Keen to show the fluidity of border areas, and the limits of state control, much anthropological scholarship on borders highlights arrangements, activities and opportunities that pass beneath the official radar. But while such a clandestine focus casts border dwellers as preoccupied with resisting state regulation, this article shows how Zimbabwean–South African border dwellers make the most of their location by being visible to state officials, as waged farm workers. They seek agricultural jobs as a foothold in building lucrative businesses. Moreover, waged farm workforces are hubs of border trade, as workers remit goods for resale as a response to the crisis at home in Zimbabwe. The article therefore questions the wider theoretical opposition between the creative entrepreneurship of the informal economy and the drudgery of formal employment. Formal and informal modes of livelihood constitute one another, intersect and are interdependent. This article unpacks the spatial and temporal articulations between waged work and other means of making ends meet. In so doing, it suggests fixating less on the border itself as a distinctive feature, replete with smugglers and murky goings-on, and appreciating the various meanings of work in borderland economies.

There is widespread apprehension about the resilience of the ‘traditional African’ model of the extended family in maintaining norms and practices of inter-group cooperation and care in conditions of demographic, social and economic change. In Nyanza Province, Kenya, where one of every five children is currently orphaned, and HIV/AIDS and wide-scale poverty continue to render lives and livelihoods insecure, many people are not able to take their families' care for granted. Ideas and practices of kinship have been challenged profoundly by questions regarding who is responsible for the care of orphaned children. This article looks at two complementary practices among Luo families in western Kenya that address such dilemmas: the communal initiative of ‘sitting’ as a family to discuss and resolve issues in a cooperative and consensual manner; and the individualistic initiative of ‘standing’ to represent the interests of another individual. I suggest that while the immediate purposes of sitting and standing are pragmatic in assigning caring responsibilities for specific children, their eventfulness also actualizes something greater: trust, reciprocity and solidarity among extended families.

Studies of slavery in Africa have noted the persistence of those relations in different forms, such as pawning, that allow social changes in power, status and wealth to be weathered more gradually. As pawning itself became less frequent, did other kinds of relationship take its place? Some scholars have argued that pawning was folded into marriage and fatherhood; others that there are continuities with fosterage and domestic servant arrangements today. This article examines the question of pawning's transformations in Akuapem, a region in south-eastern Ghana involved in forms of commercial agriculture that were heavily dependent on slave labour and the capital raised by pawning. Ultimately, it argues that debt became key to fatherhood and fosterage relations between children and adults, changing from a short-term exchange to more lifelong reciprocal relations of care.

Anti-retroviral therapies have radically transformed the HIV epidemic in rural southern Malawi and this article explores the ways in which women are learning to live with the virus in a matrilineal setting. Through discussion of the experiences of HIV-positive women, I argue that stigma can only be understood through an appreciation of the pre-existing, and often complicated, social relations into which new information about a person is folded. The women's narratives reveal a tentative hope for the future, which is replicated in my own optimism that the anthropology of HIV is undergoing a parallel reorientation towards the study of life with HIV, rather than death by AIDS.

This article examines the interplay of agency, culture and context in order to consider the social embeddedness of money and trade at the margins of South Africa's economy. Focusing on small-scale, survivalist informal enterprise operators, it draws on socio-cultural analysis to explore the social dynamics involved in generating and managing wealth. After describing the informal sector in South Africa, the article elucidates the relationship between money and economic informality. First, diverse objectives, typically irreducible to the maximization of profit, animate those in the informal sector and challenge meta-narratives of a ‘great transformation’ towards socially disembedded and depersonalized economic relationships. Second, regimes of economic governance, both state-led and informal, shape the terrain on which informal economic activity occurs in complex and constitutive ways. Third, local idioms and practices of trading, managing money and negotiating social claims similarly configure economic activities. Fourth, and finally, encroaching and often inexorable processes of formalization differentially influence those in the informal sector. The analysis draws on these findings to recapitulate both the ubiquity and centrality of the sociality at the heart of economy, and to examine the particular forms they take in South Africa's informal economy.

Given the observed agro-pastoralization of livelihoods of both Moose ‘farmers’ and Fulbe ‘herdsmen’, interactions between both groups living in Burkina Faso's north-central region are usually interpreted in terms of vanishing symbiosis and increasing tension along ethnic lines. There is, however, a remainder to this equation, namely the cattle Moose entrust to Fulbe. This article looks into Fulbe involvement in solving Moose fecundity problems to elucidate the nature of the relationships in which cattle entrustment is embedded. It is argued that Moose ideas about the other world and its intervention in procreation and constituting personhood allow imagining an extension of Moose societal relations beyond conventional community boundaries, that is, including Fulbe. This extension can be subsequently – but not necessarily – effectuated through the establishment and performance of spiritual kinship in which cattle owned by Moose can be embedded. The divergent extent to which sustained Moose–Fulbe relations result is explained in terms of social controversy regarding agro-pastoralization of livelihoods accompanied by differential cattle accumulation.

This study examines the consequences of the rapid and unprecedented expansion of insurances for the poor in South Africa. Over the last ten years, South African insurance companies established a myriad of policies in order to incorporate the previously excluded, mostly African, poor and lower middle classes. While poverty, violence and AIDS put state institutions and social relations under pressure, insurances enable people to manage risks in hitherto unthinkable ways. The article examines the development of this new regime of risk as a Janus head, after the Roman god of opening and closing. At the heart of access to insurance were the incongruencies that were caused by the ‘translation’ of risk into the seemingly neutral concept of costs and the inability of brokers and intermediary organizations to navigate these translations successfully. Access to insurance – here not defined as having an insurance policy but as making a successful claim when confronted with the insured risk – was fraught with the contradictions of complex high-tech bureaucracies and the poor's social networks.

Drawing on fieldwork in a rural area of KwaZulu-Natal, this article shows how people experience government and other institutions in a patchwork of encounters spread out over time, disjointedly, and via various intermediaries. Aspirations change over time and in response to these encounters. Specifically, the article focuses on the setting up of a government-regulated microfinance institution. I consider the divergence between state-led models of ‘entrepreneurship’ and the practice of individuals' engagement with the organization and their own expectations about it. One government stipulation was that the bank demonstrated its effective operation through regular inflows and outflows of cash, prior to paying out any loans. As such, members were encouraged to invest money in order to qualify for a loan at a later stage. I describe the factors that enhanced or inhibited the willingness of members to invest in the bank, arguing that these strategies were influenced not only by existing levels of economic vulnerability experienced by individuals, but also by particular expectations of the bank, including its perceived reliability, stability and degree of formality vis-à-vis existing conceptions about banking. The example demonstrates that processes of formalization are often partial and incomplete. Rather than examining them in the narrow terms of success or failure, the article focuses on the intersection of moral and economic actions that emerge in the prolonged states of limbo that they create.