Social Anthropology Workshop : The will to be governed
| Dates: | 20 March 2018 - 21 March 2018 |
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| Times: | 10:00 - 17:00 |
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| What is it: | Workshop |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Speaker: | Deborah James |
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Workshop: The will to be governed
Department of Social Anthropology
10.00-17.00
20- 21 March 2018
Limiting Government Reforms: from land to credit in South Africa
Forms of injustice left over when an authoritarian regime is in its dying throes are never easy to eradicate. At moments of fundamental political transition, there are limits on the ability of new governments, and the new laws they pass, to shape the activities and dispositions of citizens. Times of change, often preceded by struggle and suffering, seem to offer the opportunity to rearrange political and economic regimes and to deliver justice to those who never before dared to hope for better, but implementing ‘reversionary legislation’ is difficult (Falk Moore 2011). What happens to those with an existing stake in the system? How far can new arrangements be forced to accommodate the continuation of certain older ones? When governments use wide-reaching legislative programmes to implant new regimes, their decrees sometimes simply exist alongside local mores: existing ‘ways of behaving … exist parallel to and under the eyes of a new government’ (ibid: p.7). Alterations can seldom be forced by fiat. This paper looks through the prism of land reform, which attempted to address one of apartheid’s more notorious and obvious aspects of dispossession, to explore some of these questions about the limits to planned and legislated intervention in a related, less obvious, and lesser-known aspect of South Africa’s discriminatory system: ‘credit apartheid’.
Keynote speakers:
Deborah James, Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics
Dr. Stef Jansen, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester Professor
Speaker
Deborah James
Role: Speaker
Organisation: Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
Cttee Room A (Knowles)
Whitworth Building
Manchester
