Rights and Responsibilities in Rural South Africa

"This is an unusually lucid account of the moral tensions produced in a rural South African community as people are interpellated simultaneously as rights-bearing, equal individuals and as relational persons embedded in a gendered and generational social hierarchy. It will be of great interest not only to scholars of the region but much more broadly. The rich ethnography and precision of the argument make it ideal for classroom use as well."—Michael Lambek, author of Island in the Stream: An Ethnographic History of Mayotte and The Ethical Condition.

"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

"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 in South Africa.