Maxim Bolt

University of Oxford, Department of International Development, Faculty Member

University of the Witwatersrand, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER), Research Associate

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I am an anthropologist of southern Africa, specialising in labour, migration, borders, development, the social dynamics of money, and inheritance. I conducted my doctoral fieldwork along South Africa’s border with Zimbabwe, between 2006 and 2008, during acute economic and political troubles in Zimbabwe. This research focused on the border farms, their black workforces and their white landowners in this context of crisis, upheaval and displacement. Since my PhD research, I have worked as the anthropologist on the British Museum’s comparative, collaborative ‘Money in Africa’ project, alongside historians and an economic historian. As part of this project, I have conducted research with central banks in Nigeria and Uganda, and with small businesspeople in Malawi. Supported by a Future Research Leaders grant (UK Economic and Social Research Council), I am now working on the institutions and processes through which property is passed on in the form of deceased estates, in the South African metropolis of Johannesburg.

My first monograph, based on my PhD research, was published in 2015 by the International African Institute and Cambridge University Press. Entitled Zimbabwe's Migrants and South Africa's Border Farms: the roots of impermanence, it won the 2016 BBC / British Sociological Association Ethnography Award, and was shortlisted for the 2016 Melville J. Herskovits Award (African Studies Association USA) and the inaugural 2016 Fage and Oliver Prize (African Studies Association of the UK). A South African edition was published in 2016 by Wits University Press.

https://www.qeh.ox.ac.uk/people/maxim-bolt

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Books by Maxim Bolt

Zimbabwe's Migrants and South Africa's Border Farms: The Roots of Impermanence. Cambridge University Press.

During the Zimbabwean crisis, millions crossed through the apartheid-era border fence, searching ... more During the Zimbabwean crisis, millions crossed through the apartheid-era border fence, searching for ways to make ends meet. Maxim Bolt explores the lives of Zimbabwean migrant labourers, of settled black farm workers and their dependants, and of white farmers and managers, as they intersect on the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa. Focusing on one farm, this book investigates the role of a hub of wage labour in a place of crisis. A close ethnographic study, it addresses the complex, shifting labour and life conditions in northern South Africa's agricultural borderlands. Underlying these challenges are the Zimbabwean political and economic crisis of the 2000s and the intensified pressures on commercial agriculture in South Africa following market liberalization and post-apartheid land reform. But, amidst uncertainty, farmers and farm workers strive for stability. The farms on South Africa's margins are centers of gravity, islands of residential labour in a sea of informal arrangements.

Journal Articles by Maxim Bolt

Fluctuating formality: homeownership, inheritance, and the official economy in urban South Africa

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2021

One of Malinowski's legacies was a sensitivity to the ways institutions unevenly shape lives and ... more One of Malinowski's legacies was a sensitivity to the ways institutions unevenly shape lives and relationships. Taking his lead, this article develops an approach to the formal economy, combining, sharpening, and extending theories of state and market infrastructures in political and economic anthropology. Focusing on urban South Africa, it examines property inheritance among the black majority previously excluded from property rights. As a lens on the formal economy, this moves beyond production to consider how social reproduction – passing on property – weaves through disjointed state processes. The article argues that the formal economy is sustained by particular performances of its scripts: different actors connect fragments of process in their own projects, with little commitment to the official logics that notionally make systems. In a setting where state responsibility over inheritance has expanded, formality's advancing frontiers throw its fluctuating character into relief: institutions’ apparently coherent abstractions are given force in piecemeal fashion.

Recognising the family house: a problem of urban custom in South Africa

South African Journal on Human Rights, 2019

In South Africa, popular notions of the township family house derive from an interplay of customa... more In South Africa, popular notions of the township family house derive from an interplay of customary norms and the racialised history of administration and urban government-particularly exclusion from urban property rights. They also represent an insistence on the materialisation of kinship through fixed property, and on the home as transcending individual ownership or market asset. Focusing on the metropolitan area of South Gauteng, this paper argues that township family houses require understanding and recognising in terms of urban customary rules, and addressing in the context of competing rights, custom, and the place of the law in formalising these. Urban custom, too often neglected in scholarship, warrants constitutional recognition. The paper contends that there is, in fact, acknowledgment in state administration and judicial decisions of the customary force of the family house, as collective and cross-generational. Yet this is always through practical norms rather than official ones, as sympathetic state representatives navigate the lack of legislation that would enable formal recognition. In our concluding discussion, we reflect on a constitutional basis for recognising the family house, noting that even issues of constitutional compliance are better attended to within the law rather than in its gaps.

