Deborah James

The London School of Economics and Political Science | LSE · Department of Anthropology

Dealing with excess death in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic has thrown the question of a ‘good or bad death’ into sharp relief as countries across the globe have grappled with the first and second peaks of cases and mortality; and communities mourn those lost. In the UK, these challenges have included the fact that mortality has adversely aff...

This introduction to our special issue addresses scholars’ failure, in recent times, to consider and analyse the forms of capitalism that have developed on the African continent. To redress the balance, it takes up the study of economic arrangements on the continent – property, infrastructure, debt, financialization, regulation – as well as explori...

This paper explores how, in countries in the global south where sharp rises in indebtedness have accompanied the financialization of the economy, debt factors into other relationships and meanings in the life of the family and household. Using ethnographic material from South Africa, it explores local concepts of householding, obligation and saving...

Because of academic divisions of labour anthropologists have come late to the study of the changing landscape of welfare and advice provision in Euro-America (and beyond). But it is crucial to understanding contemporary economies. Attention to the increasing informalization, hybridization, plurality and complexity of welfare/care/advice provision i...

The central premise of this article can hardly be questioned: that the theoretical discussion of reproductive labor is “unfinished.” Whether one calls it unpaid work, unfree labor, care, or social reproduction, the topic seems increasingly to demand (and increasingly receive) more attention. This seems to be ever more the case as we move ever furth...

Contemporary attempts to govern ‘the state of the welfare state’ are as much about moral endeavours as they are about political and economic imperatives. Such is the argument put forward in this Introduction, which focuses on the work that advisers perform in settings of austerity across Europe. Advisers are often the last call for help for their c...

Under UK austerity, people are obliged to pay up: either to the market (those with debt to commercial creditors) or the state (for those receiving welfare benefits – a person may owe the local council or tax office because she is in arrears or was ‘overpaid’). Seeking clarification or counsel from advisers means entering a world where payments ofte...

The reliance of welfare recipients on the state is classically demonised as a relation of dependency: one that foments passivity on the part of claimants. Critical voices in austerity Britain have drawn attention to government efforts to reconfigure that relationship, by ‘reforming’ welfare, remaking the grantee as a repaying loan-taker and turning...

Kenya and South Africa are two settings in which the upwardly-aspiring ‘new middle class’ has been particularly noted: its members desire to transcend the hierarchies and inequalities that once kept some from achieving prosperity. Based on research in South Africa, this article goes beyond a focus on narrowly economic aspects of this class to explo...

When South Africa’s credit/debt landscape expanded during the 1990s, this was justified by some as a new form of inclusion but alleged by others to have intensified the power and profit of capitalism and acted to the detriment of householders, thus perpetuating ‘credit apartheid’. Yet, blame cannot be so easily assigned. Forces of state and market...

The real economy as a concept has taken root not only in highly developed economies but also in those characterized by “the rapid growth of aspiration accompanied by massive incorporation of people into the current market economy, through the expansion of indebtedness and financial devices … [and] the impossibility to pay,” where plural and shiftin...

Both land and credit in South Africa - the twin bases of apartheid - proved to need reforming when that country gained its political freedom. Both proved problematic. Land reform was charged with remedying all the problems of apartheid, but people had little wish to return to a forgotten rural past. Instead they desired upward mobility and a modern...

This article explores how marriage, or its absence, features in relation to the aspirations and obligations of members of South Africa’s new black middle class. In a context where the state and credit have played key roles in the newly financialised arrangements of neoliberalism, it considers how ties that are both conflictual and intimate — bonds...

In settings of increased inequality, where rising prosperity for some spells penury for others, savings clubs enable new types of communality to be created – especially by women – which mediate, or are mediated by, new inequalities and dependencies. Changing gender dynamics and challenges to patriarchal authority, arising from apartheid-induced rel...

This article explores everyday interactions with the British welfare state at a moment when it is attempting to shift and transform its funding regimes. Based on a study of two London legal services providers, it draws attention to a set of actors poised between local state officers and citizens: the advisers who carry out the work of translation,...

This historiographical overview examines the literature on women migrants in South Africa, arguing that it is important to consider domestic struggles and their impact on women's urban experiences within and beyond the workplace in order to understand the unfolding of the migrant labour system in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Looking at...

Migrant life has long required a careful balancing of responsibilities. Migrants travel to earn a wage in a capitalist economy while saving resources and honouring obligations that arise in a seemingly less-than-capitalist one. Various agents – rural patriarchs, traders, government authorities, appliance retailers – have used techniques to keep wag...

In South Africa, with upward mobility much aspired to but seldom attained, householders must spend money they have not yet earned. Borrowing both from formal institutions and smaller moneylenders (legal and illegal) positions them uneasily: in order to fulfill social requirements in one register, they acquire intensified obligations in another. Mon...

