Deborah James
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3581049 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Deborah James |
| PRENOMES | Deborah |
| SOBRENOME | James |
| ASSINATURA | JAMES D |
| AFILIAÇÕES | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4274-197X |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 87 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 614 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 84 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 3 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1976 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 14 |
Symposium on Carola Lentz & Isidore Lobnibe’s Imagining Futures
In this book symposium on Carola Lentz and Isidore Lobnibe’s Imagining Futures: Memory and Belonging in an African Family (Indiana University Press, 2022), the authors engage with nine distinguished Africanist colleagues. The symposium addresses, among other themes, the book’s theme of family memory as an innovative approach to African history and the opportunities and challenges of collaborative research and writing. The symposium is organized w…
James Ferguson (1959-2025)
Things Change
One Hundred Years of Argonauts
Beyond social policy? ‘patchwork’ livelihoods
Social policy has had a chequered career over the last half-century.Initially developed in Northern European and North American metropoles, with its roll-out intentionally restricted to those contexts and denied to people living in the more peripheral settings, including those which Northern countries had colonized (Cooper, 1997), it has since significantly shrunk or mutated in its original heartland while simultaneously diffusing and proliferati…
The Unspoken Voice
As speech and language therapists, we explored theories of communication and voice that are familiar to our profession and found them an inadequate basis on which to generate deep and rich analysis of the qualitative data from people who have communication difficulties and who use augmentative and alternative communication. Expanding our conceptual toolkit to include the work of John Shotter allowed us to reconceptualise voice and where it is eme…
Financialization and the Household
Finance and the household are a pair that has not received sufficient attention. As a system, finance joins citizens, states, and global markets through the connections of kinship and residence. Householders use loans, investments, and assets to craft, reproduce, attenuate, and sever social connections and to elevate or maintain their class position. Householders' social creativity fuels borrowing, making them the target of banks and other lender…
Introduction. Culture, Context and Anthropologists’ Accounts
The relationship between anthropologists’ ethnographic investigations and the lived social worlds in which these originate is a fundamental issue for anthropology. Where some claim that only native voices may offer authentic accounts of culture and hence that ethnographers are only ever interpreters of it, others point out that anthropologists are, themselves, implanted within specific cultural contexts which generate particular kinds of theoreti…
Culture Wars
The relationship between anthropologists’ ethnographic investigations and the lived social worlds in which these originate is a fundamental issue for anthropology. Where some claim that only native voices may offer authentic accounts of culture and hence that ethnographers are only ever interpreters of it, others point out that anthropologists are, themselves, implanted within specific cultural contexts which generate particular kinds of theoreti…
Lektüren
The State of the Welfare State
Contemporary attempts to govern 'the state of the welfare state' are as much about moral endeavours as they are about political and economic imperatives. Such is the argument put forward in this Introduction, which focuses on the work that advisers perform in settings of austerity across Europe. Advisers are often the last call for help for their clients/dependents who find themselves increasingly at the mercy of local authorities, immigration re…
Owing Everyone
Under UK austerity, people are obliged to pay up: either to the market (those with debt to commercial creditors) or the state (for those receiving welfare benefits - a person may owe the local council or tax office because she is in arrears or was 'overpaid'). Seeking clarification or counsel from advisers means entering a world where payments often seem to be automated and where the state is 'giving with one hand and taking away with the other'.…
‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic
Dealing with excess death in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the question of a ‘good or bad death’ into sharp relief as countries across the globe have grappled with multiple peaks of cases and mortality; and communities mourn those lost. In the UK, these challenges have included the fact that mortality has adversely affected minority communities. Corpse disposal and social distancing guidelines do not allow a process of mourning …
Preparing a supervision model for the aftermath of Grenfell
In this paper, we describe the preparation for the supervision approach that we used on behalf of the Social Work Company to supervise workers at the Grenfell Support Service. This paper centres on a moment of new consciousness concerning the formation of values that occurred when discussing a poem written by the first author, Deborah, during a narrative interview conducted by the second author, Hellmuth. We present the poem and use auto-ethnogra…
