Aspirations in flux: Pentecostalism and the everyday (re)shaping of middle-class identities among Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how Zimbabwean migrants in Johannesburg, South Africa sustain middle-class aspirations under conditions of economic volatility, precarious legal status, and xenophobic marginalisation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in three Zimbabwean-founded Pentecostal congregations, it analyses how Pentecostal belief, ritual practice, and congregational life mediate migrants’ pursuit and performance of middle-class belonging. Rather than approaching transnational migration primarily through narratives of crisis, the study conceptualises aspiration as a moral, relational, and embodied practice through which uncertainty is reworked into endurance, respectability, and social distinction. It demonstrates that middle-class subjectivities are re/produced through interrelated domains of consumption, transnational obligation, shared repertoires of hope, and gendered regimes of moral regulation, including gossip, hierarchy, and reputation. The dissertation argues that Pentecostalism operates ambivalently: it provides symbolic and social resources for resilience while simultaneously reproducing neoliberal moralities of self-discipline, personal responsibility, and success. By foregrounding migrants’ everyday labour of sustaining life projects amid precarity, the study contributes to migration studies, the sociology of religion, and debates on African middle-class formation.