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Becoming and Unbecoming Farm Workers in Southern Africa

More than most forms of employment in Southern Africa, farm work seems to evoke the past. Recent ... more More than most forms of employment in Southern Africa, farm work seems to evoke the past. Recent events, however, have foregrounded global integration and cost-cutting casualisation as much as plantation-style racialised hierarchies. Legacies of farmer paternalism, themselves shaped by workers’ on-site residence, have inflected changes in agriculture. But these changes invite fresh investigation of what we mean by “farm workers,” as a stereotyped and evocative label intersects with and shapes people’s terms of livelihood. This introduction offers an opening framing for five articles that examine how farm workers have become and unbecome, in the past and today. Incorporation into farm hierarchies remains crucial, but the category is political — imposed, claimed, denied, negotiated or transcended in the service of different interests and imaginaries. A wide array of processes shapes becoming a farm worker, from outright coercion to marginalisation, to corporate ethical frameworks. Similarly, unbecoming may be the result of losing a job or non-recognition, or indeed the collapse of a whole sector. The collection’s theme has important implications: how workers are defined is crucial amidst falling employment. In these circumstances, “workers” and “workplaces” have significance not only as straightforward descriptors, but as categories with claim-making power and historical resonance.

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Making Workers Real: Regulatory Spotlights and Documentary Stepping-Stones on a South African border farm

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2017

Documents are central to the infrastructure through which formal workforces are constituted. They... more Documents are central to the infrastructure through which formal workforces are constituted. They thus offer a privileged vantage point onto how formality is asserted and experienced as real. On the Zimbabwean–South African border, where formality is a plural and uneven patchwork of "formalizations," thousands of migrants are employed on export-oriented commercial farms. Connections between state institutions and workplaces are regulatory spotlights. More complex than employee protection or domination, or than window-dressing fiction, they make workers by recognizing them as different from "border jumpers." Workers make their own use of spotlights. Documents become stepping-stones, as migrants broker conversions toward more durable forms of worker identity. They navigate the constellation of fixed points that documents represent, bringing coherence to fragmentary encounters. Spotlights and stepping-stones lie at the point where formal regulation and livelihood plans constitute one another, and thereby establish the shared ground for negotiating the "reality" of a wage economy.

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Camaraderie and its Discontents: Class Consciousness, Ethnicity and Divergent Masculinities among Zimbabwean Migrant Farmworkers in South Africa

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2010

As a result of Zimbabwe's economic troubles and displacement, the Zimbabwean workforces on South ... more As a result of Zimbabwe's economic troubles and displacement, the Zimbabwean workforces on South Africa's border farms display a heightening diversity of regional origins, languages, ages, ethnicities and class histories. This article asks what happens to class consciousness under such conditions. It does so by exploring how male fruit pickers on one particular farm interpret the nexus of class, ethnicity and masculinity. It illustrates how migrant masculinities diverge along class lines, polarising the farm's workers. The work process generates a dominant masculinity based on a ‘rough’ banter, both producing and reflecting shared experiences. But as a strong statement of this masculinity, it is also a model in contrast to which those with middle-class sensibilities can understand themselves. Picking work is therefore an arena for the performance of competing masculinities. These performances in turn reveal workers’ interpretations of class ideals and corresponding ethnic difference. The article offers insight into displaced Zimbabweans’ experiences of their own diversity and of agricultural work itself.

