,740 --> 00:32:13,070 When the spices were brought in here, we began digging them and selling them. 303 00:32:13,070 --> 00:32:18,050 Even my father used to come and sell spices in the market every morning after his working in the palace. 304 00:32:18,050 --> 00:32:23,220 So he's working the palace, but he was farming spices on the side as an extra business. 305 00:32:23,220 --> 00:32:26,390 So even as early as the kind of the very, very start the 20th century CE, 306 00:32:26,390 --> 00:32:32,070 the proliferation of diverse and livelihood activities and particularly the kind of straddling of the market and non-market economies. 307 00:32:32,070 --> 00:32:42,920 So in this case this fall, this kind of performing tributary latent labour for the public and the monarchy at the same time as selling spices 308 00:32:42,920 --> 00:32:51,560 on the side in the market economy in Kampala and so early photographs of some of the first marketplaces in Kampala. 309 00:32:51,560 --> 00:32:54,410 When thinking through the history of markets also interests to differentiate 310 00:32:54,410 --> 00:32:57,680 and try and kind of tease out the differences between the market as a client, 311 00:32:57,680 --> 00:33:01,760 the marketplace as a colonial institution and kind of different assemblages or 312 00:33:01,760 --> 00:33:06,980 different ideas and marketplaces that were assembled in different parts of the city, 313 00:33:06,980 --> 00:33:15,930 but the modern day city at this time. Right. So Nicastro Market was very much located within the racialised confines of compartments of 314 00:33:15,930 --> 00:33:22,970 polity within so-called Indian commercial space located here within the centre of Kampala. 315 00:33:22,970 --> 00:33:33,280 So African kind of day vendors and so-called luggage carriers were permitted entry into the market during the day, but had to leave at night. 316 00:33:33,280 --> 00:33:37,460 Right. And so what that meant is that other forms of marketplace, 317 00:33:37,460 --> 00:33:41,210 other kind of ideas of marketplace began to proliferate in other bits of the city around 318 00:33:41,210 --> 00:33:46,340 around the kind of edges of Kampala Township and conforming to different types of logic. 319 00:33:46,340 --> 00:33:50,870 Right. And what's interesting here is that these kind of market scenes conform much more, 320 00:33:50,870 --> 00:33:57,500 much more closely to kind of the contemporary nicastro market than the colonial market did. 321 00:33:57,500 --> 00:34:00,740 And what we see here is a much more flexible idea of the marketplace in which 322 00:34:00,740 --> 00:34:05,390 anyone can come on any given day without necessarily having a rental contract, 323 00:34:05,390 --> 00:34:08,840 without necessarily having to have a legally kind of designated space. 324 00:34:08,840 --> 00:34:12,950 Everyone can come on a given day with a certain amount of goods and pace and amount of money to 325 00:34:12,950 --> 00:34:17,540 the people around them and and sell everything they had until until I've done and they go home. 326 00:34:17,540 --> 00:34:20,030 They may come back the next day, they may not rent. 327 00:34:20,030 --> 00:34:29,540 So more kind of spontaneous kind of intrusive idea of the marketplace than that put forward by the current administration. 328 00:34:29,540 --> 00:34:38,810 And we then see, of course, a range of of of licencing laws and kind of legal instruments aiming to prohibit the entry of 329 00:34:38,810 --> 00:34:47,330 of of the so-called petty trader or African trader into the European and Indian marketplace. 330 00:34:47,330 --> 00:34:52,730 So this is quite amazing quotation from a colonial researcher, Brailsford, 331 00:34:52,730 --> 00:34:59,980 in relation to the copper markets in the markets in the Copper Belt in Zambia, 332 00:34:59,980 --> 00:35:05,210 which is also quoted and cited by pipeline administrators in Kampala at the time. 333 00:35:05,210 --> 00:35:09,920 And he argued it is not undesirable for an African to make money, but the danger lies in the second fascination. 334 00:35:09,920 --> 00:35:15,590 Fascination of marketeering for added to financial reward is the attraction of a leisurely way of life. 335 00:35:15,590 --> 00:35:16,700 The man is his own master. 336 00:35:16,700 --> 00:35:23,570 He does not have to follow the grind of monotonous labour, and shouting and gossiping between cells is a way of life that has its compensations. 