Economies of Care

Return Migration from South Africa to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe

By: Saana Hansen

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Hardcover | 15 June 2026

At a Glance

Hardcover
252 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6

Hardcover

$377.75

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Provides important and timely insights into the negotiation of care across generations, space, and time in contexts of multiple intersecting crises particularly across the borders of Zimbabwe and South Africa, but also across the globe.
Focuses on bureaucratic and intimate care relations amidst ongoing crises in southern Africa, with a particular focus on care arrangements for the “vulnerable”, such as infants, the sick and the dead, and the local social and cosmological sensitivities and bureaucratic complexities involved.
While existing scholarship on Zimbabwe’s crisis has emphasized the post2000 conditions, this book explores the legacies of colonial bureaucratic logics and modes of labour organization as they reverberate in the present. It particularly shows how these relate to the social and political organization of space, the politics of labour organization in South Africa, and relationships with national and international NGOs in Zimbabwe.
Seeks to rework anthropology of the state and kinship by rejecting the image of African state(s) and bureaucrats as merely failed and violent, and kinship as overtly cozy and flexible. On the one hand, while recent scholarship has argued that states are doing less in terms of care and welfare of their citizens, the book demonstrates that although the Zimbabwean state has very little resources to distribute as material care, the power that the state agents embody draws on their authority to mobilize and distribute resources that the state does not supply itself.
Makes a particular contribution to the anthropological scholarship of return migration and child migration, topics rarely examined in Zimbabwe’s context of feminized migration. Besides examining the forms and practices through which children move across borders and between different care configurations, it teases out how the crisis has challenged kinship norms and how relations of intimacy are bound up with monetary and material transmissions.

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