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.

Feminine futures: female initiation and aspiration in matrilineal Malawi

“…Emphasis was placed on ‘respect’ ( ulemu ), which entailed the girls living well with others: treating their parents, elders, traditional leaders, future husbands, and parents‐in‐law in the appropriate manner; abiding by rules or taboos that would prevent harm coming to those around them; and observing shared norms in relation to the property and privacy of others, thereby ensuring at once their own moral personhood and the harmonious co‐existence of kin (cf. Rice ). This kind of advice, praise, and admonition was also directed at the girls’ mothers and close kin and would be repeated at the girls’ subsequent initiation ceremonies and yet again some years later at their own daughters’ rites.…”

Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017

“…Looking at histories of genetic forensic identification, she traces a shift from a human rights framework in the 1980s that was social‐movement based and characterized by South–South exchange to the humanitarian framework focused on security and a stance of political neutrality that dominates today. For Kathleen Rice (), the specificity of terms is similarly generative. She juxtaposes two ways of talking about rights in the rural Eastern Cape in South Africa: the socially embedded and relational concept amalungelo , and the legally enshrined human rights (here expressed as irhayti ).…”

The Lack of a Fully Intersectional Approach to Gender-Based Violence in South Africa

“…Though gender divisions of labor were an important fixture of the South African indigenous culture, "current role expectations are operating in a very different economic and political environment" than they were in historical indigenous cultures (Gordon, 2001, p.272). South African women continue to The Lack of a Fully Intersectional Approach to GBV in South Africa have little decision-making power in relationships with men, and less authority than they did in indigenous cultures (Gordon, 2001;Rice, 2017). The white reliance of black labor in the mining industry is one example of a historically white institution that penetrated and exacerbated female oppression in African culture through.…”

“…In South Africa, forms of oppression are historically glaring in the everyday lives of citizens of all races and ethnicities, and the culture of domination has been instilled as normal and matter of fact. Feelings that women should be obedient and even subservient to men, though this has changed over time, are still very relevant within South African culture, for both white and black women (Rice, 2017;Shefer et al, 2008). The contribution of all these levels of oppression to gender-based violence must be considered to decrease the rates of such violence in South Africa.…”