337 00:35:23,570 --> 00:35:27,380 Even in cases where the cash receipts or is not as big as from labour and a 338 00:35:27,380 --> 00:35:30,920 great many cases is designed for the leisurely life has developed into low paid, 339 00:35:30,920 --> 00:35:33,590 low paying for their a few shillings to be made. 340 00:35:33,590 --> 00:35:39,650 Such profits are not deserved, and they earned by a lazy man or unemployed worker at the expense of the consumer. 341 00:35:39,650 --> 00:35:50,210 So again, we see this kind of real re-emphasise of this kind of racialised idea of the wage earning male worker right? 342 00:35:50,210 --> 00:35:59,180 And at the same time, the criminalisation of all kind of all alternative ideas of what it means to work right. 343 00:35:59,180 --> 00:36:04,340 Going back to the elections of fatigue, Labour write a great a great amount of the work in the marketplace. 344 00:36:04,340 --> 00:36:11,150 The contemporary marketplace is exactly around these forms of networking, of gossiping, of negotiation, of gift exchange. 345 00:36:11,150 --> 00:36:17,930 And so we've seen. And so we see in the 1930s a marketplace with very few people in it. 346 00:36:17,930 --> 00:36:25,910 All right. Very kind of highly regulated space suggested here by the kind of the policeman standing on the kind of right 347 00:36:25,910 --> 00:36:33,050 hand side of the picture observing the kind of enforcement officer observing the space in front of him? 348 00:36:33,050 --> 00:36:37,160 Right. A space is a kind of picture is very difficult to imagine. 349 00:36:37,160 --> 00:36:40,940 And in contemporary component, 350 00:36:40,940 --> 00:36:50,240 we then see in the 1960s and the early kind of post-independence era scholars such as Christine Obo and Meccanica Masisi have written about the 351 00:36:50,240 --> 00:36:59,480 kind of incremental role of of of the Canada market trade and particularly the female gender market trader in the early post-independence era. 352 00:36:59,480 --> 00:37:08,660 And so this is the famous postcard of female fruit sellers in front of the new Ugandan Parliament Buildings, the 1960s and 70s. 353 00:37:08,660 --> 00:37:15,290 He argues that during this period, the the retreats of the colonial state and in some sense, 354 00:37:15,290 --> 00:37:24,290 the kind of partiality of the independent state created new spaces and opportunities for women to enter the cash economy. 355 00:37:24,290 --> 00:37:28,280 So Canada women began trading from their households on footpaths and roads and the passageways 356 00:37:28,280 --> 00:37:33,640 between city buildings and in open-air marketplaces akin to those that we saw minutes ago. 357 00:37:33,640 --> 00:37:38,930 And they also created their own new kind of urban infrastructures, including the female night market. 358 00:37:38,930 --> 00:37:44,000 The 10 year old candy, or don't step in mine. So I'll use this on year as a place. 359 00:37:44,000 --> 00:37:49,790 Where can the women pursue aggressive mini capitalist ventures selling food by the light of paraffin lanterns? 360 00:37:49,790 --> 00:37:56,460 For me, a demand generated by shortages of food and cooking cooking equipment in the early post-colonial era? 361 00:37:56,460 --> 00:38:01,220 Right. So we see the kind of the proliferation of different ideas of work. 362 00:38:01,220 --> 00:38:09,230 And if you like the appropriation of the marketplace by the gang, the population in particular by going to women, right? 363 00:38:09,230 --> 00:38:17,150 Combining ideas of market exchange, many capitalist fantasies described Masisi with other forms of reciprocation right through which women, 364 00:38:17,150 --> 00:38:21,710 for example, which one, five or six different women would share the same space in the marketplace, right? 365 00:38:21,710 --> 00:38:28,010 And share childcare responsibilities on the occasions where they were unable to attend the market. 366 00:38:28,010 --> 00:38:43,040 The 1970s is an image of a of an Asian man being arrested on Kampala Road next to the marketplace and as part of the expulsion in the 1970s. 367 00:38:43,040 --> 00:38:50,870 In an interesting era in terms of Amin's Uganda, in terms of this is we're kind of entering into the kind of oral history of the marketplace here, 368 00:38:50,870 --> 00:38:54,800 the living history of the marketplace in which people would talk about the role of static labour, 369 00:38:54,800 --> 00:38:59,760 the role of kind of hidden channels and communications for sustaining life in the market, right? 