The Moral Economy of the Migrant in South Africa pre-1994: Reflections on the work of James Scott
Patrick McAllister, University of Canterbury
The notion of ‘moral economy’ as applied by E. P. Thompson in his work on the English working class, and adapted by James Scott in his studies of peasant economy in South-East Asia, has received wide attention from scholars in a number of academic disciplines, and its contemporary relevance has recently been assessed and analysed by a group of contributors to the American Anthropologist. In this paper the relationship between black migrant workers, capitalist endeavour in South Africa, and the apartheid state, is examined in terms of Scott’s contribution to social science’s analytical tool kit. In particular, the question of whether it is possible to identity a ‘moral economy’ among migrant workers, one that encompasses both their rural homes of origin and their urban-industrial workplaces, is explored. Attention is also given to how such a moral economy differs from that identified by Thompson and Scott.
