The government of poverty and the arts of survival: mobile and recombinant strategies at the margins of the South African economy

In this paper, we consider responses from ‘above’ and ‘below’ to the ‘truncated agrarian transitions’ (Li 2011) by which people are displaced out of agricultural employment without significant prospects of employment in the non-farm economy. While the empirical facts relating to global un-and underemployment and working poverty are well established, the implications for policy and action are contested. One problem is that dominant competing interpretations are politically and ideologically overdetermined, shaped by teleological assumptions about the likely (or wished for) directions of change and characterized by sweeping and homogenizing generalizations. A more differentiated account is needed.