‘Everyday life’ – the practices, interactions, and relations that make up our daily existence – is a key site in which human beings exercise agency and negotiate relations of power. It is also a site where people effectively, though within various limits and constraints, produce or ‘make’ history. Accordingly, both ‘everyday life’ and its frequent companion ‘lived experience’ are watchwords increasingly found across historical and allied disciplines. In the study of dictatorial, colonial, and other authoritarian regimes, ‘the everyday’ is a particularly important analytical framework, since such regimes are not just constructed ‘from above’, but also ‘from below’, within ‘the local spaces and everyday cultures inhabited and performed day-to-day by the people who live through them’.Footnote 1 With that in mind, this review examines how historians (and scholars from associated disciplines) working in and on different global regions have explored the history of everyday life under repressive political systems. Written by three authors working on everyday life histories of Europe, Southern Africa, and Latin America, this article offers both a critical assessment of and novel intervention in the current ‘state of the art’ of our respective research fields. We trace how histories of everyday life written on and in these regions have developed over time and how, in these contexts, scholars have understood and approached their analyses of everyday life under authoritarian rule.
In the case of histories of European dictatorship, this scholarship has tended to coalesce around two main historical approaches: Alltagsgeschichte (everyday life history) and microhistory. In the cases of Global South historiographies, whilst some scholarship has been undertaken under the rubric of a ‘named’ approach – for instance, the ‘history of private life’ – most scholars have operated from diverse and fragmented perspectives. Nevertheless, in all cases, these are dynamic and growing fields of study, asking crucial questions about agency, practice, and subjectivities, as well as how power is articulated, contested, and negotiated – at micro scales between individuals and the state in dictatorial, authoritarian, and illiberal contexts. In this review, we present the points of contact, synergy, and divergence between scholars of everyday life in Latin America, Southern Africa, and Europe, making the case for increased – and ‘decentred’ – further interaction, exchange, and collaboration. By drawing out the conceptual frames, tools, and categories of analysis used in these distinct literatures, and by interrogating the importance of authorship and context, we demonstrate the potential for mutual learning and the development of more engaged and informed histories of everyday life in authoritarian settings.
It is important to note that even ostensibly ‘democratic’ governments engage in repressive practices, and the extent to which they rule by consent remains a topic of considerable debate. For their part, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman famously highlighted the role of corporate media in ‘manufacturing consent’ among the US populace.Footnote 2 Many systems of rule which have defined themselves as ‘democratic’ – from the pre-civil rights era United States to Narendra Modi’s India – have, to various degrees, pursued policies and practices that systematically disenfranchised and/or excluded certain groups.Footnote 3 Indeed, prior to women’s political emancipation, almost all supposedly ‘democratic’ states were ‘undemocratic’ for just over half of their populations.Footnote 4 Some suggest that the state itself is, by its very nature, repressive and anti-democratic: this is what anarchists, for instance, have argued since the nineteenth century.Footnote 5 Like democracies, dictatorships are also socially constructed, flexible, and contingent categories, and, accordingly, we acknowledge the problems entailed in drawing a clear distinction between ‘democratic’ and ‘non-democratic’ systems. In this respect, so-called ‘hybrid regimes’, which exhibit features of both democracy and autocracy, complicate matters further.Footnote 6 Equally, Marlies Glasius has recently pointed out that, in our interconnected and globalized world, ‘authoritarian practices’ are no longer mainly the preserve of governments or political leaders anyway, since state actors increasingly work with external agencies – like multinational corporations – that operate across borders.Footnote 7 Nevertheless, for reasons of space, here we refer primarily to scholarship on regimes that, historically, exhibited especially marked authoritarian tendencies, using the term ‘authoritarian regime’ (or variations thereof) as shorthand for a range of political systems, including (but not limited to) colonial regimes, would-be totalitarian states, and military dictatorships.
Most importantly, this review ‘decentres’ European histories and historiographies – and the methodological and theoretical tools that they habitually use to explore everyday life within authoritarian political systems – by situating Southern African, Latin American, and European approaches alongside one another, thereby eschewing hierarchies of originality or primacy between them. We point to the similarities and differences in their historiographical contexts, approaches, and tools; the connections and transfers between scholars working in and on Europe, Southern Africa, and Latin America; and, crucially, the independent development of everyday life histories within these regions. This enables us to better understand the historiographical trajectories of everyday life histories, and to highlight areas in which historians of everyday life in authoritarian contexts might connect and learn from one another.
In the first section, we explore what everyday life historians working in and on these regions understand and mean by ‘everyday life’, a term notoriously difficult to pin down. We examine core historical questions, definitions, categories, and concepts used by scholars across the field: in particular, the notions of ‘ordinariness’ and ‘extraordinariness’.
The second section focuses on ‘authorship’, establishing the key works that mark the development of everyday life histories in Latin America, Southern Africa, and Europe. We ask who, to date, has written the histories of everyday life under authoritarian regimes in these regions, and we examine the contexts in which these studies have been produced. In doing so, we illustrate both the diversity of everyday life histories, and the vital role of context in shaping their approaches.
Finally, we consider two crucial concepts that, in some respects, lie at the heart of all the studies examined in this article: ‘agency’ and ‘resistance’. Since many works on everyday life articulate forms of resistance to power, we explore how scholars interpret the meanings and implications of agency and resistance as they play out in different contexts.
I
At the outset, it is important to clarify two things. Firstly, though this article discusses the history of everyday life, it does not focus exclusively on the work of historians. Studies of everyday life in all three regions examined here are often situated at the intersection of multiple disciplines, including history, anthropology, sociology, and archaeology. For example, the work of scholars such as Njabulo S. Ndebele, Belinda Bozzoli, and Sandra Bhatasara – all discussed below – are key to the historiography on everyday life in Southern Africa, but none of them would describe themselves as historians. In the Latin American case, the interdisciplinarity of everyday life histories is particularly notable. For instance, a diverse range of Latin Americanists have drawn on a combination of historical, anthropological, and archaeological evidence to research everyday life in Mesoamerica.Footnote 8 As such, in this particular field, ‘it is not possible to make a strict division between ethnographic work, history, microhistory and everyday life [because] they intersect with one another’.Footnote 9 Equally, since its inception, some of the key practitioners of everyday life history in Europe have straddled several disciplines simultaneously, including Michel de Certeau, Luisa Passerini, and Alf Lüdtke. In other words, whilst the work discussed here focuses primarily on everyday life in the past, we draw on literatures that span multiple fields and disciplines.
