In its spring 2015 volume, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology published the special issue “Remaking the Public Good: A New Anthropology of Bureaucracy”, edited by Laura Bear and Nayanika Mathur. In this blog post, Olaf Zenker – contributor of the article “De-judicialization, Outsourced Review and All-too-flexible Bureaucracies in South African Land Restitution” – describes how he came across the peculiar case analysed in his article and how this land claim ended up speaking about the “Remaking of the Public Good” in South Africa and beyond.
How is the new South African state imagined, enacted and contested, when citizens engage officials in the attempts to get back their land lost through racist colonial and apartheid dispossessions? What kinds of “public goods” are brought into play, by whom and with what effects, when the post-apartheid state simultaneously functions as the main driving force behind this land restitution process, as its judicial arbiter through the specialist Land Claims Court, and as its core reference point, as all claims are lodged against the state? Questions like these have driven my intermittent ethnographic fieldwork on South African land restitution since 2010 – not only with regard to claimant communities, but especially also concerning the operations within the two relevant state agencies: the Land Claims Commission and the Land Claims Court.