Recentring the margins
This introduction to our special issue addresses scholars' failure, in recent times, to consider and analyse the forms of capitalism that have developed on the African continent. To redress the balance, it takes up the study of economic arrangements on the continent – property, infrastructure, debt, financialization, regulation – as well as exploring the history and politics of the scholarly field of African economics as an intellectual and insti…
Life and debt
This paper explores how, in countries in the global south where sharp rises in indebtedness have accompanied the financialization of the economy, debt factors into other relationships and meanings in the life of the family and household. Using ethnographic material from South Africa, it explores local concepts of householding, obligation and saving (asking whether relations of commodified debt nullify those of longstanding social commitment), inv…
Money from Nothing
This book explores South Africa's "crisis" of consumer indebtedness, set against the longer history of exploitation of black people by the forces of capitalism, and shows the complex ways those forces currently manifest themselves in a social order where neoliberal means serve to ensure the ever wider spread of redistribution. Alongside the notorious racial segregation and denial of rights, this book explores the longer history of exploitation of…
Economies of Advice
Because of academic divisions of labor, anthropologists have come late to the study of the changing landscape of welfare and advice provisions in Euro-America (and beyond). However, this study is crucial to understanding contemporary economies. Attention to the increasing informalization, hybridization, plurality, and complexity of welfare-care-advice provisions in the context of 21st-century austerity in Europe challenges the widely held view of…
‘Sorting out income’
The reliance of welfare recipients on the state is classically demonised as a relation of dependency: one that foments passivity on the part of claimants. Critical voices in austerity Britain have drawn attention to government efforts to reconfigure that relationship, by ‘reforming’ welfare, remaking the grantee as a repaying loan‐taker and turning dependents into responsible, autonomous citizens. This paper, based on research in the debt advice …
The Alchemy of a Corpus of Underwater Images
Through an ecocinema lens, an unconventional corpus of photographs of Carysfort Reef, one of seven iconic coral reefs along the Florida Reef Tract, represents something of an extreme time-lapse series. In the absence of a cohesive underwater documentary record at the time when the Florida Reef Tract is undergoing the most extensive reef restoration in the world, speculation allows us to search for patterns in damaged places with incomplete inform…
Householding and social reproduction
Th e central premise of this article can hardly be questioned: that the theoretical discussion of reproductive labor is "unfi nished. " Whether one calls it unpaid work, unfree labor, care, or social reproduction, the topic seems increasingly to demand (and increasingly receive) more attention. Th is seems to be ever more the case as we move ever further away from the decades when the postwar consensus, established especially in Northern European…
New subjectivities
Kenya and South Africa are two settings in which the upwardly-aspiring 'new middle class' has been particularly noted: its members desire to transcend the hierarchies and inequalities that once kept some from achieving prosperity. Based on research in South Africa, this article goes beyond a focus on narrowly economic aspects of this class to explore the role of the Pentecostal or neo-charismatic churches in articulating and (re)shaping its subje…
Mediating Indebtedness in South Africa
When South Africa's credit/debt landscape expanded during the 1990s, this was justified by some as a new form of inclusion but alleged by others to have intensified the power and profit of capitalism and acted to the detriment of householders, thus perpetuating 'credit apartheid'. Yet, blame cannot be so easily assigned. Forces of state and market have intertwined to create a redistributive neoliberalism, enabling brokers - who have played a key …
Confronting Trump’s Trade Agenda from the Left
On the first day of Donald Trump's presidency, the death certificate for the moribund Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was signed. Although the TPP was already dead in the water—President Obama neve
Deductions and counter-deductions in South Africa
The real economy as a concept has taken root not only in highly developed economies but also in those characterized by "the rapid growth of aspiration accompanied by massive incorporation of people into the current market economy, through the expansion of indebtedness and financial devices ... [and] the impossibility to pay," where plural and shifting scales coexist (Neiburg and Guyer, this volume), and where there "is interplay between different…
The return of the broker
