CLAWING BACK, redistribution in precarious times

181pp., illus., map, paperback, First SA Edition, Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 2025

ISBN: 9781776149698

First published in the USA in 2025.

Drawing on a comparative ethnography in South Africa and the United Kingdom, Deborah James explores how notions of reallocation and payout are intimately connected with those of compensation for a loss.

"James reveals how work, welfare, and debt are not merely survival mechanisms but are woven into a larger tapestry of moral, familial, and financial interdependence. With a keen eye, James deftly challenges totalizing accounts of financialization and evocatively illuminates how financial and familial relationships interlock, people tack back and forth between calculative and relational forms of reason, and borrowing can be seen not as a beggar's supplication but a strategist's gambit, which while not always unequivocally successful nevertheless affirms agency in a world where we so frequently feel we have been stripped of it." Bill Maurer, University of California, Irvine

"In Clawing Back, discover how people creatively piece together wages, welfare, and debt to claim what they are owed. This provocative exploration urges us to radically rethink redistribution, highlighting the informal and everyday strategies people use to secure a fairer share in an increasingly and dramatically unequal world. An essential read for anyone interested in poverty, inequality, and justice." Isabelle Guérin, French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development

Deborah James is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Faculty Associate in the International Inequalities Institute. She is the author of Money From Nothing (2015).