Shingirai Nyakabawu

Current Fellows: Anthropology Department, PhD

“Economic transnationalism amongst Zimbabweans in South Africa” looks on looks at the nature of transnational business activities of Zimbabwean migrants based in Cape Town, South Africa. More specifically, it focuses on how transnational entrepreneurs use their life experience constructed by living in two countries to engage in transnational entrepreneurship, how they navigate transnational social fields and mobilise social capital in these two countries. . Most of the studies on Zimbabweans in South Africa have adopted a structuralist position and underestimated the capabilities of human actions in times of crisis not merely as passive recipients of institutional or structural arrangements. This study however, does not adopt a structure and agency framework because these dichotomies ail in the field of entrepreneurship and stunt theory development. It adopts a relational perspective guided by Bourdieu’s theory of practice that offers a viable alternative to overcoming these paradigmatic dichotomies by examining transnational entrepreneurship in its situated context generated through the interdependence of agency, structure, and action