370 00:38:59,760 --> 00:39:10,040 There's a period of heavy regulation of tariffs of rationing, which was negotiated by people in the market through these forms of frantic labour, 371 00:39:10,040 --> 00:39:12,890 illustrated by the fact that by the 19th early 1980s, 372 00:39:12,890 --> 00:39:19,130 politicians had to come and address the market vendors in the market rather than the other way around. 373 00:39:19,130 --> 00:39:29,330 So this is a Laura Callow addressing market traders in 1980, pleading with them to obey government legislation on price restrictions. 374 00:39:29,330 --> 00:39:35,390 And so this kind of appropriation, if you like to the market or a kind of plural ization of the idea of what the marketplace, 375 00:39:35,390 --> 00:39:44,180 this continues to the present day and to the kind of privatisation through which market vendors have continually over kind of a 20 year period, 376 00:39:44,180 --> 00:39:53,090 successfully resisted redevelopment and privatisation by laying claim to alternative ideas to very particular ideas about what the marketplace is. 377 00:39:53,090 --> 00:39:57,830 So a lot of the placards during this period read things like Don't you want us to eat right? 378 00:39:57,830 --> 00:40:03,650 So making claims to the moral economy of the marketplace and making claims of their livelihood, 379 00:40:03,650 --> 00:40:07,040 but also making claims over the marketplace as a broader institution, 380 00:40:07,040 --> 00:40:15,380 an educational institution, a place that provides food and also contacts and livelihood to new arrivals in the city, 381 00:40:15,380 --> 00:40:22,490 eventually ending in a consultation with the very opportunistic Museveni. 382 00:40:22,490 --> 00:40:31,790 Just prior to the election. And so that kind of final slide here is thinking about. 383 00:40:31,790 --> 00:40:39,550 So during this period, you've seen this kind of journey from this kind of interaction of different ideas of work through the pre-colonial era, 384 00:40:39,550 --> 00:40:44,110 thinking about the role of gift exchange and using persons and ideas of economy and 385 00:40:44,110 --> 00:40:48,820 sociality for the colonial era for this kind of very deliberate attempt to kind of tie down 386 00:40:48,820 --> 00:40:53,410 and reduce this very restrictive idea of work as wage as a kind of masculine wage labour 387 00:40:53,410 --> 00:40:57,200 and then into the kind of neoliberal Uganda in which we have a different kind of idea. 388 00:40:57,200 --> 00:41:01,240 This kind of idea of entrepreneurship starts to to enter popular discourse. 389 00:41:01,240 --> 00:41:09,610 And scholars like Wheatgrass have argued for the proliferation of so-called neoliberal norms and values within these kind of marketplaces. 390 00:41:09,610 --> 00:41:13,420 All right. So affecting the moral order of the marketplace, 391 00:41:13,420 --> 00:41:19,930 these kind of neoliberal norms and values manifested in the rise of individual self-interest, inquisitiveness and ruthlessness. 392 00:41:19,930 --> 00:41:24,310 So the question really for an ethnographic question, which is about how the idea, 393 00:41:24,310 --> 00:41:28,720 this particular idea of the marketplace interacts with previous ideas? Right. 394 00:41:28,720 --> 00:41:32,650 Both Gandhi's ideas of the marketplace as being a kind of foreign institution. 395 00:41:32,650 --> 00:41:41,020 Right. Which which is kind of undermines systems of gift exchange to this kind of more restrictive, 396 00:41:41,020 --> 00:41:45,400 reductive idea of the British colonial administration marketplace. 397 00:41:45,400 --> 00:41:51,820 How do these kind of different ideas of what it is to be a marketplace and what it is to work in the marketplace, interact with one another? 398 00:41:51,820 --> 00:41:58,310 So that's the kind of ethnographic question is the last? Snapshot, if you like. 399 00:41:58,310 --> 00:42:05,710 Before I provide some reflections. 400 00:42:05,710 --> 00:42:14,470 So this is the mark at the time of my entry in 2014, at which point something I said around 10000 people a residing in this particular place. 401 00:42:14,470 --> 00:42:22,480 And so one of my first tasks was was trying to kind of write down and I'm trying to get to grips with all the different socioeconomic, 402 00:42:22,480 --> 00:42:27,100 social, economic activities that were taking place within the space. 403 00:42:27,100 --> 00:42:31,850 And so it soon became apparent that this task was akin to that of writing a dictionary. 