The broker, a key concept in 1960s and 1970s political anthropology, merits revival in settings of rapid social transition. In South Africa, where state planning directs the course of change while attempting to privilege the market, brokers do not merely negotiate between fixed positionalities of 'state/market' and 'people'. Instead, they embody and bring into being socio-economic positions and identities. They blend together the egalitarianism a…
Money-Go-Round
Considerable attempts to create a single economy of credit, in part through regularizing microlenders (especially the much-demonized loansharks or mashonisas), have been made by the South African government, notably through the National Credit Act. This article explores how borrowing and indebtedness are seen from the point of view of consumers and of those who aim to protect them. It suggests that we should speak of moneylending rather than mone…
Deeper into a Hole
In South Africa, with upward mobility much aspired to but seldom attained, householders must spend money they have not yet earned. Borrowing both from formal institutions and smaller moneylenders (legal and illegal) positions them uneasily: in order to fulfill social requirements in one register, they acquire intensified obligations in another. Moneylending and money borrowing, owing much to the legacies of "credit apartheid," involve an uneven m…
Introduction
African economies have long been a matter of concern to anthropologists, not least in the pages ofAfrica.These economies are situated, somewhat contradictorily, between global settings of financialized capitalism on the one hand and impoverished local arenas where cash-based economic transfers predominate on the other. The more such economies appear to be tied to wider global arenas and operations that place them beyond the reach of ordinary peop…
Money from Nothing
This book explores South Africa's "crisis" of consumer indebtedness, set against the longer history of exploitation of black people by the forces of capitalism, and shows the complex ways those forces currently manifest themselves in a social order where neoliberal means serve to ensure the ever wider spread of redistribution. Alongside the notorious racial segregation and denial of rights, this book explores the longer history of exploitation of…
Not marrying in South Africa
This article explores how marriage, or its absence, features in relation to the aspirations and obligations of members of South Africa's new black middle class. In a context where the state and credit have played key roles in the newly financialised arrangements of neoliberalism, it considers how ties that are both conflictual and intimate - bonds that simultaneously distance people from, while creating increasingly intimate connections to, both …
The State of the Welfare State
Contemporary attempts to govern 'the state of the welfare state' are as much about moral endeavours as they are about political and economic imperatives. Such is the argument put forward in this Introduction, which focuses on the work that advisers perform in settings of austerity across Europe. Advisers are often the last call for help for their clients/dependents who find themselves increasingly at the mercy of local authorities, immigration re…
After years in the wilderness
This article examines land restitution in the new South Africa, and the intersecting roles of land-claiming communities, forcibly resettled from their land during the apartheid years, and the NGOs and - since 1994 - Government Commissioners who have helped them to reclaim the land. Ideas and practices concerning land, community and development that emerge from the interaction between these different players are mutually constitutive but sometimes…
Financialization and the Household
Finance and the household are a pair that has not received sufficient attention. As a system, finance joins citizens, states, and global markets through the connections of kinship and residence. Householders use loans, investments, and assets to craft, reproduce, attenuate, and sever social connections and to elevate or maintain their class position. Householders' social creativity fuels borrowing, making them the target of banks and other lender…
Life and debt
This paper explores how, in countries in the global south where sharp rises in indebtedness have accompanied the financialization of the economy, debt factors into other relationships and meanings in the life of the family and household. Using ethnographic material from South Africa, it explores local concepts of householding, obligation and saving (asking whether relations of commodified debt nullify those of longstanding social commitment), inv…
Credit Apartheid, Migrants, Mines and Money
Migrant life has long required a careful balancing of responsibilities. Migrants travel to earn a wage in a capitalist economy while saving resources and honouring obligations that arise in a seemingly less-than-capitalist one. Various agents - rural patriarchs, traders, government authorities, appliance retailers - have used techniques to keep wages beyond migrants' control. Paradoxically, similar techniques have, on occasion, been eagerly embra…
Empathy and Expertise
Under recent reforms, the UK government has eroded state funding for civil legal aid. Funding cuts affect asylum and immigration law as produced, practiced, and mediated in the course of interactions between case workers and their clients in legal-aid-funded Law Centers in South London. The article explores the contradictory character of one-on-one relationships between case workers and clients. Despite pressure to quantify their work in “value f…