Secondly, not all historical scholarship exploring everyday life – or aspects of people’s everyday lives – refers to itself explicitly as ‘everyday life history’. For example, in Latin America, there is considerable emphasis on the history of ‘private life’ and, since the 1990s, studies of private life have appeared in countries such as Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, most of which are multi-authored and multi-volumed.Footnote 10 Among Latin American historians, the relationship between histories of ‘private life’ and ‘everyday life’ remains contested. David Campos Moreno stipulates that ‘private life’ corresponds to ‘the domestic space, where there exists neither third-party observers nor public interest’, whereas ‘everyday life’ denotes ‘the activities of the day-to-day which can take place in public or in private…but which [are] repetitive’.Footnote 11 However, for Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru – arguably the most influential practitioner of everyday life history in the region – the distinction between these two fields cannot be ‘categorical or total’, and Pablo Rodríguez Jiménez even suggests that the history of everyday life addresses ‘a continual fluidity between public life and private life’.Footnote 12 Regardless of where one draws the line between these two fields, the themes explored in Latin American histories of ‘private life’ will certainly be familiar to those who identify as historians of ‘everyday life’. Such studies have examined practices of sociability in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Chile; how ‘honour’ influenced private and public gestures in eighteenth-century Potosí; and how Argentina’s Pampa communities socialized at pulperías (a form of general store that also served as a saloon) throughout the colonial period.Footnote 13 Given the commonalities between the methodologies, analytical tools, and research interests of those who describe their work as ‘private life’ and ‘everyday life history’, these fields can – and should – inform one another.Footnote 14
For practitioners of everyday life history (however loosely we define it) in all three regions examined here, ‘the ordinary’ is integral to their understandings of ‘the everyday’. Nevertheless, ‘ordinariness’ and ‘ordinary people’ are far from stable categories.Footnote 15 The labelling of what might be deemed ‘ordinary’ – and, by extension, ‘extraordinary’ – is subject to change and contestation, depending on the time or place in which practices, peoples, and things are being labelled; whose practices, whose things, and which people are being labelled; and who is doing the labelling. Contemporaries’ understandings of what was ‘ordinary’ or ‘extraordinary’ in their own politico-social context might surprise historians, and diverge wildly from the assumptions that historians bring to these categories. Moreover, if ‘the everyday’ is taken to mean ‘habitual’ or ‘normal’, this is itself a construction, referring to patterns of behaviours or actions that appear to be ‘regular, normal or habitual’.Footnote 16 Indeed, equating ‘the everyday’ with ‘repetition’ or ‘routine’ is, strictly speaking, incorrect, as no action can ever be ‘repeated’ in the truest sense of the word: one can never eat exactly the same meal more than once, or walk down the street repeatedly in exactly the same way.Footnote 17 Furthermore, microhistory has demonstrated how both what is ‘normative’ and what is ‘non-normative’ – the ‘typical’ and the ‘exceptional’ – can be discerned simultaneously within the same individual life story or micro-scale event.Footnote 18 Put simply, things can be both ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’ at the same time.
Early critics of Alltagsgeschichte – the study of everyday life under dictatorship pioneered in the 1980s and 1990s by historians of Nazi Germany – based some of their criticisms around a perception of mundanity and banality.Footnote 19 Yet, it is a misconception to equate everyday life solely with the ‘ordinary’ or ‘ordinary people’, and even more so with the ‘mundane’ and ‘repetitive’. Most everyday life historians do not work with rigid definitions of ‘the everyday’, instead finding value in the term because of its flexibility as a heuristic device or conceptual lens to examine past people and societies. It is a way of seeing and studying the past which asks questions about practice, experience, relations, and interactions, and ‘exposes the agency and subjectivities of historical actors, the density and messiness of their experiences, and the multidirectionality of analytical scales’.Footnote 20 Accordingly, everyday life histories might take in episodes of extraordinary upheaval such as war and displacement, or focus on moments of relative calm.Footnote 21 They may examine practices and experiences that were repeated frequently (perhaps even daily); and they may also consider practices and experiences that were infrequent, or that happened only once.
Part of the conceptual core connecting many everyday life histories, particularly those written since the turn of the century, is a focus on ‘everyday spaces’, and how these ‘enact’ historical events. Such studies often concentrate on those spaces inhabited and traversed regularly in people’s day-to-day lives, from homes, workplaces, and leisure spaces to streets, squares, and markets. For example, Kate Ferris’s research into the role of bars and alcohol in shaping the enactment and investigation of everyday ‘political crimes’ in Fascist Italy bears similarities with Nathaniel Chimhete’s work on shebeens (unlicensed bars) in colonial Zimbabwe, which he depicts as places of negotiation and political banter.Footnote 22 In Argentina, Dora Barrancos has highlighted the relationship between space and gender at the turn of the twentieth century, showing how, as the streets of Buenos Aires were, from a class perspective, becoming ‘the most diverse and democratic arena’, they were still masculine spaces, which women rarely entered unaccompanied.Footnote 23 Yet, everyday life histories can also be located in spaces frequented less often, even ‘extraordinary spaces’ such as parliaments, palaces, and governors’ residences (which, for some, are also their quotidian workspaces and homes). Though, in her work, Gonzalbo Aizpuru focuses primarily on ‘routines [hitherto] considered irrelevant’, rather than ‘the exceptional lives of extraordinary individuals’, she stresses that historians of everyday life must consider both that which ‘is common to many or all’ and that which ‘is peculiar to a place and to a moment and to a few subjects’.Footnote 24 People in positions of power – even dictators – have ‘everyday lives’, too, whilst seemingly ‘ordinary’ people can have ‘extraordinary’ experiences.Footnote 25
In this respect, Ndebele’s path-breaking 1986 essay on ‘the rediscovery of the ordinary’ cannot go unmentioned. Here, he explores South African writers’ representations and experiences of everyday life under Apartheid, observing that, during this period, Black journalists displayed a marked tendency towards ‘spectacular representation or reporting’.Footnote 26 Ndebele charts the movement between representations of the ‘extraordinary’ – which he terms ‘spectacle’ or ‘spectacular’ – and more ‘ordinary’ impositions of the Apartheid regime. As he points out, ‘everything [in South Africa’s “social formation”] has been mind-bogglingly spectacular’, from the state’s
monstrous war machine…; the random massive pass raids; mass shootings and killings; mass economic exploitation…; the mass removal of people; the spate of draconian laws passed with the spectacle of parliamentary promulgations; the luxurious life-style of whites: servants, all-encompassing privilege, swimming pools and high commodity consumption; the sprawling monotony of architecture in African locations, which are the very picture of poverty and oppression.Footnote 27
