Maxim Bolt

Main profile

Maxim is Reader (Associate Professor) in Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK, and a Research Associate at WISER. He is an anthropologist working largely on questions of economy in southern Africa – particularly labour, migration, borders, development, the social dynamics of money, and will-making and inheritance. His first ethnographic project involved fieldwork on South Africa’s border with Zimbabwe, between 2006 and 2008, during acute economic and political troubles in Zimbabwe. This focused on the border farms, their black workforces and their white landowners in this context of crisis, upheaval and displacement. The monograph that emerged from this – Zimbabwe’s Migrants and South Africa’s Border Farms: The Roots of Impermanence – was published in 2015 by Cambridge University Press and in South Africa in 2016 by Wits Press. It won the 2016 British Sociological Association / BBC Thinking Allowed Ethnography Award. He has worked as the anthropologist on the British Museum’s comparative, collaborative ‘Money in Africa’ project, alongside historians and an economic historian. As part of this project, he conducted fieldwork with small-scale businesspeople in Malawi, as well as interview-based research in central banks in Nigeria and Uganda.

In 2016, Maxim began a three-year project, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, on wills, inheritance and class reproduction in South Africa's middle class. In the post-apartheid era, making wills has taken on new significance amidst exponential middle-class expansion, as well as the rapid proliferation of financial services. The project explores how wills and testaments are produced and administered, and the disputes surrounding their execution, connecting questions of socio-economic position to questions of kinship, property, and legal and bureaucratic processes.

Maxim is currently co-editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies.

Book

Bolt, Maxim. 2015. Zimbabwe’s Migrants and South Africa’s Border Farms: The Roots of Impermanence. South African edition. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. South African edition published in 2016 by Wits Press.

Edited volumes

Bolt, Maxim, and Dinah Rajak (eds.) 2016. Labour, Insecurity and Violence in South Africa. Special issue of Journal of Southern African Studies 42(5).

Meagher, Kate, Laura Mann and Maxim Bolt (eds.) 2016. Making the Right Connections:  Globalization, Economic Inclusion and African Workers. Special issue of Journal of Development Studies 52(4). Also published as an edited book by Routledge.

Articles and chapters

Bolt, Maxim. Forthcoming 2017. ‘Navigating formality in a migrant labour force’, in W. Adebanwi (ed.), The Political Economy of Life in Africa. Woodbridge: James Currey.

Bolt, Maxim. 2016. ‘Mediated paternalism and violent incorporation: enforcing farm hierarchies on the Zimbabwean-South African border’, Journal of Southern African Studies 42(5): 911-27. In special issue, edited by Maxim Bolt and Dinah Rajak, on Labour, Insecurity and Violence in South Africa.

Bolt, Maxim and Dinah Rajak. 2016. ‘Introduction: labour, insecurity and violence in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 42(5): 797-813. In special issue, edited by Maxim Bolt and Dinah Rajak, on Labour, Insecurity and Violence in South Africa.

Bolt, Maxim. 2016 ‘Accidental neoliberalism and the performance of management: hierarchies in export agriculture on the Zimbabwean-South African border’, Journal of Development Studies 52(4): 561-75. In special issue, edited by Kate Meagher, Laura Mann and Maxim Bolt, on Making the Right Connections:  Globalization, Economic Inclusion and African Workers.

Meagher, Kate, Laura Mann and Maxim Bolt. 2016. ‘Introduction:  African workers and the terms of global economic inclusion’, in co-edited special issue, Journal of Development Studies 52(4): 471-82. In special issue, edited by Kate Meagher, Laura Mann and Maxim Bolt, on Making the Right Connections:  Globalization, Economic Inclusion and African Workers.

Bolt, Maxim. 2014. ‘The sociality of the wage: money rhythms, wealth circulation and the problem with cash on the Zimbabwean-South African border’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20(1): 113-30.

Reviews and comments

Bolt, Maxim. 2016. Review of Witchcraft and a Life in the New South Africa by Isak Niehaus, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22(1).

Bolt, Maxim. 2015. ‘Making Freedom: apartheid, squatter politics, and the struggle for home by Anne-Maria Makhulu’, New Release Book Review essay, Anthropological Quarterly 88(4).

Bolt, Maxim. 2015. ‘What dogs tell us about race and inequality’, comment in forum section, ‘Anthropologists Debate (In)equality’, on Harri Englund’s Human Rights and African Airwaves, Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 40(1).

2014. ‘Transcending the economic: comment on Callebert’s “Transcending dual economies”’, Africa 84(1).