Rights and responsibilities in rural South Africa: implications for gender, generation, and personhood

Abstract

In the rural Eastern Cape, South Africa, contests over the meaning and merit of human rights feature prominently in intergenerational and intergendered conflicts. In this article I identify and analyse a tension between amalungelo (a socially embedded and relational form of rights) and irhayti (a Xhosaization of the English ‘[human] right’) as a means of exploring the interpersonal tensions that arise through the production and contestation of the subject positions that human rights set in motion. Using the examples of elders’ complaints of neglect, and of young men's accusations of human rights violations on the part of women, I ground this investigation in men's and elders’ explanations of how human rights enable morally reprehensible actions, and are implicated in what they perceive to be a climate of interpersonal neglect. In analysing these claims, I show that gendered and generational conflict in this region is grounded in uncertainty about the content of gendered and generational subject positions themselves, and speaks to the relative moral value of autonomous versus relational forms of personhood. Moreover, I show that where inequality and interdependence are intrinsic to the ways in which gendered and generational subject positions are constituted and understood, human rights serve both to destabilize the content of these subject positions in ways that render appropriate gendered and generational sociality unclear, and also to bring into question the relative moral value of autonomous versus more relational forms of personhood.