404 00:42:31,850 --> 00:42:38,740 All right. Insofar as as soon as you would write down 10, 20, 30, 40 different activities that were taking place in different space, 405 00:42:38,740 --> 00:42:43,330 a dozen more would kind of arise or fusions of different activities would could arise, 406 00:42:43,330 --> 00:42:47,740 or people would describe what they were doing differently on different days. 407 00:42:47,740 --> 00:42:52,930 But from kind of more conventional understandings of of work in relation to procurement, retail, 408 00:42:52,930 --> 00:42:59,050 wholesaling, brokering, transporting by lying to kind of more intermediary activities like speculation, 409 00:42:59,050 --> 00:43:07,690 money lending, gambling and service provision involving entertainment, catering, waitressing, cleaning, recycling, etc. 410 00:43:07,690 --> 00:43:11,510 And so this idea in terms of the thinking about work. 411 00:43:11,510 --> 00:43:16,300 And one of the puzzles here was thinking about the ways in which people made sense of their exchanges in the market, right? 412 00:43:16,300 --> 00:43:21,280 And exchanges which did not conform to conventional ideas of of wage exchange. 413 00:43:21,280 --> 00:43:28,210 So to give an example, somebody would say when you go and park your car in the market, which is very difficult to do, 414 00:43:28,210 --> 00:43:33,750 two or three guys will come and kind of block off a space for you or guide you to the best place in the market, 415 00:43:33,750 --> 00:43:44,650 a very familiar scene in markets all over the world, and they will not expect an immediate payment necessarily for that service. 416 00:43:44,650 --> 00:43:49,900 All right. What they will expect, however, is for you to procure another service for them as you kind of enter into a different kind of 417 00:43:49,900 --> 00:43:54,610 contract with them through which they then carry your shopping for you around the marketplace. 418 00:43:54,610 --> 00:43:58,870 Right? Which then would raise expectations of a cash payment. 419 00:43:58,870 --> 00:44:05,740 But as all kinds of other kinds of interactions in which a service is rendered and without an immediate economic return. 420 00:44:05,740 --> 00:44:12,700 So is a question about what this does to our conception of work when we suspend payment, when we suspend when the return is somehow suspended. 421 00:44:12,700 --> 00:44:19,120 All right. How might this kind of complicate our understandings of work and the wage relation? 422 00:44:19,120 --> 00:44:27,100 And so to trying to get to grips of some of these questions? So in addition to kind of mapping out different socio economic activities, 423 00:44:27,100 --> 00:44:30,790 those involve kind of mapping out different social and cultural institutions in the market, 424 00:44:30,790 --> 00:44:39,670 which again were numerous from all kinds of of of kind of committees which appear to follow the language of of the kind of Clinton administration. 425 00:44:39,670 --> 00:44:45,420 So market disciplinary committees in particular and the language of the contemporary Ugandan state, for example, 426 00:44:45,420 --> 00:44:53,650 there is even a market defence committee responsible for defending the market from the incursions of outside forces, 427 00:44:53,650 --> 00:45:01,600 but also a range of kind of sporting, cultural and institutions that might be associated with forms of social welfare. 428 00:45:01,600 --> 00:45:10,420 Burial societies forms of social assistance that you can appeal to in cases where you're unable to work. 429 00:45:10,420 --> 00:45:18,040 And so in illuminating these kind of the interaction of these kind of economic activities in the social institutions that underpin them, 430 00:45:18,040 --> 00:45:27,010 I had a kind of ethnographic extract which follows one particular member of the market around over the course of a typical market day. 431 00:45:27,010 --> 00:45:36,470 And so this is Alex, who's in his early 20s, and he describes his role in the market as one of a waste picker and a recycler, 432 00:45:36,470 --> 00:45:43,960 someone who moves rubbish and collects rubbish from different pots and waste from different parts of the market and deposits it and the rubbish dump, 433 00:45:43,960 --> 00:45:50,980 right? And so I'll now try and illustrate some of his kind of daily interactions as a way of 434 00:45:50,980 --> 00:45:57,130 thinking through different kind of forms of work that exist in the contemporary market. 