School of Social and Political Science

Description

The Centre of African Studies is delighted to invite you to the following seminar:

'Distributive labour' in South Africa: Debt, work, and welfare

Speaker: Professor Deborah James, Professor of Anthropology, LSE

Chair: Dr Gerhard Anders, Senior Lecturer in African Studies & International Development, UoE

This paper--mounting a challenge to suggestions by Ferguson (2015) that wage work has virtually disappeared, forcing people instead into ‘distributive labour’--explores the interaction between debt, work and welfare as it has played out in South Africa. It sees debt as part of a complex matrix, rather than as a single-stranded phenomenon that, as an outcome of financialization, has turned welfare into debtfare and welfare beneficiaries into repayers. Instead, they need to be understood in relation to other, broader factors that make their search for a viable livelihood possible and that enable their life in society: borrowing money and accessing loans in addition to the conventional routes of state benefits and wage labour. People seek out a living through a nexus of interacting relationships: from the private or state institutions (or individuals) from whom they borrow money and to which (or whom) they owe it; those in market or state settings who employ them and pay their remuneration; and the government bureaucracies, non-governmental organisations or charitable institutions through which they seek, and sometimes find, social protection. Often the three are almost indistinguishably interwoven, and advisers and activist-intermediaries are relied upon to help draw boundaries between them.

When: Wednesday 16th October 2024 (3:30-5pm GMT)

Where: G.07 Meadows Lecture Theatre - Doorway 4 (Medical School, Teviot) 

Format: In-person only

Speaker Biography:

Deborah James is a specialist in the anthropology of South Africa and the UK. Her work is broadly political and economic in focus. A research project entitled produced a 2020 special issue of Ethnos co-edited with Insa Koch entitled ‘The State of the Welfare State: Advice, Governance and Care in Settings of Austerity’ (2020). Her book Money from Nothing: Indebtedness and Aspiration in South Africa (Stanford University Press, 2015) 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. In her forthcoming book Clawing Back: A New Anthropology of Redistribution in Precarious Times (Stanford University Press, 2025), she explores the triad of debt, wages, welfare as they play out in South Africa and the UK.