How to Do Things with Land: A Distributive Perspective on Rural Livelihoods in Southern Africa

Discussions on land use and land reform too often reduce the land question to the agrarian question. Yet a rich empirical literature in the region shows that producing agricultural goods is really only one of many, many ways in which land is used, and not necessarily the most important. This paper argues that many of the ways in which land is used (often labelled ‘social’ or ‘cultural’) are in fact best understood as part of processes of distribution that are a vital part of many poor Southern Africans' livelihoods. An exclusive focus on production as the problem, and more productive agriculture as the solution, blinds us both to most of the things that people, in fact, do with land, and to many of the most important issues facing low‐income rural people. Giving a more central place to processes of distribution may help us to see just how much is lost if we allow distribution to be treated as an afterthought to production – or the land question to be reduced to the agrarian question.