435 00:45:57,130 --> 00:46:01,390 And so Alex is twenty six year old and twenty six years old, 436 00:46:01,390 --> 00:46:07,360 and you arrived in the market about three years ago as an orphan without a secondary school 437 00:46:07,360 --> 00:46:12,110 qualification or the contacts or capital necessary to enter other areas of the market, 438 00:46:12,110 --> 00:46:22,210 right? Well, the contacts of capital necessary to enter the proper kind of market economy, right, as in the sale of commodities. 439 00:46:22,210 --> 00:46:28,510 And so in some owns word, it might be said of someone who arrived in the market with only his bare life to offer. 440 00:46:28,510 --> 00:46:37,060 And so he wakes up every morning around 6:00 in the morning on the veranda of a hardware store on the edge of the market. 441 00:46:37,060 --> 00:46:41,650 He's woken by Frank Matovic, the owner of the shop, who greets him before opening his business. 442 00:46:41,650 --> 00:46:47,410 Frank and Alex are the same age. A university graduate, Frank is responsible for one of his mother's several shops in the market, 443 00:46:47,410 --> 00:46:51,800 including handling phone calls to suppliers of tools and appliances from China and Dubai. 444 00:46:51,800 --> 00:46:59,920 Right. So conventional kind of sociological analysis would put frank and omics in very different class categorisations. 445 00:46:59,920 --> 00:47:04,240 Right? The shop veranda offers Alex a space of shelter in relative. 446 00:47:04,240 --> 00:47:07,570 Safety not found, another is the market or the centre of Kampala, 447 00:47:07,570 --> 00:47:15,370 which Frank provides in return for the security that Alex offers his shop at night through his provision of eyes on the street. 448 00:47:15,370 --> 00:47:18,500 Frank describes Alex as a low earner in the market. So again, 449 00:47:18,500 --> 00:47:23,740 I got kind of class distinction and in doing so invokes the obligations that so-called high earners such as 450 00:47:23,740 --> 00:47:34,150 himself have in providing addicts with forms of work advice and other unnamed forms of material support. 451 00:47:34,150 --> 00:47:38,530 So after waking up on on on Veranda, Alex crosses the road. 452 00:47:38,530 --> 00:47:45,850 Sorry, into the ghetto, and the ghetto is the entry point into the market, with people with only their bare limbs, 453 00:47:45,850 --> 00:47:50,200 they've said, and willingness to engage in challenging forms of physical labour. 454 00:47:50,200 --> 00:47:54,130 New arrivals by their entry into the market, into the ghetto through the offer of gifts, 455 00:47:54,130 --> 00:47:58,420 which are then shared out amongst the group after initially being chased away from the market. 456 00:47:58,420 --> 00:48:03,160 On his arrival, Alex secured his entry through the offer of cigarettes, which were then shared out amongst the group. 457 00:48:03,160 --> 00:48:12,130 So in this particular space, he takes a drink of water, Archie Ugandan spirit, an exchange of stories with the men in the area from the night before. 458 00:48:12,130 --> 00:48:16,690 After a couple of hours, he then says he begins work where he begins his hustle. 459 00:48:16,690 --> 00:48:17,950 He leaves the ghetto and walks through. 460 00:48:17,950 --> 00:48:23,710 The Cabango near Cabango is inhabited by a younger group of men who arrived in the market with small amounts of capital, 461 00:48:23,710 --> 00:48:29,290 which they were able to purchase single sacks of produce that they sell in this 462 00:48:29,290 --> 00:48:31,990 open air of the markets is the area of the market that very much resembles, 463 00:48:31,990 --> 00:48:38,710 if you like, the very early markets of the 20th century, which we see on the outskirts of the colonial capital. 464 00:48:38,710 --> 00:48:46,870 People arriving and negotiating access to space with a single sack of goods to sell in a single day. 465 00:48:46,870 --> 00:48:51,040 New arrivals to this space must place their produce on the road designation on the edge of the market, 466 00:48:51,040 --> 00:48:54,610 where they risk being confiscated by a council enforcement officers. 467 00:48:54,610 --> 00:49:03,710 They then seek to enter the market proper by performing favours for those further exchange inside me by moving kind of to the right, 468 00:49:03,710 --> 00:49:07,660 moving into the market, for example, by watching someone stock while they're away. 469 00:49:07,660 --> 00:49:14,320 By offering to sell their stock for them for a number of days and for various other forms of kind of favours. 