On Ethnography, Politics, and Critique On Rutherford, Blair. Farm Labor Struggles in Zimbabwe: The Ground of Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017, 294 pages

Like many anthropologists, I have tried to make my research contribute to some sort of “social change,” particularly as it is often looking at intermeshed racialized, classed, gendered power and social relations that produce uneven configurations of exploitation, immiseration, and accumulation in different sub-Saharan African countries. In my academic writing, this ambition can lead me to focus on how a critical politics can emerge, or has emerged (Li 2019). In so doing, I recognize that both the cultural politics of my positioning informs the reception of my research with different audiences and publics (for example, Hamdy 2017) and as my research occurs in jurisdictions other than those where I live and far from my home in Ottawa, as Tania Li (2019, 43), put it, “[e]ffective politics … requires intellectual and organisational resources that go far beyond those a visiting anthropologist could possibly supply.” I am thus especially grateful to Anthropologica for being able to use David Moore’s thoughtful and thorough review of my last ethnography, Farm Labor Struggles in Zimbabwe (Rutherford 2017), as a way to receive brief commentaries about the review and the book from two sharp anthropologists who work on agrarian dynamics and struggles in southern Africa, namely, Lincoln Addison and Andrew Hartnack. Aside from it being flattering to see the Ground of Politics getting so much thoughtful and critical discussion, I also welcome the opportunity to briefly discuss wider disciplinary perspectives on politics and critique. Moore is a Canadian professor of Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg and a well-known scholar of politics in Zimbabwe (for example, Moore 1991, 2001, 2004, 2018) as well as a frequent and perspicacious commentator on Zimbabwean politics in regional and international media. He is thus a very relevant interlocutor for my book, which examines poritikisi (“electoral politics” in ChiShona) and a long, bitter farm labour struggle that took place on a small plantation outside of Harare from late 1998 to early 2000. In retrospect, this period was transformational in terms of national politics and economy in this southern African country, as a greater push for “democracy” sparked both the emergence of a new and very popular political party in 1999 and a massive and highly politicized (on a localized, national and international scale) land distribution program starting in 2000 targeting white-owned farms by the ruling party then under the leadership of Robert Mugabe. Moore generously recommends my book to those commentators on Zimbabwean politics from other disciplines (like political science, his own), suggesting that its attentiveness to the grounding of national politics in specific struggles like this farm labour dispute sheds new light on political dynamics in the country. As readers of Anthropologica know, such alertness to “scale-making projects” (Tsing 2000) is a common feature of more ethnographies, showing how the social and power relations and their contestations that anthropologists learn about through participant observation can be entangled in wider-scale conditions and arrangements in a variety of ways (an exemplary example and, as Hartnack observes, an influence on my writing, is Donald Moore’s 2005 ethnography, Suffering for Territory). David Moore does suggest that I could have considered systemizing my analysis a bit more, examining, for example, if there is any overlap between shifts in political party allegiance and accumulation or survival practices, as such a taxonomy may be more helpful to, what I am assuming, other (comparative?) studies than my own heuristic tools of ‘social projects’ and ‘belonging.’ Such a (mild) criticism is apropos, for despite my aim that (some of) my analytical arguments be suitable for analyses of agrarian and other dynamics and disputes elsewhere, I crafted them …