In South Africa, with upward mobility much aspired-to but seldom attained, householders must spend money they have not yet earned. Borrowing both from formal institutions and smaller moneylenders (legal and illegal) positions them uneasily: in order to fulfill social requirements in one register, they acquire intensified obligations in another. Mon...

Money from Nothing explores the dynamics surrounding South Africa's national project of financial inclusion—dubbed "banking the unbanked"—which aimed to extend credit to black South Africans as a critical aspect of broad-based economic enfranchisement. Through rich and captivating accounts, Deborah James reveals the varied ways in which middle- a...

The anthropological study of citizenship enables an understanding of restitutive and redistributive reforms in the post-transitional context of South Africa. In its earlier, state-derived form, citizenship’s situated and contingent character, its use of pre-existing modes of identification as templates, and its ethnic differentiation which expresse...

Under recent reforms, the UK government has eroded state funding for civil legal aid. Funding cuts affect asylum and immigration law as produced, practiced, and mediated in the course of interactions between case workers and their clients in legal-aidfunded Law Centers in South London. The article explores the contradictory character of one-on-one...

African economies have long been a matter of concern to anthropologists, not least in the pages of Africa. These economies are situated, somewhat contradictorily, between global settings of financialized capitalism on the one hand and impoverished local arenas where cash-based economic transfers predominate on the other. The more such economies app...

Considerable attempts to create a single economy of credit, in part through regularizing microlenders (especially the much-demonized loansharks or mashonisas), have been made by the South African government, notably through the National Credit Act. This article explores how borrowing and indebtedness are seen from the point of view of consumers and...

This article explores the contradictory and contested but closely interlocking efforts of NGOs and the state in planning for land reform in South Africa. As government policy has come increasingly to favor the better-off who are potential commercial farmers, so NGO efforts have been directed, correspondingly, to safeguarding the interests of those...

This book enters into the many worlds of expression brought forth across Africa by the ravaging presence of HIV/AIDS. Africans and non-Africans, physicians and social scientists, journalists and documentarians share here a common and essential interest in understanding creative expression in crushing and uncertain times. Chapters investigate and en...

The broker, a key concept in 1960s and 1970s political anthropology, merits revival in settings of rapid social transition. In South Africa, where state planning directs the course of change while attempting to privilege the market, brokers do not merely negotiate between fixed positionalities of ‘state/market’ and ‘people’. Instead, they embody an...

The contributions in this book address the ways in which people in all sectors of South African society are confronting its development dilemmas. This chapter considers the nature and impact of land redistribution policies.

The relationship between anthropologists’ ethnographic investigations and the lived social worlds in which these originate is a fundamental issue for anthropology. Where some claim that only native voices may offer authentic accounts of culture and hence that ethnographers are only ever interpreters of it, others point out that anthropologists are,...

The article considers the kinds of responsibilities anthropologists might have when working on immigration and asylum matters, particularly in the light of recent ‘reforms’ to the funding of legal aid in the UK. The article focuses on a single case study in its context, exploring an interaction between an immigrant applicant and a lawyer/case worke...

The relationship between anthropologists' ethnographic investigations and the lived social worlds in which these originate is a fundamental issue for anthropology. Where some claim that only native voices may offer authentic accounts of culture and hence that ethnographers are only ever interpreters of it, others point out that anthropologists are,...

Land is a significant and controversial topic in South Africa. Addressing the land claims of those dispossessed in the past has proved to be a demanding, multidimensional process. In many respects the land restitution program that was launched as part of the county’s transition to democracy in 1994 has failed to meet expectations, with ordinary cit...

Ethnomusicologists and anthropologists of southern and South Africa have long argued that the composition and performance of songs and dances is integral to affirming or creating identities. Early research, with an apparently more conservative emphasis, highlighted the role of musical performance in configuring fixed social contexts, delineating li...

In the new South Africa, the promise of land restitution raised millennial-style expectations amongst dispossessed and dispersed former landholders. Partly prompted by emerging policy discourses, iconic tropes of localised cultural experience such as grave sites, initiation lodges and cattle byres have acquired new significance: they became verifia...

The Rights and Wrongs of Land Restitution: ‘Restoring What Was Ours’ offers a critical, comparative ethnographic examination of land restitution programmes. Drawing on memories and histories of past dispossession, governments, NGOs, informal movements and individual claimants worldwide have attempted to restore and reclaim rights in land. Land...

The efforts of southern African women migrant workers to gain control of resources in the linked spheres of urban workplace and rural base have rarely been characterized —by anthropologists or local communities—as ethnic in nature. This suggests the truth of the southern African Tswana proverb that "women have no tribe." It is puzzling, though, tha...

This volume presents for the first time the selected photographs of the renowned British anthropologist Isaac Schapera (1905–2003). Taken between 1929 and 1934, largely during his earliest work among the Kgatla peoples of Bechuanaland (now Botswana), the 136 images in this selection reveal an emotional engagement and aesthetic impulse that Schape...

