Tag: South Africa
Spring Simulated Shelves

Browse our February and March 2020 releases in Anthropology, Archaeology/Heritage Studies, History, Memory Studies, and Mobility Studies and see what’s new in paperback.
Habits of Austerity
The following is a guest blog post written by Jürgen Schraten. Below, Schraten discusses his chapter in the recently published book, Economy for and Against Democracy.
I wrote the first chapter of the book Economy For and Against Democracy, edited by Keith Hart and published this month by Berghahn Books – you can buy the book here with a 50% discount until 20 December; use the code HAR449. The chapter is titled “Habits of austerity: financialisation and new ways of dealing with money”. As the title suggests, it focuses on the financialisation of everyday life in South Africa within the global context of the concomitant expansion of financialised markets and government austerity policies.
Flexible Bureaucracy & The “Public Good”: Land Restitution in Post-Apartheid South Africa
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.