Abstract
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 units of measure and scales” (Neiburg 2016: 82). This plurality, in the South African case, means official figures fail to capture the true extent of borrowing and lending and the way state salaries and grants serve as collateral for apparently informal loans. Attempts to regulate or improve the situation, aimed at controlling “reckless lending,” have problematized the debtor as unaccustomed to the idea of repayment. Rather than being excluded from the mainstream economy, however, debtors are in danger of being wholly incorporated into it—but with the disadvantage ...
Highlights
The real economy as a concept has taken root in highly developed economies and 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 units of measure and scales” (Neiburg 2016: 82)
This plurality, in the South African case, means official figures fail to capture the true extent of borrowing and lending and the way state salaries and grants serve as collateral for apparently informal loans
Debtors, and the legal and human rights practitioners who act on their behalf, do not unquestioningly accept such predations: this essay examines the various counter-deductions they have put in place
Summary
Original citation: James, Deborah (2017) Deductions and counter-deductions in South Africa. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 7 (3). This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/85975/ Available in LSE Research Online: August 2018. LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website
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