Overview

Rights and Responsibilities in Rural South Africa examines the gendered and generational conflicts surrounding social change in South Africa's rural Eastern Cape roughly twenty years after the end of Apartheid. In post-Aparatheid South Africa, rights-based public discourse and state practices promote liberal, autonomous, and egalitarian notions of personhood, yet widespread unemployment and poverty demand that people rely closely on one another and forge relationships that disrupt the gendered and generational hierarchies framed as traditional and culturally authentic. Kathleen Rice examines the ways these tensions and restructurings lead to uncertainties about how South Africans should live together in their daily lives. Focusing particularly on the women of the village of Mhlambini, Rights and Responsibilities in Rural South Africa offers compelling portraits of how they experience and navigate widespread social and economic change and presents their experiences as a way of understanding how people navigate the moral ambiguities of contemporary South African life.

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9780253066169

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Reviews

This is an unusually lucid account of the moral tensions produced in a rural South African community as people are interpellated simultaneously as rights-bearing, equal individuals and as relational persons embedded in a gendered and generational social hierarchy. It will be of great interest not only to scholars of the region but much more broadly. The rich ethnography and precision of the argument make it ideal for classroom use as well. --Michael Lambek, author of Island in the Stream: An Ethnographic History of Mayotte and The Ethical Condition.

"""This is an unusually lucid account of the moral tensions produced in a rural South African community as people are interpellated simultaneously as rights-bearing, equal individuals and as relational persons embedded in a gendered and generational social hierarchy. It will be of great interest not only to scholars of the region but much more broadly. The rich ethnography and precision of the argument make it ideal for classroom use as well.""--Michael Lambek, author of Island in the Stream: An Ethnographic History of Mayotte and The Ethical Condition. ""Rights and Responsibilities in Rural South Africa is a thoroughly researched ethnographic account of the ambiguities inherent in local understandings of 'rights' and the ways in which they are mobilized in and through gendered interactions in communities that are experiencing severe economic precarity and significant transitions around modes of social reproduction and simultaneous 'ideological transformations'. It makes an important contribution to understandings of the impact of such transformations as described above on young rural women's lives.""--Sindiso Mnisi Weeks, University of Massachusetts Boston ""This marvellous book lucidly unpacks the evolving gender and generational relations and tensions in rural South Africa after apartheid. It shows how the individual rights are enshrined in the celebrated South African constitution collide with social hierarchies of power and culturally embedded notions of personhood, rights, and responsibilities in rural communities on South Africa's eastern seaboard. Rice shows how different cultural and constitutional frameworks of rights and entitlements are a constant source of struggle over meaning, status, and identity in the rural landscape.""--Leslie Bank, Walter Sisulu University in South Africa."

"""This is an unusually lucid account of the moral tensions produced in a rural South African community as people are interpellated simultaneously as rights-bearing, equal individuals and as relational persons embedded in a gendered and generational social hierarchy. It will be of great interest not only to scholars of the region but much more broadly. The rich ethnography and precision of the argument make it ideal for classroom use as well.""—Michael Lambek, author of Island in the Stream: An Ethnographic History of Mayotte and The Ethical Condition. ""Rights and Responsibilities in Rural South Africa is a thoroughly researched ethnographic account of the ambiguities inherent in local understandings of 'rights' and the ways in which they are mobilized in and through gendered interactions in communities that are experiencing severe economic precarity and significant transitions around modes of social reproduction and simultaneous 'ideological transformations'. It makes an important contribution to understandings of the impact of such transformations as described above on young rural women's lives.""—Sindiso Mnisi Weeks, University of Massachusetts Boston ""This marvellous book lucidly unpacks the evolving gender and generational relations and tensions in rural South Africa after apartheid. It shows how the individual rights are enshrined in the celebrated South African constitution collide with social hierarchies of power and culturally embedded notions of personhood, rights, and responsibilities in rural communities on South Africa's eastern seaboard. Rice shows how different cultural and constitutional frameworks of rights and entitlements are a constant source of struggle over meaning, status, and identity in the rural landscape.""—Leslie Bank, Walter Sisulu University in South Africa."

"""This is an unusually lucid account of the moral tensions produced in a rural South African community as people are interpellated simultaneously as rights-bearing, equal individuals and as relational persons embedded in a gendered and generational social hierarchy. It will be of great interest not only to scholars of the region but much more broadly. The rich ethnography and precision of the argument make it ideal for classroom use as well.""--Michael Lambek, author of Island in the Stream: An Ethnographic History of Mayotte and The Ethical Condition. ""Rights and Responsibilities in Rural South Africa is a thoroughly researched ethnographic account of the ambiguities inherent in local understandings of 'rights' and the ways in which they are mobilized in and through gendered interactions in communities that are experiencing severe economic precarity and significant transitions around modes of social reproduction and simultaneous 'ideological transformations'. It makes an important contribution to understandings of the impact of such transformations as described above on young rural women's lives.""--Sindiso Mnisi Weeks, University of Massachusetts Boston"

Author Information

Kathleen Rice is Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at McGill University, where she holds the Tier II Canada Research Chair in the Medical Anthropology of Primary Care.

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