A world turned upside down

Abstract This paper is, in part, an overview of the research done in Qwaqwa in the 1980s by members of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, and it seeks to reflect some of the concerns that characterised that body of work ‐ in particular the concern to place key anthropological issues, such as the internal organisation of domestic groups and the relationships between domestic groups, in the context of historical changes in Qwaqwa in the 1970s and 1980s. In this respect the paper serves as an introduction that locates the papers by two of my co‐researchers that follow. It also, however, seeks to examine the relationship between processes of social and material differentiation amongst working‐class households in Qwaqwa's closer settlements in these two decades, on the one hand, and the different patterns of migration from Qwaqwa in the period after the lifting of influx control restrictions in 1986, on the other.