On the threshing floor : roadblocks and the policing of everyday life in Zimbabwe
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Between 2012 and 2017, the Zimbabwean government dispatched police officers to mount roadblocks on the country's major roads and many of the minor ones. What had once been a ten-minute drive to work or to drop children off at school could now become an hour-long series of negotiations with the police officers who manned the roadblocks, in a country with no militias and no armed conflict. This dissertation presents a close examination of encounters at the roadblocks. Taking roadblocks as a key site of citizen/state engagement in the crisis era, it asks how people's conceptions of mobility, of governance, and of citizenship are expressed and transformed in the face of unrelenting policing. Emerging in the wake of staggering economic and sociopolitical crisis, roadblocks are central the state's performance of itself as such. Yet, as police and policed come together to negotiate the rituals of inspection, forms of sociality arise at the roadblock that prompt a different kind of understanding of citizenship, and challenge neat distinctions between police and policed. The dissertation is based on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in Zimbabwe - on the road, driving around in combis, buses, cars and trucks with motorists while they were stopped and inspected - as well as at police stations, government buildings, and other spaces in which the terms of everyday life are negotiated.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Takabvirwa, Kathryn |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Ferguson, James |
| Thesis advisor | Ferguson, James |
| Thesis advisor | Ebron, Paulla A, 1953- |
| Thesis advisor | Malkki, Liisa H. (Liisa Helena) |
| Thesis advisor | Tambar, Kabir |
| Degree committee member | Ebron, Paulla A, 1953- |
| Degree committee member | Malkki, Liisa H. (Liisa Helena) |
| Degree committee member | Tambar, Kabir |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Anthropology. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Kathryn Takabvirwa. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Anthropology. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Kathryn Farisai Takabvirwa
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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