Morphing between the margins: how youth make a living across multiple spaces in South Africa and beyond

Abstract

Young South Africans regularly generate livelihoods on the move, as they morph across a mainstream economic field and two translocal sub-fields. While a field implies sets of relations operating under common conditions, translocal sub-fields are local spaces of exchange and practice, where resources are utilised, in a relationship with other linked spaces. In South Africa, the mainstream economic field largely consists of an urban labour market with some good jobs and unskilled labour. Alongside it a rural sub-field consists of farm and off-farm activities, reciprocal exchange and state grants. Finally, on the outskirts of urban areas a township sub-field consists of young people hustling resources in the informal sector. After describing how mobile young South Africans make a living across these spaces, I show how this case is both similar and different to other post-colonial contexts with substantial informal economic sectors like India and Brazil. In these places, youth strive to make a living by accumulating resources as they move across spaces that include, but transcend, the labour market. A particular form of mobile, global South youth livelihood generation occurs across the mainstream capitalist economy and informal urban and rural contexts, where economic relations remain largely embedded in social life.