“The Cultural Politics of Politics”: Macro and Micro Entanglements in the Work of Blair Rutherford

Abstract

It has been almost twenty years since Blair Rutherford published his first book, Working on the Margins (2001), highly influential for anyone studying agrarian labour relations, not only in Zimbabwe but in southern Africa generally. Rutherford's concept of "domestic government," which he so skilfully outlined then, has provided scholars with a useful theoretical lens, especially for understanding gendered power relations on large-scale commercial farms, and the ways in which farm workers were placed within these relations, and negotiated life on the margins.