Blair Rutherford

Biography

My ethnographic research has been predominantly in Zimbabwe and South Africa, particularly on commercial farm workers. I have been examining the economic strategies, institutional arrangements and the constitutive cultural politics shaping current and former farm worker strategies to access resources, particularly land, during the on-going land redistribution exercises in Zimbabwe and deepening political and economic crises in this southern African nation, including those that involve working on South African farms. More recently, I am engaged with two research projects examining gender and artisanal and small-scale mining in Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and DRC, which has entailed my carrying out ethnographic research in Sierra Leone and Mozambique.

Research Interest

Politics and possibilities of international development, civil society in sub-Saharan Africa; rural livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa; anthropology of citizenship, gender, state and globalization; colonialism and post-colonialism; migration; public anthropology.