Ndebele posits that, from the 1950s onwards, Black South Africans’ journalistic and literary writings tended to highlight ‘spectacularity’ as a means of underscoring the absurdity of the countless daily, lived oppressions of Apartheid. However, he notes, in more recent years, a ‘rediscovering of the ordinary’ in Black South Africans’ writings which, in his view, constitutes an attempt to return to and ‘maintain a semblance of normal social order’, such as the ‘thematically ordinary’ story of ‘a woman [who] simply wants to get a man’.Footnote 28 Ndebele welcomes this development because, for him, ‘the habit of looking at the spectacle has forced us to gloss over the nooks and crannies’.Footnote 29 It is precisely in these ‘nooks and crannies’ of the ordinary that we are reminded ‘that the problems of the South African social formation are complex and all-embracing: they cannot be reduced to a single, simple formulation’.Footnote 30
Adopting a similar approach in their article on the Renamo war – and the disturbances that occurred along the Zimbabwe–Mozambique border from the 1980s – Nicholas Nyachega and Wesley Mwatwara choose not to focus on the so-called ‘spectacularity’ of this conflict, or on how the Zimbabwean and Mozambican states deployed troops to ‘discipline’ citizens and ensure security over their respective national territories. Instead, they reveal the ‘ordinary’ ways in which, in everyday life, citizens exploited opportunities that arose from the war. They demonstrate how people defined ‘their own conventions and everyday lives in ways that sometimes openly or clandestinely contradict[ed] the nation state’s prescribed conduct and ways of governing borderlands’.Footnote 31 Chimhete also moves from the ‘spectacular’ to the ‘ordinary’ when examining the relationship between liberation soldiers and community residents in Gudyanga. Again, rather than focusing on the ‘spectacularity’ of the Zimbabwean War of Liberation, he highlights the everyday relations between armed soldiers and local people. His work affords agency to a rural community in its interactions with freedom fighters, showing how locals’ discursive forms of engagement with these soldiers ‘manifested themselves in songs that mocked guerrilla fighters, in nicknames given to freedom fighters, and in the names families gave to children born out of guerrilla fighters’ relationships with local women’.Footnote 32
By examining historiographies of everyday life from three different regions, we have reflected both the convergences between and the diversity of historians’ interpretations and understandings of ‘the everyday’, again in the hope of ‘decentring’ the European literature. Notions of ‘the ordinary’ and ‘the extraordinary’ remain central to histories of everyday life in these contexts, but our examination illustrates how any discussion of the ‘ordinary–extraordinary’ binary must ask a series of questions: ‘ordinary’ (or ‘extraordinary’) to whom? ‘Ordinary’, when? And ‘ordinary’, where?
II
In Europe, scholars became increasingly concerned with ‘the everyday’ – including the experiences of those hitherto overlooked in historical research – during the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote 33 These decades saw the appearance of two separate (but, in many ways, complementary) fields: microhistory and Alltagsgeschichte.Footnote 34 The former – often associated with French and Italian scholars such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carlo Ginzburg, and Giovanni Levi – and the latter – pioneered by German historians Alf Lüdtke, Detlev Peukert, and Hans Medick – challenged prevailing understandings of historical development: adopting ‘micro’ scales of analysis, they attributed a greater degree of agency to human beings than to abstract structures.Footnote 35 As Levi himself indicates, the first practitioners of microhistory sought ‘a more realistic description of human behaviour’, recognizing people’s ‘[relative] freedom beyond, though not outside, the constraints of prescriptive and normative systems’.Footnote 36 In like manner, Lüdtke argues that the methods of Alltagsgeschichte – especially the use of ‘thick description’, and the compilation of mosaics of stories, or ‘miniatures’ – serves to ‘broaden our perspective’, capturing ‘the “density” of life situations and contexts of action’.Footnote 37 Whilst Lüdtke and other Alltagsgeschichte historians initially focused on the National Socialist regime in Germany, they drew inspiration from earlier Annales and ‘history from below’ approaches, and shared many questions and methods with historians then working on Stalin’s Soviet Union and the post-war regimes in Eastern Europe (particularly the GDR).Footnote 38 Moreover, when the ‘first chapter’ of Alltagsgeschichte, as it was termed, gave way to a ‘second chapter’ at the turn of the twenty-first century, the approach was expanded in three important respects: firstly, to explore everyday life also in non-dictatorial European contexts; secondly, to develop, or develop further, conceptual frames such as ‘everyday space’ and spatial practices; and thirdly, to extend the (comparative) investigation of everyday life in dictatorial contexts to other regimes, particularly in southern Europe, and most notably Fascist Italy and Francoist Spain.Footnote 39
Nevertheless, ‘the everyday’ has long been integral to histories of other regions, too, not least Southern Africa and Latin America. For example, Charles van Onselen’s book Chibaro, published in 1976, explores the everyday exploitation of African labourers under the colonial regime in Southern Rhodesia, whilst Beverly Grier and Hilda Bernstein have, respectively, centred on the everyday living and working conditions of children and women, both in colonial Zimbabwe and under Apartheid.Footnote 40 To date, the historiography on everyday life in Southern Africa has yielded valuable insights into the colonial and post-colonial periods, especially in territories forming part of present-day South Africa and Zimbabwe. It has shown how, particularly for Black women, the colonial period was one in which everyday survival was negotiated within a constricted space, and with limited opportunities.Footnote 41 Similarly, studies of everyday life in the post-colonial period (including contemporary Southern African communities) have, broadly speaking, focused on themes such as crisis, resilience, and survival, as well as everyday cultural practices.Footnote 42 For example, an edited collection published in 2022, and bringing together studies from across the continent, explores people’s everyday experiences of state power – or, as the editor puts it, the ‘everyday state’ – in Africa today, delving into phenomena such as everyday policing in South African townships, and ‘everyday engagement’ with the Renamo party in Mozambique.Footnote 43 In the Zimbabwean context, a whole body of work dubbed ‘crisis literature’ has emerged, looking at the deterioration of the country’s economy in the 2000s, and Zimbabweans’ subsequent survival strategies.Footnote 44
In Latin America, the history of everyday life began to take shape as early as the 1960s, but the 1990s, in particular, marked a significant juncture: from this point onwards, the scale of activity in the field increased significantly, and a steady stream of publications – often collaborative – has continued to flow. The Historia de la vida cotidiana en Colombia, published in 1996, constituted a ‘special landmark’ in Colombian historiography, bringing together a diverse range of studies encompassing the Spanish Conquest, colonial New Granada, and the resulting republics.Footnote 45 In Argentina, two major studies appeared around this time, including Ricardo Cicerchia’s Historia de la vida privada en la Argentina, the first volume of which was published in 1999, and all three volumes of a multi-authored study with the same title, released in the same year.Footnote 46 The six-volume Historia de la vida cotidiana en México, published between 2004 and 2007, incorporates no fewer than seventy-two studies. Put simply, the last thirty years have seen an explosion in Latin American everyday life histories, especially in Colombia, Argentina, and Mexico. Historians of colonial Spanish America have investigated the daily routines of priests and nuns in seventeenth-century Mexico City; ‘unequal’ marriages in colonial Quito and Lima; and the everyday experiences of enslaved labourers in the gold mines of New Granada.Footnote 47 The literature on post-colonial Latin America has addressed topics as varied as ‘everyday nationhood’ in nineteenth-century Nicaragua; the development of the ‘teenager’ in early twentieth-century Uruguay; and, most recently, everyday life among Argentina’s military communities in the 1970s.Footnote 48