470 00:49:14,320 --> 00:49:20,320 An exchange that take place over the course of a market thing on the entry into the Cabango, 471 00:49:20,320 --> 00:49:27,850 young men take a great deal of care to manage their reputation as a good boy as opposed to being a so-called thief or a moral deviant. 472 00:49:27,850 --> 00:49:31,360 A good boy in the market is generally understood to be someone who uses their full family name, 473 00:49:31,360 --> 00:49:37,840 as opposed to the pseudonym Abstains from crime, drugs and alcohol, and speaks well to market elders. 474 00:49:37,840 --> 00:49:41,890 So these categories are interesting as a kind of fusion of this kind of colonial 475 00:49:41,890 --> 00:49:49,510 idea of the of the good valorise kind of male wage employee and this kind of gun, 476 00:49:49,510 --> 00:49:57,850 the idea of the kind of at the good of the good kind of reciprocates of the person who who, 477 00:49:57,850 --> 00:50:02,860 who is who is respectful of the kind of social hierarchies of the market and is able 478 00:50:02,860 --> 00:50:10,630 to reciprocate and redistribute as they kind of move through the market structure. 479 00:50:10,630 --> 00:50:15,640 And so success in this area of the market requires young men to speak in multiple registers to master the soft, 480 00:50:15,640 --> 00:50:18,340 deferential tones expected by customers and suppliers, 481 00:50:18,340 --> 00:50:26,020 as well as the loud, self-confident performances geared towards the protection of their space from their immediate neighbours and competitors. 482 00:50:26,020 --> 00:50:27,350 So Alex kind of arrives in this area. 483 00:50:27,350 --> 00:50:33,610 He greets the guys working here and engages in bets and arguments relating to sporting matches the night before and 484 00:50:33,610 --> 00:50:40,750 before continuing towards the upper stalls where his his kind of work of waste collection begins and is there. 485 00:50:40,750 --> 00:50:48,670 The market is populated probably by female vendors of Kenyan origin, selling imported fruit and vegetables from as far as Egypt and South Africa. 486 00:50:48,670 --> 00:50:52,570 As Frank arrives, he greets Margaret, a young female vendor, at the end of the row. 487 00:50:52,570 --> 00:50:58,570 He then cleans the ditch behind a stall, dividing the discarded produce between that which is spoilt and consigned to the dump, 488 00:50:58,570 --> 00:51:02,890 and that which is salvageable and may be sold from the floor in the ghetto. 489 00:51:02,890 --> 00:51:07,960 People in the market make a common distinction between first and second class produce. 490 00:51:07,960 --> 00:51:14,830 First class produce is sold in these kind of areas of the stalls often imported fruit and vegetables 491 00:51:14,830 --> 00:51:19,660 seen as high class fetches a high price and associated with a particular type of customer. 492 00:51:19,660 --> 00:51:26,650 Often Indian Uganda customers, on the other hand, second class produce is produced, which is not spoilt, 493 00:51:26,650 --> 00:51:30,550 which is nevertheless fetches a much lower price and is sold to a different kind 494 00:51:30,550 --> 00:51:35,170 of more working class if you like customer base on the outskirts of the market. 495 00:51:35,170 --> 00:51:39,100 And so Alex's job, in addition to kind of cleaning the marketplace, 496 00:51:39,100 --> 00:51:47,560 is differentiating between these three categories of produce and kind of reforming and reorganising the marketplace in relation to these categories. 497 00:51:47,560 --> 00:51:55,120 So in relation, in return for his work of cleaning, Monica pays front, pays Alex about 1000 shillings, about 30 percent. 498 00:51:55,120 --> 00:51:59,290 However, she also provides him with additional forms of support as and when they are needed, 499 00:51:59,290 --> 00:52:04,470 for example, by bailing them out of the local police post when he's arrested under the Vagrancy Act. 500 00:52:04,470 --> 00:52:06,210 On a regular basis. 501 00:52:06,210 --> 00:52:12,900 And so Alex makes his first trip back to the ghetto, carrying one sack of rubbish and one sack of second class produce to sell behind the road. 502 00:52:12,900 --> 00:52:18,930 And you can see the kind of differentiation between the dump and the sale of second class produce here in front. 503 00:52:18,930 --> 00:52:22,410 At the end of the market day, he makes around eight thousand shillings, 504 00:52:22,410 --> 00:52:30,510 about 2.50 of which he spends around thousand food and drink and two thousand fifty doesn't drink and remains around 4000. 