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Waged Entrepreneurs, Policed Informality: Work, the Regulation of Space and the Economy of the Zimbabwean-South African Border

Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute, 2012

Keen to show the fluidity of border areas, and the limits of state control, much anthropological ... more Keen to show the fluidity of border areas, and the limits of state control, much anthropological scholarship on borders highlights arrangements, activities and opportunities that pass beneath the official radar. But while such a clandestine focus casts border dwellers as preoccupied with resisting state regulation, this article shows how Zimbabwean–South African border dwellers make the most of their location by being visible to state officials, as waged farm workers. They seek agricultural jobs as a foothold in building lucrative businesses. Moreover, waged farm workforces are hubs of border trade, as workers remit goods for resale as a response to the crisis at home in Zimbabwe. The article therefore questions the wider theoretical opposition between the creative entrepreneurship of the informal economy and the drudgery of formal employment. Formal and informal modes of livelihood constitute one another, intersect and are interdependent. This article unpacks the spatial and temporal articulations between waged work and other means of making ends meet. In so doing, it suggests fixating less on the border itself as a distinctive feature, replete with smugglers and murky goings-on, and appreciating the various meanings of work in borderland economies.

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Producing Permanence: Employment, Domesticity and the Flexible Future on a South African Border Farm

Economy and Society, 2013

What does it mean to be ‘permanent’ in an increasingly flexible world of work? On the Zimbabwean-... more What does it mean to be ‘permanent’ in an increasingly flexible world of work? On the Zimbabwean-South African border, white farmers guard against risk by investing in portfolios of estates and emphasizing their mobility. But the farms rely on core black workforces of resident ‘general workers’, known as mapermanent. The lives of mapermanent embody temporal contradictions in South African agriculture. Work regimes depend on arrangements established through long-term residence in labour compounds, a stability threatened by employers' pragmatism in a volatile sector. Here, short-term ‘permanence’ coexists with longer-term insecurity. Moreover, what I call provisional permanence is built on others’ transience: mapermanent draw on the domestic labour of temporary contract workers and the order enforcement of rotating border garrisons. Tensions between temporalities characterize workers' assertions of ‘permanence’, and their limitations, in an economy of flexibility and shifting investments.

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The Sociality of the Wage: Money Rhythms, Wealth Circulation, and the Problem with Cash on the Zimbabwean-South African Border

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2014

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Accidental Neoliberalism and the Performance of Management: Hierarchies in Export Agriculture on the Zimbabwean-South African Border

Journal of Development Studies, 2016

South Africa’s export farms have shifted from racialised paternalism to corporate managerialism. ... more South Africa’s export farms have shifted from racialised paternalism to corporate managerialism. But how have workforce dynamics changed? This article offers an ethnographic perspective on agriculture on the transient Zimbabwean border. An ‘actor-centred’ approach examines the causes and extent of transformation. Who furthers managerial logics? Why? With what effects? White farmers emphasise impersonal, rationalised business for diverse reasons. What looks like part of a single global process of neoliberalisation is an accidental result. At the same time, foreign supermarket-funded development projects become subjected to logics of work- force paternalism. Managerialism itself has limited effect on labour arrangements. Workers’ hierarchies and cross-border networks are built on different principles from global supply chains. From within each network, it is as if the other were invisible.

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Making the Right Connections: Globalization, Economic Inclusion and African Workers

by Laura Mann, Maxim Bolt, and Kate Meagher

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Mediated Paternalism and Violent Incorporation: Enforcing Farm Hierarchies on the Zimbabwean–South African Border

Journal of Southern African Studies, Oct 2016

Paternalism and violence on South African farms have been famously intertwined. In a kinship idio... more Paternalism and violence on South African farms have been famously intertwined. In a kinship idiom, fatherly white farmers confer 'gifts' on black workers, their 'people'. This discretion maintains the conditions for racialised violence. But, on the Zimbabwean–South African border, mass-migration and globalised agriculture give paternalism and violence new significance. If white extra-legal violence was previously key to maintaining racialised, hierarchical order in rural areas, today a similar order is maintained through collusion between white farmers, senior black workers, and border guards. Such distributed coercion has precedents, with white and black patriarchs enforcing their positions and agendas through physical force. Today, however, white farmers are keen to perform a corporate style and appear removed from any vigilante violence. Senior black workers actively entrench themselves as powerful arbiters of farm order amid transience and widespread unemployment, drawing on the coercive power of border guards. But as the latter mediate paternalism down the chain of command, this remains at the pleasure of their employers. It all depends on having a job. Moreover, even as everyday influence is devolved down the hierarchy, senior workers are kept in their place by an absolute distinction between black and white.

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