The processual approach emerging from the agrarian literature is also
closely congruent with key themes in critical geography that call for
explicitly spatialized understandings of how local and translocal
processes continually constitute and reconstitute one another within an
increasingly interconnected global system (e.g., Pred and Watts, 1992;
Massey, 1994, 1995). “A local place,” as Massey suggests, is most usefully
thought of not as a bounded enclosure, but as “a particular subset of the
interactions which constitute social space, a local articulation within the
wider whole” (1995:115). By the same token, the global processes driving
capital mobility are always experienced, constituted, and mediated locally
(Pred and Watts, 1992).
In the discussion that follows, I illustrate—of necessity quite schematically—the
way I have put these ideas to work in illuminating how
national and transnational capital is taking hold in former bantustan areas
of South Africa. Following from the arguments laid out above, I illustrate
two central propositions. First, at a broad societal level, the distinguishing
feature of industrial decentralization in South Africa is that it was preceded
by massive dispossession; this, fundamentally, is what distinguishes
it from processes of rural industrialization in various regions of
East Asia that, although quite distinctive in their own ways, have been
predicated on the retention of small property as well as various forms of
state-sponsored subsidies in the agrarian sphere.15 Second, these historically
constructed property relations set the broad terrain of industrial
accumulation in predominantly rural regions, but do not in any unilateral
way determine specific local outcomes that are in practice enormously
varied. My recent ethnographic research in two localities in northwestern
KwaZulu-Natal that are structurally and locationally quite similar reveals
clearly how particular local trajectories are the product of ongoing
processes of struggle and contestation in multiple, intersecting social arenas,
both local and translocal. These diverse local trajectories also display
unexpected twists and turns that defy notions of embeddedness and path
dependency, but are a central element of conflicting efforts to bring about
social change or maintain the status quo.