505 00:52:30,510 --> 00:52:36,600 Have a role in keeping this honest person. He gives it to a moneylender in the market to keep safe. 506 00:52:36,600 --> 00:52:42,180 Over the course of the Single Market Day, Alex is involved in exchanges and interactions with a diverse range of people generating 507 00:52:42,180 --> 00:52:46,590 social and material compositions across a range of singular capacities and needs, 508 00:52:46,590 --> 00:52:51,120 and contributing to the reproduction of the market as a social and the material space. 509 00:52:51,120 --> 00:52:55,470 So it's physically moving the tables around the market and reproducing the market in this kind of way. 510 00:52:55,470 --> 00:53:00,360 But he's also contributing to the reproduction of these kind of categories and hierarchies 511 00:53:00,360 --> 00:53:06,920 through which these forms of reciprocation and redistribution are taking place. 512 00:53:06,920 --> 00:53:12,980 And so the social organisation of the market draws heavily on notions of social spatial hierarchy of high and low earners, 513 00:53:12,980 --> 00:53:22,550 a first and second class produce in ways that a kind of remind me of a lot of the kind of literature coming out 514 00:53:22,550 --> 00:53:30,080 on the Buganda sociology and of gift exchange and the kind of activities and exchanges between these categories. 515 00:53:30,080 --> 00:53:35,390 Arguably illustrative of Ferguson's idea of distributed labour moving kind of products, 516 00:53:35,390 --> 00:53:41,840 materials and resources across very different sets of capacities and needs. 517 00:53:41,840 --> 00:53:42,440 But in this sense, 518 00:53:42,440 --> 00:53:51,470 this is a kind of hierarchical sense of redistribution from the so-called high earners and vendors of first class produce to the so-called Low A. 519 00:53:51,470 --> 00:53:55,430 And so obligations to extend forms of social and material support emerge around particular 520 00:53:55,430 --> 00:53:59,720 practises negotiated through a range of moral categories which have their histories, 521 00:53:59,720 --> 00:54:04,880 both in the colonial administration and the kind of pre-colonial era. 522 00:54:04,880 --> 00:54:08,870 So these categories of The Good Boy and the young. 523 00:54:08,870 --> 00:54:15,470 And so when I asked Alex what he's doing in the market, how he would describe his activities of this kind of market thing, 524 00:54:15,470 --> 00:54:19,790 he would draw upon the word of the verb or canchola to work. 525 00:54:19,790 --> 00:54:24,650 But of course, on further inspection, this is a word in Uganda which has many other meanings. 526 00:54:24,650 --> 00:54:31,050 It's a word which also means to make to make do right in relation to the kind of ethnographic literature on May two to construct, 527 00:54:31,050 --> 00:54:34,520 to execute, to perform, to toil, to abuse and to mend. 528 00:54:34,520 --> 00:54:43,040 So again, an emphasis on this kind of this kind of cyclical feature of the work that he's performing in the market. 529 00:54:43,040 --> 00:54:46,910 However, him and the other people are working with him in the ghetto would also use different kind of verbs. 530 00:54:46,910 --> 00:54:55,400 So we also draw up on a language of struggle and survival and in articulating what they're doing in the market. 531 00:54:55,400 --> 00:54:58,850 And again, when kind of thinking about the market as a place of work, 532 00:54:58,850 --> 00:55:05,510 people were quick to kind of re designate the market by the plurals ideas of the marketplace. 533 00:55:05,510 --> 00:55:09,680 There was a school, a garden and a pharmacy for the common man, a pharmacy in the sense, 534 00:55:09,680 --> 00:55:14,840 the place where people could access spices and kind of home home remedies. 535 00:55:14,840 --> 00:55:17,000 Markets are important for building society. 536 00:55:17,000 --> 00:55:21,890 People come from all over the country and learn to lose their bad habits and to be in one line to have a good heart and to help others. 537 00:55:21,890 --> 00:55:26,960 So there's this kind of disciplinary social socialising effect of the marketplace, 538 00:55:26,960 --> 00:55:34,870 albeit based on a very different kind of idea of the market for that articulated by the British Columbia administration. 