From its origins, the Latin American literature has seen considerable European influence, and leading Latin American historians have cited European scholars frequently in their work.Footnote 49 French authors such as Jacques Soustelle and Jean Descola wrote some of the earliest histories of everyday life in this region and, from the 1960s, historians in Latin America drew inspiration explicitly from the Annales school, including the history of mentalities.Footnote 50 For example, the Seminar for the History of Mentalities, based at the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History from the late 1970s, served as an incubator for what became the history of everyday life in Mexico.Footnote 51 However, what might appear to be European (or North American) ‘imports’ often share commonalities with traditional forms of communicating historical memory in Latin America. For instance, whilst ‘academic’ oral history began to take root in the region in the 1970s – building, in part, on Britain’s History Workshop movement – oral traditions formed part of Latin American cultures long before this (much as they did in many African cultures).Footnote 52 Furthermore, whilst academic oral history emerged later in Latin America than in Europe, Latin American scholars have since played a crucial role in developing the field. From the 1980s, the late Dora Schwarzstein was a highly influential figure among oral historians, both in her home country of Argentina and globally, and her 1991 anthology La historia oral continues to be a core text for oral history practitioners worldwide.Footnote 53
Most importantly, though a considerable degree of cross-fertilization has occurred between (in particular) European and Latin American scholarship, the literatures on everyday life in the three regions examined here have all, to a large extent, evolved independently of one another, reflecting specific regional characteristics and historical contexts. In the Global South, the colonial period remains a key site of inquiry, which historians have often approached from a social history perspective, highlighting the experiences of oppressed groups, including women and/or indigenous populations. For instance, in Cotton is the mother of poverty, published in 1996, Allen Isaacman explores how, in everyday life, African labour power was exploited to serve the colonial economy of Mozambique and, similarly, in a 2003 study, Kathleen Sheldon examines women’s everyday experiences of markets and gardens in the urban spaces of Maputo.Footnote 54 In South Africa, several works have focused on everyday experiences of Apartheid and/or colonialism, such as Belinda Bozzoli and Mmantho Nkotsoe’s Women of Phokeng, which uncovers the everyday survival strategies of twenty-two Black women born in the 1900s.Footnote 55 Hilda Bernstein discusses similar themes in her work, delving into the everyday living and working conditions of Black women under the Apartheid regime, as well as the experiences of migrant workers, including the impact of migration on the family, children, and social security.Footnote 56 Scholarship on Latin America has also illustrated people’s lived experiences of racialized power-structures under colonialism. For example, Pablo Rodríguez Jiménez and Jaime Humberto Borja have investigated everyday life in the gold mines of New Granada, discussing the use of forced labour – initially of indigenous peoples and, from the late sixteenth century onwards, enslaved Africans – which consisted, partly, of children.Footnote 57 Equally, Douglas Cope has shed light on the complex relationship between workers – including enslaved people – and bosses in the cities of New Spain, revealing how, due to the close proximity in which they worked, labourers and masters often knew a great deal about each other’s personal lives.Footnote 58
Of course, researching everyday life in authoritarian contexts poses significant difficulties. Unfortunately, ‘there is no obvious or clear-cut archive for everyday life history’, not least because ‘the experiences of “ordinary” historical actors are less likely to be recorded’, at least directly, than the experiences ‘of those who occupied prominent positions or enjoyed a particular status’.Footnote 59 Colonial archives are especially problematic: since the perspectives of the colonized are often absent, historians must read colonial-era documents ‘against the grain’.Footnote 60 To navigate such obstacles, researchers of ‘the everyday’ in both the Global South and Global North derive their material from a wide variety of sources, combining official records with jokes, songs, memoirs, diaries, newspapers, pamphlets, and personal correspondence. In particular, oral history remains key to reaching and understanding the everyday lives of the oppressed. European scholars such as Luisa Passerini, Alessandro Portelli, Neni Panourgiá, and Huw Halstead have worked extensively with oral sources, demonstrating both the strengths and limitations of this material.Footnote 61 Similarly, Andrés di Tella has drawn on oral testimonies to reconstruct everyday life in the notorious ‘clandestine detention centres’ used by the 1976–83 military dictatorship of Argentina whilst, more recently, Javiera Velásquez Meza has utilized oral histories to shed light on the role of women in resisting the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.Footnote 62 In the Southern African case, many scholars of the region – such as Beverly Grier, Ushehwedu Kufakurinani, and Joseph Mujere – have also used oral histories as alternative sources to explore ‘everyday’ experiences, beyond those dominant forms of evidence left behind by those in (or adjacent to) power.Footnote 63 Still, whilst oral history methods clearly offer valuable opportunities to access and amplify those quotidian experiences not readily found in conventional, text-based archives, they also raise important questions and challenges – especially those carried out during and after authoritarian contexts – regarding potentially illusory assumptions around the authenticity of subjects’ accounts and, similarly, of obtaining fully informed consent in repressive settings.Footnote 64
Indeed, historians of the everyday in both the Global South and Global North have often written about politically charged eras that are still fresh in the minds of participants. To take one example, Panourgiá’s book Dangerous citizens explores the everyday lives of left-wing Greek activists under periods of dictatorship between the 1920s and 1970s, primarily using interviews with people who had direct experience of these regimes.Footnote 65 Equally, scholars of Southern Africa have studied recent experiences of war, as well as social and economic suffering.Footnote 66 Trauma transcends physical wars and conflicts, since harsh economic experiences can be traumatic, too. Accordingly, both Mujere and Madimu have used interviews to reveal lived experiences of unemployment, vulnerability, and exploitation in South Africa.Footnote 67 Whilst researching such topics runs the risk of informants re-living their trauma, the positionality and subjectivity of the researcher, who often comes from the area under study, complicates this further. This was true for many early Alltagsgeschichte historians of Nazi Germany, and it continues to be the case for historians working on (to name just a few examples) Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, the Greece of the Colonels, Pinochet’s Chile, and the ‘National Reorganization Process’ of Argentina, where memories of executions, torture, and – in the Portuguese case – atrocities of colonial war remain very much ‘alive’.
