ABSTRACT
The unsympathetic critic could claim that ethnography is a relic of the era of travel writing and exploration, of adventure and astonishment; that it remains content to offer observations of human scale and fallibility; that it still depends, disingenuously, on the facticity of first-hand experience. For ethnography personifies, in its methods and its models, the inescapable dialectic of fact and value. Insofar as global systems and epochal movements always root themselves somewhere in the quotidian, then, they are accessible to historical ethnography. The players in the theater of the ordinary changed one another by means of humble acts within the terrain they came to share— although their behavior also moved, increasingly and in ways barely realized, to the beat of global imperatives. The objects moved along the prosaic pathways that bore the traffic of global capitalism and its culture to Southern Africa—and carried their recipients toward material dependency.