539 00:55:34,870 --> 00:55:40,800 And so there's a couple of slides on on this work of redistribution and how people decide whether to redistribute to others or not. 540 00:55:40,800 --> 00:55:46,430 Right. Invoking ideas of kind of hierarchical status, but also faith. 541 00:55:46,430 --> 00:55:53,080 All right. So a lot of the money lending institutions were run by Pentecostals. Pentecostal Christians. 542 00:55:53,080 --> 00:55:57,430 And yet these kind of categories kept resurfacing and these explanations? Right. 543 00:55:57,430 --> 00:55:59,260 So this distinction between the criminal? 544 00:55:59,260 --> 00:56:07,780 I mean, I and a good point and I noticed that these countries could be mobilised by high earners to deny the redistributive requests of young men. 545 00:56:07,780 --> 00:56:16,300 So you could mobilise this idea of the money in order to deny the request of someone to whom you're obliged to share resources and 546 00:56:16,300 --> 00:56:22,070 so distribute of labour in the market thus requires young men to conform to a certain normative idea of the good market citizen. 547 00:56:22,070 --> 00:56:32,140 Right? However, I get this idea of the good market citizen is a much broader understanding than that of the waged employees. 548 00:56:32,140 --> 00:56:35,700 So some final reflections in many senses, 549 00:56:35,700 --> 00:56:43,050 the history of the market can be read as a refusal of people a market in Nicosia to abstract work from life to in December, 550 00:56:43,050 --> 00:56:51,150 the economy from the realm of the social. So rather than passively accepting the kind of commodification of labour and the people in 551 00:56:51,150 --> 00:56:56,160 the market have mobilised alternate theories of value grounded in local history and culture. 552 00:56:56,160 --> 00:57:01,050 And so the result is neither the annihilation of pre-colonial systems of exchange and reciprocation, 553 00:57:01,050 --> 00:57:06,030 as is often assumed in some of the kind of new neoliberal literature in which everyone is kind of walking 554 00:57:06,030 --> 00:57:13,860 around and kind of hustling and continually after kind of very individualistic ideas of accumulation. 555 00:57:13,860 --> 00:57:19,770 But neither are these. Neither of these kind of particular institutions emerge unscathed in this kind of contemporary moment. 556 00:57:19,770 --> 00:57:22,890 And what we instead see is the proliferation of diverse forms of life and labour 557 00:57:22,890 --> 00:57:27,810 produced through the interaction of market and non-formal non-market forms of exchange. 558 00:57:27,810 --> 00:57:32,280 So what Palani would termed a double movement. 559 00:57:32,280 --> 00:57:36,990 And so, as many have argued, we need to better differentiate between the diverse forms of life and labour. 560 00:57:36,990 --> 00:57:42,690 They're often folded into the categories of informal entrepreneurialism surplus and also avoid reproducing narrow 561 00:57:42,690 --> 00:57:48,450 conceptualisation of work based on the historical experiences of wage labourers industrial in you're right. 562 00:57:48,450 --> 00:57:55,920 And so Alec's work in the market may be characterised as informal insofar as it's unrecognised and registered by the state. 563 00:57:55,920 --> 00:58:00,690 However, such a conceptualisation would conceal the form generating qualities of his work and 564 00:58:00,690 --> 00:58:05,770 the various social and cultural institutions that regulate it right at the same time. 565 00:58:05,770 --> 00:58:10,080 Alex's work in the market might be categorised as an entrepreneurialism insofar 566 00:58:10,080 --> 00:58:14,220 as it involves the creation of economic activity out of individual endeavour. 567 00:58:14,220 --> 00:58:22,800 However, such a conceptualisation would conceal the social structures and relationships that facilitate his work in the morning, and at the same time, 568 00:58:22,800 --> 00:58:31,320 Alex is working like may again be characterised as surplus insofar as it appears to be on valued or minimally valued by the capitalist economy. 569 00:58:31,320 --> 00:58:38,580 However, again, such a conceptualisation would conceal the value of his work to the real or needs based economy of Kampala. 570 00:58:38,580 --> 00:58:46,620 And so I argue that the seeds of an alternative story of work in Kampala and in Uganda are located in these, however. 571 00:58:46,620 --> 00:58:54,230 These besides and these elsewhere. And this is the starting point for thinking differently for governments. 572 00:58:54,230 --> 00:59:02,718 I want to thank you.