As a result, researchers are, at times, also ‘participants’ in their own studies. Though this might generate concerns about a supposed lack of ‘objectivity’, the personal experiences of scholars hold particular value: not only do they help to shape research agendas in fields that might otherwise overlook the experiences of oppressed groups, but scholars’ personal connections to the objects of their analyses can also allow them a level of access that others would struggle to obtain. In this respect, the work of Southern African scholars such as Kufakurinani, Nyachega, and Mwatwara – who engage in ‘auto-ethnography’, a research technique in which their own experiences form part of the research data – show us how direct lived experiences of authoritarian rule can inform and be incorporated into research into everyday life in ways that are genuine, open, and thoroughly illuminating.Footnote 68
Furthermore, the realities of operating under existing authoritarian regimes can, in and of themselves, shape – and obstruct – research processes. Periods of conflict and repression have impeded the ability of researchers in all fields to carry out their work, often resulting in scholarship on the lived experiences (and other dimensions) of repressive regimes being conducted in exile, with authors dislocated from their countries of origin and/or subjects of study. A notable example is Njabulo S. Ndebele, who first outlined what he called the ‘Rediscovery of the Ordinary’ in a keynote address at the Commonwealth Institute in London, in 1984. Ndebele’s exile from South Africa was initiated by his parents, who sent him to boarding school in Eswatini in 1960 to ‘save us’, he wrote, from Apartheid’s segregated Bantu education system.Footnote 69 From there, Ndebele progressed to undergraduate studies in Lesotho, where ‘academic freedom was a lived norm’; a Masters degree in Cambridge; and a Ph.D. in the United States.Footnote 70 This was followed by a long period of employment at the University of Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland (later the National University of Lesotho), where he eventually became pro-vice chancellor. He returned to South Africa only in 1991, shortly after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison.
Elsewhere in Southern Africa, since the end of the colonial period, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Angola have all experienced political conflict, which has directly impacted scholars’ ability to write freely about their countries’ pasts, at least from the inside. In the Zimbabwean case, academics have, inevitably, not been immune to the economic instability wrought by the state’s command economic policies, or to the ‘trickle down’ authoritarian leadership styles that transferred from state structures to universities, and which have served to stifle initiative, suffocate innovative research, and create insufferable working conditions, especially for those who dare to challenge imposed curricular or research agendas.Footnote 71 The politico-economic crisis has also seen generations of Zimbabwean scholars emigrate, primarily to South Africa and the Global North: indeed, all the scholars cited here who have written on ‘the everyday’ in Zimbabwe are or were based outside the country, and have published mainly with institutions outside Southern Africa. An insecure research and living environment is a lived reality in the present for many scholars working on everyday life histories as they relate to Zimbabwe’s shrinking democratic spaces, and this insecurity does not necessarily dissipate if or when these scholars continue their work in exile: thoughts of those who remain back ‘home’ – and the hope or, indeed, necessity (given the current precarity of academic employment in both Global North and South institutions) of a potential future return – cannot be disregarded. Therefore, even when writing from the outside, the constricting pressures of an authoritarian regime can still be felt.
In Latin America, periods of dictatorship during the second half of the twentieth century posed similar obstacles to researchers in states such as Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile, with many academics and students arrested, killed, or forced into exile.Footnote 72 Under these regimes, governments intervened directly in university life, almost culminating in the complete disappearance of social sciences from higher education institutions.Footnote 73 For instance, José Pedro Barrán, a leading figure in Uruguayan social history, and one of the editors of the three-volume Historias de la vida privada en el Uruguay, was sacked from his position at the Universidad de la República in 1978, at the instigation of the new military authorities.Footnote 74 Equally, at a time when the history of everyday life in Europe was reaching its apogee, government intervention effectively stymied the development of historical scholarship in Argentina which, since the 1960s, had begun to incorporate new fields of study, such as oral history.Footnote 75 All this might help to explain why, at least in the Southern Cone, the history of everyday life began to flourish later than in parts of Europe.
Of course, European scholars have, at various points, contended with such difficulties, too. Many historians fled the GDR once the state began to persecute those researchers whom it viewed as ideologically opposed to the new regime and, in like manner, Soviet historians such as Aleksandr Nekrich and Zhores Medvedev were forced into exile for writing histories of the Soviet Union that contradicted officially sanctioned narratives.Footnote 76 However, in addition to political repression, other factors continue to induce scholars from the Global South, in particular, to move abroad. For instance, the prospect of higher salaries and greater opportunities for career advancement draw Latin American researchers from all disciplines to seek employment in the United States and Europe today.Footnote 77 At the same time, readers might notice that several of the Latin Americanists cited in this article (including one of its authors) are Europeans or North Americans, and this reflects wider trends within Latin American Studies. In 2010, 8 per cent of the global population resided in Latin America, but Latin American scholars generated only 1.7 per cent of research on the region.Footnote 78
Whilst the historiographies of everyday life in the three regions explored here share key similarities (and, in some cases, draw on transnational intellectual exchanges), the question of authorship – what is researched, by whom, and how – cannot be ignored. Context matters: both the context that historians of everyday life write about and, equally, the context in which they conduct their research have a considerable impact on research processes, the research that is produced, and where it is produced. The imbalances created by the stifling of academic freedoms and the continued dislocation of scholars from regions like Latin America and Southern Africa are crucial: if the voices of scholars in developing countries are not heard, then there is a risk that prevailing understandings of these parts of the world simply reflect European and North American sensibilities and assumptions.Footnote 79
III
Ultimately, those who write histories of everyday life in Europe, Southern Africa, and Latin America share the conviction that the historical actors whose lived experiences they uncover are important historical agents and that evidence of their agency – forms of self-assertion and acts which effectively contest and negotiate micro articulations of power – can be seen in their everyday practices. In other words, the concepts of ‘agency’ and ‘resistance’ are ‘red threads’ running through historiographies of everyday life in different global regions. Joseph Mujere illustrates this in his exploration of the ‘active waiting’ practices of those who inhabit South Africa’s informal settlements. For Mujere, informal settlers in Rustenberg do not wait passively for the delivery of essential services, employment, and the official recognition and incorporation of their settlement within the local municipal authority. Instead, they enact creative and productive ‘engaged activities’, which ‘seek to alleviate, transform or end their waiting’ for themselves, through the illicit connection of their homes to water and electricity supplies; the establishment of business activities and other ‘temporary’ means to eke out a livelihood whilst anticipating ‘permanent’ work in the local mines; and through grassroots meetings, protests, and other forms of local organizing to agitate for employment, services, and the formalization of their community.Footnote 80 In this respect, even the seemingly disempowered act of waiting, which significantly conditions the everyday lives of inhabitants of informal settlements and their relations with the state in Southern Africa – just as it has done in other authoritarian contexts, including the Stalinist Soviet Union – can be understood as ‘an explicit expression of agency’.Footnote 81
In his ground-breaking study The practice of everyday life, first published in French in 1980, Michel de Certeau suggests that, whilst those with power enact ‘strategies’ involving planned programmes of action, the ‘silent majority’ must ‘make do’, and engage in ‘tactical’ practices that must necessarily be ‘flexible’ and ‘opportunistic’, since they are enacted in an environment whose rules and confines are set by others.Footnote 82 The deployment of ‘tactics’ and other practices of ‘making do’ allows people to act creatively and autonomously, whilst remaining in ‘the space of the other’.Footnote 83 In short, de Certeau uses the term ‘strategies’ to refer to the practices that those in power employ routinely to maintain their grip on society, whereas ‘tactics’ denotes the everyday ‘opportunistic, adaptive and resourceful acts’ of the ostensibly powerless.Footnote 84 The conceptual tools that scholars like de Certeau crafted to express the possibilities for autonomous action by people relatively removed from power in European contexts have significant points of commonality with the conceptual tools of scholars working on colonial contexts in the Global South. One example is the Subaltern School popularized by Ranajit Guha who, alongside other Indian historians, challenged nationalist histories that traditionally centred on ‘great men’.Footnote 85 Instead, the Subaltern School focused on the ‘subordinated section of the society’, such as peasants and workers.Footnote 86 Another example is what John Lonsdale has called ‘agency in tight corners’, in reference to historical scholarship that has highlighted how colonial subjects in both East and Southern Africa ‘could make history only under conditions not of their own making’.Footnote 87 Moreover, a particularly influential development (especially for everyday life historians) was anthropologist James C. Scott’s identification of forms of ‘everyday resistance’ among peasant communities in South-East Asia, including those visible only or predominantly as ‘hidden transcripts’; what Scott describes as ‘critique[s] of power spoken behind the back of the dominant’.Footnote 88 This concept (or variations thereof) has drawn attention from scholars in many disciplines – including history, subaltern studies, and feminist studies – and working on a range of historical and geographical contexts.
Among Latin Americanists, historical scholarship has consistently revealed forms of resistance that permeated everyday life, as far back as the Spanish Conquest. In an essay first published in 1988, Serge Gruzinski challenges widespread assumptions about the supposed ‘defeatism’ or passivity of indigenous peoples during the early colonial period, by reaffirming their agency in assimilating and creating new cultural systems.Footnote 89 For his part, Roberto Ramírez Montenegro has focused on Spanish domination in the Colombian Amazon, with a particular emphasis on ‘passive resistance’, primarily in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote 90 He looks at the use of magic as a ‘weapon of war’, as well as other ‘ritual and/or spiritual practices’ that the indigenous peoples employed to preserve their own social order in the face of the Spanish invasion.Footnote 91 In turn, Peter Fleer has illustrated the continual reproduction of power structures in modern Guatemalan history, exploring, among other things, how the ‘counter-power’ – a concept used by a range of scholars, including Scott – of the oppressed has, historically, served to limit (or at least mitigate) the power of the country’s ruling elite.Footnote 92 More recently, Fabiola Bailón Vásquez has again drawn on scholars such as Scott, de Certeau, and fellow Mexican scholar Romana Falcón to highlight how, in the state of Oaxaca during Mexico’s Porfiriato (the period of authoritarian rule that lasted from 1876 to 1911), female domestic workers made use of a range of resistance tactics, from deliberately preparing food badly to keeping the change left over from household purchases.Footnote 93
In the Southern African context, scholars have also revealed the myriad ways in which, in everyday life, resistance manifested itself during both the colonial and post-colonial periods, stressing the agency of those often overlooked in historical scholarship, including women and children. Jane Parpart has used a combination of interviews and archival sources to demonstrate Zambian workers’ everyday resistance to capitalism and colonialism, whilst Bridget O’Laughlin, Allen Isaacman, and Barbara Isaacman have explored active and passive forms of resistance in Mozambique.Footnote 94 Similarly, in her work on child labourers in colonial Zimbabwe, Grier has shown how children challenged hierarchies at work and within families, whilst Ivo Mhike has investigated the extent to which, in the same context, youth delinquency also constituted a form of resistance to authority.Footnote 95 Once again, experiences of Apartheid are particularly relevant. In addition to Women of Phokeng – a classic study of agency and resistance, from a gendered perspective, in South Africa’s rural economies – the edited volume Rural resistance in South Africa analyses the Mpondo protests of the 1960s from various interdisciplinary perspectives, examining the meanings, interpretations, and implications of the resistance.Footnote 96 According to Thembela Keep and Lungisile Ntsebeza, these protests were the ‘culmination of resistance of the marginalized…ranging from passive to violent resistance, with some overt and others “hidden”’.Footnote 97 Regarding the post-colonial period, studies of Zimbabwe are especially salient. In particular, the edited volume Keep on knocking explores workers’ active and passive forms of resistance towards the country’s increasingly paternalistic and repressive state.Footnote 98 As the Zimbabwean government became more authoritarian under the Mugabe regime (1980–2017), freedoms of speech and association grew more and more restricted.Footnote 99 Jennifer Musangi has shown how, in response, people deployed political humour, including caricatures of President Mugabe, which she calls ‘a version of subversion’.Footnote 100
Though it was initially applied to colonial settings, scholars have used Scott’s concept of ‘everyday resistance’ to make sense of people’s lived experiences of authoritarian rule within European countries, too. For example, they have uncovered ‘hidden transcripts’ of resistance to dictators and their acolytes in the jokes, songs, stories, drawings, and graffiti in important everyday spaces in Fascist Italy and Francoist Spain, such as homes, bars, streets, walls, and even public toilets.Footnote 101 Moreover, they have used Scott’s formulation of ‘weapons of the weak’ – such as ‘evasion’, ‘false compliance’, and ‘feigned ignorance’ – to explain modes of behaviour that allowed individuals to manoeuvre around regime diktats.Footnote 102 For instance, the innumerable episodes recorded in the police files of both Fascist Italy and Francoist Spain, in which people accused of low-level political crimes – like singing a banned song or telling a politically unacceptable joke – made recourse to a defence of drunkenness, can be read through the lens of ‘feigned ignorance’.Footnote 103 Similarly, evidence of ‘false compliance’ can be seen in the informal trading of steel rings that arose in Fascist Italy, in response to the regime’s demand that women donate their golden wedding rings ‘to the fatherland’ during the 1935–6 Ethiopian war: because steel rings were ceremoniously awarded to women who acceded to this demand, individuals able to purchase steel rings on the black market could, by wearing them, give the false appearance of having complied with the authorities, whilst secretly keeping their golden wedding rings.Footnote 104
Of course, though many everyday life histories of authoritarian rule highlight how those frequently ignored by historians (such as children) are more than just passive receptacles of state authority, these studies are not always (or, at least, not necessarily) concerned with uncovering forms of resistance. Such studies have also shown how everyday practices can include processes of adaptation and manoeuvring that actually maintain and reinforce systems of power; how the everyday can be a site of complicity. For instance, Sonya Lipsett-Rivera illustrates how, in eighteenth-century New Spain, social rank was continuously acknowledged and re-enforced through bodily gestures of respect: to take one example, a person of lower social standing was expected to remove their hat and bow when passing a superior in public.Footnote 105 Like resistance, complicity takes many forms and gradations. In her work on Fascist Italy, Luisa Passerini has identified the tensions between the ‘oppositional identity’ of a regime’s adversaries and the ‘pragmatic acceptance’ that results from having to navigate everyday life within a repressive and authoritarian context: in other words, complicit acts do not necessarily imply ideological affinity or agreement with the regime.Footnote 106
At the same time, there is little consensus among historians as to the value of conceptualizing forms of everyday action through the lens of ‘resistance’. In the first place, Gerardo Lara Cisneros has argued that terms such as ‘rebellion’ and ‘resistance’ are themselves ‘Western’ concepts and that, consequently, they are not necessarily helpful when seeking to understand the activities of, in his case, the practices of indigenous peoples in New Spain.Footnote 107 We must acknowledge the additional layer of complexity furnished by the presence of organized political and armed Resistance movements operating both within and between the countries ruled by authoritarian regimes (and those occupied by such regimes in wartime), often distinguished by the use of the capital letter ‘R’.Footnote 108 Equally, scholars in Cisneros’s field have been careful to distinguish between phenomena such as ‘rebellions’, insurrections’, and ‘uprisings’: for instance, William B. Taylor argues that ‘rebellions’ seek ‘to restablish the normal balance’, whereas ‘insurrections’ aim ‘to reorganize relations’ between the oppressed and the ruling authorities.Footnote 109
In the context of dictatorial legislation and apparatus of coercion that removed or drastically reduced people’s scope for engaging in protest or opposition to dictatorial rule, what modes of behaviour should we classify as acts of resistance? Must resistance intend to overthrow or undermine the state, or can small, individual acts intended to withdraw an individual from the gaze of the state – for example, by avoiding particular policies – be considered resistant, too? How should we account for acts that were illegal or contravened dictatorial ideology and policy, but were primarily focused on ensuring the survival of oneself and one’s family? For instance, should we interpret the recourse en masse of Spaniards in the early 1940s to buy, sell, and barter goods on the black market at a time of widespread hunger, and in the face of the Franco regime’s disastrous policies of economic autarky, as acts of resistance, survival, or both?Footnote 110 The same goes for the evidence of survival among Zimbabweans as they faced economic crisis characterized by high inflation, huge unemployment rates, and frustrating command economics from the state.Footnote 111 Is motivation all-important, given that one can surely disobey a dictatorship without necessarily dissenting to its rule? Furthermore, we must acknowledge that those in power have often failed to recognize and understand resistance, mistaking acts of opposition to their rule as mere acts of criminality. For her part, Romana Falcón has shown how, in nineteenth-century Mexico, what peasants regarded as legitimate ‘acts of armed defence’ often appear in official records simply as ‘robberies’, ‘banditry’, or ‘illegal activities’.Footnote 112 To avoid making the same mistake, historians must, again, read colonial-era, and often authoritarian-era, documents ‘against the grain’.
At the same time, we need to remember that survival in the face of oppression can, in and of itself, be regarded as a form of resistance, as is evident from the phrase ‘to exist is to resist’, adopted by – among others – Black feminists.Footnote 113 Patently, existence cannot be read universally as resistance across and within authoritarian settings; equating survival – or existence – with resistance depends significantly upon one’s positionality in relation to power, and can be contingent and change over time. Clear examples of this include the case of mixed-race and Jewish Italians, whose identities, citizenship, and survival were challenged by the Fascist regime’s ‘racial laws’ in 1938, as well as the imposition of a ‘politics of hunger’ during Franco’s famine in Spain which, in the years immediately following the Civil War, denied and seriously obstructed access to food for Spaniards deemed ‘reds’ or sympathizers with the Republic.Footnote 114 Nevertheless, ethnographic studies on Southern Africa show us the elision and overlap between survival and resistance practices, which are especially evident in contexts of shifting power relations such as borderlands and informal settlements. For Nedson Pophiwa, smuggling practices across the South Africa–Zimbabwe border are best understood as entwined survival and resistance tactics to the twin repressions of command economics and border control regimes.Footnote 115 Similarly, as Tapiwa Madimu suggests – writing about South Africa’s informal settlements – the Zama Zamas’ (informal miners) working in disused, out-of-bounds mines constitutes, in and of itself, an act of everyday resistance.Footnote 116 Again, in a study focusing explicitly on the ‘everyday resistance’ of the Maya people during the Spanish Conquest, anthropologist Mario Humberto Ruz is clear that he regards ‘the maintenance of earlier structures and conceptions in the face of the imposition of Western culture to be a form of resistance’, too.Footnote 117
Unsurprisingly, historians have reached different conclusions as to the analytical value of identifying everyday acts as ‘resistance’, particularly in contexts in which organized political and armed Resistance movements operated. Almost all adopt a qualifying term, even within the umbrella qualifier of ‘everyday’ (as opposed to ‘organized’ or ‘open’) resistance. For example, Passerini adopts the term ‘cultural resistance’ to describe acts of symbolic or cultural rebelliousness that were irreverent and perhaps disobedient vis à vis the Fascist regime, but which were not ever intended (or able) to seriously undermine it.Footnote 118 Scholars of Francoist Spain have similarly used the term ‘symbolic resistance’ to explain acts such as jokes, songs, and insults, noting the benefits (to the agent) of the inherent ambiguity of such acts, and the effective amplification of what might be considered ‘political’ in a dictatorial context.Footnote 119 Others have preferred to adopt different terms altogether, such as ‘pragmatic acceptance’, utilized (as noted above) by Passerini. Writing on Franco’s Spain, Claudio Hernández Burgos – echoing Frank Trommler’s work on Nazi Germany – framed ordinary people’s everyday responses to the respective regimes in relation to the ‘desire for normality’ as opposed to instability, upheaval, or conflict.Footnote 120 Moreover, within the heated debates in German historiography over the use of the term Resistenz, coined by Martin Broszat to pertain to acts that in some way limited the penetration of National Socialist ideology and policy as a foil to the conventional and narrow term for resistance, Widerstand, Peukert devised a pyramid-shaped typology which posited a base of ‘non-conformity’, followed by ‘refusal to co-operate’, and ‘protest’, with only a small top-section of Widerstand to capture those (few) behaviours ‘in which the National Socialist regime in its entirety was rejected’.Footnote 121 Whilst presenting a spectrum of behaviours that might be classified as disapproving, dissenting, oppositional, and resistant is clearly important, this conception is less helpful in its implication of a hierarchy of actions, and a possible progression from one to another.
Despite the considerable debate that terms such as ‘resistance’ – and, especially, ‘everyday resistance’ – have generated among scholars of everyday life and/or authoritarian regimes, the literatures discussed above have consistently shown how, even under systems of rule that imposed their ideology and will on their populations through violence, fear, and other forms of compulsion, individuals could find some scope (however limited) to exercise choice in their thoughts and actions, and to respond creatively, with agency, to regime policies and wider political, social, and economic conditions. Consequently, ‘decentring’ the European historiography – and opening up new dialogues between literatures on ‘the everyday’ in different parts of the world – can enrich our understandings of how, historically, power was enforced, negotiated, and contested.
IV
This review has explored how the methodologies and conceptual tools of everyday life history have been understood and applied by scholars working on a range of different temporal and spatial contexts. Specifically, we have demonstrated how histories of ‘the everyday’ in Latin America, Southern Africa, and Europe form part of a continuum in which shared trajectories and themes have been developed and explored, sometimes collectively and, at other times, independently. In particular, scholars of all three regions continue to interrogate notions of ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’, whilst the theme of ‘resistance’ underpins many of the studies cited here, too. Despite this, we have also argued that context remains critical to the production of everyday life histories; to how these are conceptually framed; to who writes them, and under what conditions. For example, the experiences and legacies of colonialism in Southern Africa, Latin America, and also Europe have had a considerable impact on the process of writing these histories, as have the continuities and legacies of other authoritarian political systems, such as Fascism and state communism. In other words, we have underscored how writing about the lived experiences of authoritarian rule is not the same for scholars writing without academic security, privilege, or the safeguarding of freedoms of expression.
Most importantly, by setting everyday life histories of authoritarian rule alongside one another in a way that ‘decentres’ the European historiography, we hope to encourage further mutual engagement and dialogue among scholars working on and in different regions, and to explore further the commonalities and peculiarities in their approaches and findings. Though there has been at least some dialogue between these various literatures, there has arguably been less cross-fertilization than might be expected – especially between, for example, Africanists and Latin Americanists, or between Europeanists and Africanists – given the commonalities discussed above. Further, at least from our reading, what exchange there has been appears to have been (in the Latin American–European case, for instance) primarily in one direction (that is, from Europe to Latin America). With all of this in mind, we argue that greater engagement between scholars of everyday life in different regional contexts can deepen historical understandings of people’s lived experiences of authoritarianism in two main ways: firstly, the incorporation of theoretical frameworks and methodologies from other literatures and contexts can furnish historians with a more diverse range of tools with which to approach their respective fields of study; secondly, because extending further the comparative investigation of everyday life under authoritarian regimes will, it is hoped, lead to new explanations for the emergence, survival, and fall of authoritarian systems of rule, and deeper understandings of what is shared and what is context-specific, of what is enduring and what is contingent in how people have, historically, experienced, negotiated, maintained, and resisted such regimes.
Acknowledgements
Authors are listed in alphabetical order and have contributed equally to producing this article. Nathaniel Andrews’s current institutional affiliation is: Department of History, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK, where he holds a Simon Research Fellowship. Ushehwedu Kufakurinani’s current institutional affiliations are: School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK; Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa.
Funding statement
This work was supported by ERC grant (DICTATOREXPERIENCE, 772353) undertaken with Professor Kate Ferris as PI at the University of St Andrews, 2018–24.
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