Gaining Ground? Rights and Property in South African Land Reform examines how land reform policy and practice in post-apartheid South Africa have been produced and contested. Set in the province of Mpumalanga, the book gives an ethnographic account of local initiatives and conflicts, showing how the poorest sectors of the landless have defied the S...

The article demonstrates some unintended consequences of land reform, showing how the restoration of land has become a local political resource. Sectors of South African society beyond the classic 'black spot'/restitution constituency have latched on to the discourse linking restored land with restored citizenship: many farm workers and tenants, al...

Letter from the Guest Editors - Volume 27 Issue 3-4 - Deborah James, Albert Schrauwers

As part of its attempt to understand ‘an apartheid of souls’, this volume is concerned to show how mission activity, particularly that of European-based churches with close links to the expansion of Dutch/Calvinist influence, may have nurtured the local construction of race or ethnic difference in Indonesian and South African society. One well-know...

South Africa and Indonesia are countries whose postcolonial trajectory has been characterised by racial, ethnic and religious tensions: tensions whose roots lie in their shared colonial past. Whether simmering and subdued, or overt and necessitating international intervention, these tensions demand a renewed critical perspective by academics who, u...

Education in “life skills” has been a central pillar of state and NGO strategy in combating the threat of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. Based on research conducted in Durban in 1999, this paper examines how life skills education – thought of by some as a euphemism for “teaching about safe sex” but by others as an essential way of contextualising sex ed...

South Africa’s land reform programme has been underpinned by ambivalence about land and what it signifies. One set of discourses and practices shows that ownership of or access to rural land is a key part of many African families’ well-being and livelihood. But it is only a part: small-scale agriculture in South – and southern – Africa has been sho...

This article provides a detailed ethnographic exploration of a case of land restitution in South Africa. It shows how the development discourse invoked during the process of reclaiming land, rather than being imposed in an entirely top-down manner, has been the result of negotiations between those claiming and those — in government and NGOs — who h...

The essays in the present issue originate in papers that were presented first at a series of two workshops on 'Popular Culture and Democracy', organized by a research programme on 'Livelihood, Identity and Organisation in Situations of Instability' based at the Centre for Development Research in Copenhagen and International Development Studies at R...

The paper examines land restitution in the new South Africa, and looks at the intersecting roles of land-claiming communities who were forcibly resettled from their land during the apartheid years and the NGOs and – since 1994 - Government Commissioners who have helped them to reclaim the land. Ideas and practices concerning land, community and dev...

The efforts of southern African women migrant workers to gain control of resources in the linked spheres of urban workplace and rural base have rarely been characterised - by anthropologists or local communities - as ethnic in nature. This suggests the truth of the African proverb that "women have no tribe". Puzzlingly, though, women are seen in ot...

This article uses a case study of the kiba migrant performance genre from the Northern Province of South Africa to illuminate recent theoretical ideas on the role of performers and audiences, and in so doing to offer a critical perspective on the way in which the concept of class has been conceptualised in some southern African studies. While the h...

The insights of such authors as Mitchell, Barth and Cohen can be usefully applied to understanding the occurrence of ethnicity in small‐scale communities within the context of the South African system of ethnic homelands. In this paper, deep‐seated divisions between Pedi and Ndebele in a village in the Pedi Homeland of Lebowa are examined. While it...

Recently, audiences in Europe and the United States have responded with great excitement and enthusiasm to black music from southern Africa, especially from South Africa. While this new and unprecedented interest may be a product of growing awareness of the injustices and deprivations of apartheid, it must represent an appreciation of the rhythmic...

While ethnographers document rules of inheritance as favouring the oldest son in both Pedi and Ndebele tradition, the inhabitants of this Trust village ‐ of both language groups ‐claim to practise last‐born inheritance. The paper explains this change as resulting from the extreme shortage of land in the village, due to the area's rapid population b...

This dissertation is a study of the way in which ethnicity shapes various aspects of the life of a Lebowa vi11age. Differing histories as labour tenants on the white farms of the south-eastern Transvaal have determined differing access to agricultural resources for Pedi and Ndebele when they left the farms for their present home in the village of M...

This paper explores the interlocking – but sometimes contradictory - efforts of NGOs and the state to safeguard the rights of those who have no land. "The landless" in South Africa, categorised along with "the poor and the dispossessed" by those who advocate their cause in the NGO sector, have come to occupy a contested position. As government poli...

More starkly than any other contemporary social conflict, the crisis in South Africa highlights the complexities and conflicts in race, gender, class, and nation. These original articles, most of which were written by South African authors, are from a special issue of the Radical History Review, published in Spring 1990, that mapped the development...

Ethnomusicologists and anthropologists of sub-Saharan Africa have long argued that music is securely positioned within specific social contexts: delineating life-cycle stages, political allegiances, or gender positions. The performance of songs and dances has also been shown to be a mechanism in the creation of identities. A subsequent generation o...