“We want to live a good life”

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Christine Jeske
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
Good Work ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
African People ◽  
Economic Trends

This chapter introduces the book and talks about the ways people seek a good life, and how their various ways of seeking a good life do — or don't — intersect with work. It aims to help in understanding some of the global political and economic trends that make it rare for South African people to find the good life through a paid job, and how people go on finding the good life anyway. It explains that when good work is hard to find, politically polarized discourses of scapegoating abound. It then discusses how the different narratives people are inclined to believe shape their lives. Finally, the chapter talks about the danger of the hard-work narrative.

The Laziness Myth

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Jeske
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
South African ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
Good Work ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
The People ◽  
Good Lives

When people cannot find good work, can they still find good lives? By investigating this question in the context of South Africa, where only 43 percent of adults are employed, this book invites readers to examine their own assumptions about how work and the good life do or do not coincide. The book challenges the widespread premise that hard-work determines success by tracing the titular “laziness myth,” a persistent narrative that disguises the systems and structures that produce inequalities while blaming unemployment and other social ills on the so-called laziness of particular class, racial, and ethnic groups. The book offers evidence of the laziness myth's harsh consequences, as well as insights into how to challenge it with other South African narratives of a good life. In contexts as diverse as rapping in a library, manufacturing leather shoes, weed-whacking neighbors' yards, negotiating marriage plans, and sharing water taps, the people described in the book will stimulate discussion on creative possibilities for seeking the good life in and out of employment, in South Africa and elsewhere.

“I need to respect that person and that person needs to respect me”

2020 ◽  
pp. 82-109
Author(s):  
Christine Jeske
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Social Group ◽  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Moral Code ◽  
African People ◽  
People’S Perception

This chapter explores the narrative that people associate strongly with a Zulu identity, but which also resonates beyond South Africa, a moral schema demanding that the good life requires respect for all people. It talks about hierarchies, how it affects people's perception of who they are, and how they learn to live with them. It defines inequality as the kind of situation when someone with lesser power has to figure out how to demand better treatment from someone in power. The chapter discusses how South African people manage with precarity — a situation when people have a source of income, a supportive social group, and a home to live in, yet they are always hovering just at the edge of losing those basic necessities. It also talks about respect as a moral code, respect being at the intersection of work and the good life, and it asks if respect is truly achievable.

“They don’t want to work”

2020 ◽  
pp. 26-54
Author(s):  
Christine Jeske
Keyword(s):  
Social Problems ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
The Good Life

This chapter takes a look at the dominant narrative the author calls the laziness myth, exploring the origins and effects of a narrative that tells employers and employees alike that laziness is to blame for unemployment and poverty. It discusses the beliefs about laziness and about lazy people that make up the laziness myth: (1) that hard work determines who should achieve the good life, (2) that people who don't work hard are lazy, (3) that certain groups of people are especially lazy, and (4) that laziness is the source of social problems, so solving laziness should be central to solving social problems. The chapter explains the harm that the laziness myth has done using the experience of Zulu people as an example. It also presents three reasons to why the myth is just a myth: (1) because people are working hard but the myth keeps that work invisible, (2) because the causes of unemployment and poverty are systemic but the myth keeps those reasons invisible, and (3) because seemingly lazy behaviors have causes that are other than laziness.

Chasing Money: Tourist-Induced Labor Migration and Pentecostal Teachings of Success in Zanzibar

Exchange ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-30
Author(s):  
Hans Olsson
Keyword(s):  
Labor Migration ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Induced Labor ◽  
Labor Migrants ◽  
Muslim Society ◽  
Tourist Economy ◽  
Charismatic Christianity

Abstract This article explores the role of Pentecostal-Charismatic teachings of growth and success in the context of Christian labor migrants’ efforts to “make it” in the predominantly Muslim society of Zanzibar. The study ethnographically assesses how dreams of making money and accumulating wealth in the islands’ growing tourist economy are addressed in teachings on how to mature spiritually through a combination of classic holiness living and ideas of how to reach and maximize people’s inner potential. Tracing the different theological ideas behind the promise of successfully attaining the good life suggests that the view of how prosperity is communicated within Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity in Africa needs to be nuanced in light of its diversity as well as in relation to local contextual circumstances. Thus, the case underlines how neo-Pentecostal ideas of realizing potential mingle with classic Pentecostal teachings emphasizing striving and hard work which, in Zanzibar, stress time and endurance in order to become a successful migrant in both material and spiritual terms.

Tensions Between the Good Life, the Good Profession, and the Good Society

1998 ◽  
Vol 43 (10) ◽  
pp. 667-668
Author(s):  
Isaac Prilleltensky
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Good Society
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