Everyday sociality, political protest and the commodity boundary in southern Africa

ABSTRACT

This paper takes a sceptical look at the treatment of connected practices of commodification and consumption in some exemplary works of mainstream critical social theory that seek to identify cross-contextual historical logics linking economic action to socio-political life. Drawing on situated research from South and southern Africa that helps to complicate our understanding of these links, it argues that many influential claims in the mainstream critical literature remain poorly substantiated and pass silently over vast provinces of complex, situated thought and action. When analysing how markets function, recurrent critical tropes of highly manipulable consumer desire suffer from a tendency to argue by simple fiat, while also abstracting out the historically shifting forms of moral and legal regulation mediating commodification and consumption on most real-world markets. This paper also makes a case for greater scepticism towards categorical associations between market action and the reproduction of socio-political dispositions of power. Consumer behaviour undeniably can shore up distinction and domination, but it has often also been observed to tamper with them by indirect means, while concentrated consumer initiatives in the form of boycotts remain an under-theorised and largely forgotten form of resistance within mainstream critical social theory.

KEYWORDS:

• Commodification
• consumption
• critical theory
• South Africa
• southern Africa

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work is based on research supported by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and made possible through the project on “A Practice of Postapartheid Freedom” at the Centre for Humanities Research of the University of the Western Cape. The author would like to thank Bernard Dubbeld and an anonymous reviewer for comments that helped to improve the article, as well as Ute Kuhlmann for valuable editorial and Alice Sholto-Douglas for administrative assistance, while accepting all responsibility for whatever flaws remain.

Notes on contributors

Samuel Sadian

Samuel Sadian received his PhD in sociology at the University of Barcelona, where he was a member of the Trajectories of Modernity project comparing southern African, Latin American and European varieties of modernity. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape.