Electronic Theses and Dissertations (PhDs)

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Browsing Electronic Theses and Dissertations (PhDs) by Author "Katsaura, Obvious"

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    Love, Care, and Cure: Economies of Affect in a Zimbabwean Transnational Pentecostal Church
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-09) Thonje, Admire; Katsaura, Obvious
    This thesis attends to affective relations as they manifest in local and transnational settings. The thesis’s empirical site is a Zimbabwe-founded Pentecostal church which is pseudonymised as Speak in Tongues (SIT). SIT has since grown to establish presence in South Africa, among a host of other countries. The research deployed a multi-sited ethnography whose spatial connections included Johannesburg, Pretoria, and the church headquarters in Gweru (Zimbabwe). Relying on purposively selected South African branches and their membership, ties among and ties between members and non-members are explored to reveal the formation of affective community, affective solidarity, and affective curatorship. These three affective relationalities emerge, solidify and in some instances disintegrate. In tracing the ties, the thesis highlights the productivity of affect. I argue that affective ties form and circulate in what I deem to be a relational economy of affect. For a start, affective community in this thesis emerges as the product of deliberate efforts by the leadership as well as discursive tools which shape the ways in which church relationalities members relate among themselves, as well as between members and their leaders. This is, however, not a straightforward endeavour because members negotiate and resist some of the efforts and discourses. As a result of the varied intensities of affective ties, notions of affective community tend to yield micro-communities even within the church as a group. The result are different sensibilities of affective solidarity. Affective solidarity’s variability is evident in how love is negotiated in the church as well as how members attend celebrations of love in weddings. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, some members require the intervention of fellow members and leaders to extend a form of affective pastoral care which is identified as ‘affective curatorship’. Affective curatorship is extended to members as an extension of the church’s care work. It is also extended to non-members as part of social outreach which ostensibly doubles as some form of proselytizing. In exploring these dimensions, the study engages the literature on affective relations (Pedwell, 2014; Röttger-Rössler & Slaby, 2018; von Scheve, 2018) via Sara Ahmed’s ‘affect economies’ to reveal the production of affective ties in social encounters that occur in the everyday. Contrary to scholarship which posits affect as a neutral and passive force which only appears in moments of encounter, the study spotlights the active production of affective ties in social contact. In the process, it reveals a vibrant life — an affective economy where affects and emotions are produced, circulated and sustained both in and outside of the church — around the selected Pentecostal church. The vibrant life lies beyond sensationalised miracles that hog the public limelight. In addition, the study shows through affective ties that the distinction between sacred and profane is very shaky. Affective ties bind believers and non-believers as they share social spaces as well as materials.
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    The ‘social life’ of digital money: User experiences of mobile money in Manzini, Eswatini and Masvingo, Zimbabwe
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-07) Mavodza, Emma; Katsaura, Obvious; Kenny, Bridget
    Digital financial service innovations have long been hailed as a catalyst for financial inclusion and empowerment for the unbanked (Beck, et al, 2007; Anderlone and Vandone, 2010; Johnson and Arnold, 2012; Lahaye, et al. 2015; Jack and Suri, 2016; Dermiguc-Kunt et al, 2018; World Bank, 2018;). However, most of these studies assume that the current state of exclusion and lack of access to transformative financial services is a natural state in these communities. While socio-anthropological perspectives have helped to acknowledge the place of money in the socioeconomic lives of communities (Granovetter,1985; Callon, 1998; Zelizer, 1997; Comaroff and Comaroff, 2005; 2010; 2012; Maurer, 2008; Dodd, 2014), digital financial service innovations remain a bewilderment to many who attempts to understand them. Therefore, to examine the social life of mobile money, I gathered data for this qualitative study (in 2018 and 2019) in selected informal markets in Manzini where money supply and financial institutions are stable but inaccessible to many and Masvingo where liquidity constraints are the new order of the day. My qualitative analysis of the social life of mobile money from the global South is based on the in-depth interviews, photo voice and observational data sets. Drawing from a range of literature and my empirical data on the social cultural aspects of money, I argue that mobile money usage in the informal market spaces was articulated and imagined through existing social meanings, and it was used within specific socio-cultural constraints. The thesis presents this through an examination of four overarching themes; namely, mobile money sociality at the backdrop of informality and precarity, mechanisms of building trust and solidarity, the gendered layers of mobile money usage as well as the subtle, unscripted ways employed by participants to resist subjectification and full financialisation of their everyday lives. An important finding of this study is how mobile money continues to play a critical role in the ways through which these communities’ monetary repertoires are produced, historicised, and reproduced. Drawing on the evidence I gathered, I argue that, despite their assumed vulnerability, informal market participants were not docile adopters of mobile money but rather active constructors of their own digital money usage footprints in ways not envisaged by the service providers at inception. They showcased great ingenuity through their established cultural habits and sacred traditions on money use. Therefore, instead of taking assumed and imagined vulnerability as incapacitation and lack of agency, this study has implication for financial policy that focuses on the individual and mundane financial practices of the unbanked as critical for building transformative financial behaviours among this resourceful population segment. This research contributes to an understanding of how informal markets workers make sense of mobile money as they incorporate it in alignment with existing social meanings and existing financial practices at the backdrop of socio-economic precarity. Therefore, I bring new qualitative evidence and analysis from the global South to expand the definition of social life of digital money and financial inclusion (Ahmad et al., 2020). The study also highlights how the ubiquitous proliferation of mobile money and its intimate ties to the social lives of the participants has precipitated the rise of new forms of voluntary, freely given unwaged, immaterial labour which is unconsciously performed by the users as a collective.