New subjectivities
Kenya and South Africa are two settings in which the upwardly-aspiring 'new middle class' has been particularly noted: its members desire to transcend the hierarchies and inequalities that once kept some from achieving prosperity. Based on research in South Africa, this article goes beyond a focus on narrowly economic aspects of this class to explore the role of the Pentecostal or neo-charismatic churches in articulating and (re)shaping its subje…
Land for the Landless
South Africa's land reform programme has been underpinned by ambivalence about land and what it signifies. One set of discourses and practices shows that ownership of or access to rural land is a key part of many African families' well-being and livelihood. But it is only a part: small-scale agriculture in South -and southern -Africa has been shown over the past decades to have become impossible without inputs from labour migrant remittances. The…
Burial Sites, Informal Rights and Lost Kingdoms
In the new South Africa, the promise of land restitution raised millennial-style expectations amongst dispossessed and dispersed former landholders. Partly prompted by emerging policy discourses, iconic tropes of localized cultural experience such as grave sites, initiation lodges and cattle byres acquired new significance. Because they proved what the Land Claims Commission calls 'informal rights' to land, they became verifiable evidence of effe…
Family and household in a Lebowa village
Mediating Indebtedness in South Africa
When South Africa's credit/debt landscape expanded during the 1990s, this was justified by some as a new form of inclusion but alleged by others to have intensified the power and profit of capitalism and acted to the detriment of householders, thus perpetuating 'credit apartheid'. Yet, blame cannot be so easily assigned. Forces of state and market have intertwined to create a redistributive neoliberalism, enabling brokers - who have played a key …
A question of ethnicity
The insights of such authors as Mitchell, Barth and Cohen can be usefully applied to understanding the occurrence of ethnicity in small-scale communities within the context of the South African system of ethnic homelands. In this paper, deep-seated divisions between Pedi and Ndebele in a village in the Pedi Homeland of Lebowa are examined. While it is undoubtedly true that these can be understood only in the light of the constraints on resources …
To Take the Information Down to the People
Education in "life skills" has been a central pillar of state and NGO strategy in combating the threat of HIV/AIDS in South Africa.Based on research conducted in Durban in 1999, this paper examines how life skills education -thought of by some as a euphemism for "teaching about safe sex" but by others as an essential way of contextualising sex education in its broader context of empowerment and striving for equitable gender relations -is understo…
Citizenship and land in South Africa
The anthropological study of citizenship enables an understanding of restitutive and redistributive reforms in the post-transitional context of South Africa. In its earlier, state-derived form, citizenship's situated and contingent character, its use of pre-existing modes of identification as templates, and its ethnic differentiation which expresses 'class' distinctions while also masking them, reveal that no single democratic vision can easily e…
The Encoding of Information Source in Algonquian
Land shortage and Inheritance in a Lebowa Village
While ethnographers document rules of inheritance as favouring the oldest son in both Pedi and Ndebele tradition, the inhabitants of this Trust village ‐ of both language groups ‐claim to practise last‐born inheritance. The paper explains this change as resulting from the extreme shortage of land in the village, due to the area's rapid population by ex‐labour tenants from the white farms of the southeastern Transvaal. The “rule” of ultimogeniture…
Deductions and counter-deductions in South Africa
The real economy as a concept has taken root not only in highly developed economies but also in those characterized by "the rapid growth of aspiration accompanied by massive incorporation of people into the current market economy, through the expansion of indebtedness and financial devices ... [and] the impossibility to pay," where plural and shifting scales coexist (Neiburg and Guyer, this volume), and where there "is interplay between different…
Bagagešu (Those of My Home)
The efforts of southern African women migrant workers to gain control of resources in the linked spheres of urban workplace and rural base have rarely been characterized -by anthropologists or local communities-as ethnic in nature. This suggests the truth of the southern African Tswana proverb that "women have no tribe." It is puzzling, though, that women are seen in other contexts as quintessentially traditional. I discuss this paradox, referrin…
Women Use their Strength in the House
In settings of increased inequality, where rising prosperity for some spells penury for others, savings clubs enable new types of communality to be created - especially by women - which mediate, or are mediated by, new inequalities and dependencies. Changing gender dynamics and challenges to patriarchal authority, arising from apartheid-induced relocation and, later, the expansion of a somewhat gender-skewed state grant system, now find expressio…
