RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES IN RURAL SOUTH AFRICA, gender, personhood, and the crisis of meaning

183pp., paperback, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2023

ISBN: 9780253066176

Kathleen Rice on the gendered and generational conflicts surrounding social change in South Africa's rural Eastern Cape roughly twenty years after the end of apartheid.

"This marvellous book lucidly unpacks the evolving gender and generational relations and tensions in rural South Africa after apartheid. It shows how the individual rights are enshrined in the celebrated South African constitution collide with social hierarchies of power and culturally embedded notions of personhood, rights, and responsibilities in rural communities on South Africa's eastern seaboard. Rice shows how different cultural and constitutional frameworks of rights and entitlements are a constant source of struggle over meaning, status, and identity in the rural landscape." Leslie Bank, Walter Sisulu University

"Rights and Responsibilities in Rural South Africa is a thoroughly researched ethnographic account of the ambiguities inherent in local understandings of 'rights' and the ways in which they are mobilized in and through gendered interactions in communities that are experiencing severe economic precarity and significant transitions around modes of social reproduction and simultaneous 'ideological transformations'. It makes an important contribution to understandings of the impact of such transformations as described above on young rural women's lives." Sindiso Mnisi Weeks, University of Massachusetts Boston

Kathleen Rice is Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at McGill University, where she holds the Tier II Canada Research Chair in the Medical Anthropology of Primary Care.