On the putative rule of sentence-lifting
Sentences like the following are basically the same in meaning (although not absolutely the same). (1) I believe Ralph came (2) Ralph came, I believe These have been described by Green and Morgan (1972) and Hooper and Thompson (1973) as related by a transformational rule of Sentence-Lifting or Complement Preposing (to be abbreviated here as “Slifting”). By this hypothesized rule, an underlying embedded sentence, here “Ralph came,” is raised so th…
The use of oh, ah, say, and well in relation to a number of grammatical phenomena
Two semantic constraints on the occurrence of adjectives and participles after the noun in English
Past Tense and the Hypothetical a Cross-Linguistic Study
Preview this article: Past Tense and the Hypothetical a Cross-Linguistic Study, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/sl.6.3.04jam-1.gif
Family and household in a Lebowa village
Land shortage and Inheritance in a Lebowa Village
While ethnographers document rules of inheritance as favouring the oldest son in both Pedi and Ndebele tradition, the inhabitants of this Trust village ‐ of both language groups ‐claim to practise last‐born inheritance. The paper explains this change as resulting from the extreme shortage of land in the village, due to the area's rapid population by ex‐labour tenants from the white farms of the southeastern Transvaal. The “rule” of ultimogeniture…
Musical Form and Social History
Research Article| May 01 1990 Musical Form and Social History: Research Perspectives on Black South African Music Deborah James Deborah James Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (1990) 1990 (46-47): 309-319. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-1990-46-47-309 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Deborah James; Musical Form and Social History: Re…
A question of ethnicity
The insights of such authors as Mitchell, Barth and Cohen can be usefully applied to understanding the occurrence of ethnicity in small-scale communities within the context of the South African system of ethnic homelands. In this paper, deep-seated divisions between Pedi and Ndebele in a village in the Pedi Homeland of Lebowa are examined. While it is undoubtedly true that these can be understood only in the light of the constraints on resources …
Preterit Forms in Moose Cree as Markers of Tense, Aspect, and Modality
Urban life and the struggle for autonomous culture in some Transvaal communities
1992). Urban life and the struggle for autonomous culture in some Transvaal communities. African Studies: Vol. 51, History Workshop, pp. 1-7
African Popular Music
Report on the eleventh symposium on ethnomusicology, Natal university Durban, 23–25 August 1993
Oral performance of Northern Transvaal migrant women
State's Right versus People's Rights
Paradigms slightly obscured? A partial view of the Jsas conference paradigms lost, paradigms regained held at York university, UK, 9–11 September 1994
Democracy and the gendering of the private domain
“I Dress in This Fashion”
Anthropology, history, and the making of past and place
1997). Anthropology, history, and the making of past and place. African Studies: Vol. 56, No. 2, pp. 115-136
Power, Marginality and African Oral Literature
Music of origin
This article uses a case study of the kiba migrant performance genre from the Northern Province of South Africa to illuminate recent theoretical ideas on the role of performers and audiences, and in so doing to offer a critical perspective on the way in which the concept of class has been conceptualised in some southern African studies. While the homogenising and Western-derived concept of class may well be unsuitable in some African and other so…
Gender-Linked Derogatory Terms and Their Use by Women and Men
L'A. analyse la perception par des etudiants universitaires des connotations portees par des termes utilises pour faire specifiquement reference a des traits feminins ou masculins, et dans un sens de denigrement. L'analyse montre que les hommes et les femmes sont evalues de maniere tres differente dans ce milieu universitaire de la ville de Toronto
Democracy, Multiculturalism, and the Community College
Democracy, Multiculturalism, and the Community College: A Critical Perspective. Robert A. Rhoads and James R. Valadez. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996. 231 pp
Bagagešu (Those of My Home)
The efforts of southern African women migrant workers to gain control of resources in the linked spheres of urban workplace and rural base have rarely been characterized -by anthropologists or local communities-as ethnic in nature. This suggests the truth of the southern African Tswana proverb that "women have no tribe." It is puzzling, though, that women are seen in other contexts as quintessentially traditional. I discuss this paradox, referrin…
Justice And Java Coffee In A Fair Trade Market
Popular Culture and Democracy in Some Southern Contexts
workshops on 'Popular Culture and Democracy', organised by a research programme on 'Livelihood, Identity and Organisation in Situations of Instability' based at the Centre for Development Research in Copenhagen and International Development Studies at Roskilde University.The first workshop was held at Tongaat in KwaZulu-Natal in November 1998 and the second, for presentation of revised versions of selected papers, in Copenhagen in September 1999.…
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