Clawing Back: Redistribution in Precarious Times

Professor Deborah James, London School of Economics
Chaired by Elizabeth Hallam (University of Oxford) and Cris Shore (Goldsmiths)

This talk explores how, as re-allocative processes shift beyond those that were tried and tested in the heyday of the welfare state, people make a living and pay for what they need and want. They do so, in part, by ‘clawing back’ what they feel is due to them – using a nexus of relationships through which they relate to three sets of actors: the private or state institutions to which (or individuals to whom) they owe money; those in market or state settings who employ them and pay their remuneration; and the government agencies, non-governmental organisations or charitable institutions through which they seek, and sometimes find, social protection. Often the three are almost indistinguishably interwoven, and advisers and activist-intermediaries are relied upon to help draw boundaries between them. In the process, formal and informal redistributive processes interlock.

But why redistributive? That initial syllable seems to suggest a repeated action, or one which takes into account earlier phases in a sequence. Scholars – notably Ferguson in Give a Man a Fish (Durham, 2015) - have spoken of distributive labour to evoke the efforts put into building relationships by those, completely devoid of wage work, who seek to cultivate and maintain connections. The term conjures up images of (inter)dependence, in contrast to the autonomy of the individual worker earning a wage sufficient for the wellbeing of her family. Redistribution, however, suggests not just solidaristic interchange but also recompense for losses suffered as a result of earlier wrongs. Redistributive impulses are said to have arisen out of a need to counter the inequalities that arise out of the unequal distribution of income and wealth: they are a “tool” to be applied by the state and/or society in order to curb the worst excesses of capitalist exploitation and free trade. Or, in settings where previous political regimes are reformed or replaced by new ones, they can involve redress at the formal level of policy. This talk explores how ‘clawing back’ weaves together notions of reallocation and pay-out, on the one hand, with those of compensation for a loss, on the other. The resources disbursed are no longer (if they ever were) just a matter for the state/society; where financialisation is accompanied by increased informalisation, redistribution can equally involve the market, or draw on kinship and social networks.

Deborah James is a specialist in the anthropology of South Africa and the UK. Her work is broadly political and economic in focus. A recent research project produced a 2020 special issue of Ethnos co-edited with Insa Koch entitled ‘The State of the Welfare State: Advice, Governance and Care in Settings of Austerity’ (2020). Her book Money from Nothing: Indebtedness and Aspiration in South Africa (Stanford University Press, 2015) explores the dynamics surrounding South Africa's national project of financial inclusion—dubbed "banking the unbanked"—which aimed to extend credit to black South Africans. In her forthcoming book Clawing Back: A New Anthropology of Redistribution in Precarious Times (Stanford University Press, 2025), she explores the triad of debt, wages, welfare as they play out in South Africa and the UK.

Decolonisation and the Anthropological Conjuncture: Thinking with Stuart Hall

Why has Stuart Hall's scholarship not been more central to anthropological debates;about race and decolonisation? How best can we deploy the intellectual resources that Hall bequeaths us at this decolonial conjuncture? Hall’s work provides concepts and inspiration for historically situated theorisations of culture that emerge from anti-colonial struggles and are embedded in studies of crisis, racism, social inequality. His analytic approach makes available a multi-layered, intersectional, and de-essentialising perspective that seeks to mitigate reductionism and ethnocentrism. This articulates with theoretical concerns that are central to contemporary anthropology—including temporality, neoliberalism, environmental degradation, coloniality, and populism. It also addresses and inspires a demand for decolonisation emanating from the grassroots of our discipline. Where better to open up conversations about Hall's legacy and the imaginative possibilities of his ideas than Birmingham, the home of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies? This Plenary thus seeks to assess Stuart Hall’s contribution in the context of anthropology’s self-critique and the search for viable futures.

Chair: Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispirita

Panellists: Toyin Agbetu (UCL), Yael Navaro (Cambridge), Pat Noxolo (Birmingham) and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos (Kent). 

Toyin Agbetu is a political and social anthropologist at University College London whose research interests include ‘race’, ethnicity and social identities, Afriphobia, technology and society, social movements, and institutional activism. He uses reparatory and social justice approaches to create decolonial projects employing scholar-activism, critical pedagogy, community-based resistance, and exhibitionary praxis to challenge systemic racism, structural violence, and algorithmic discrimination.

Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta is Associate Professor in Ethnomusicology and Popular Music Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK). His research focuses on urban electronic dance music scenes, with a particular focus on affect, intimacy, stranger-sociability, embodiment, sexuality, creative industries and musical migration. He is a member and resident DJ of Berlin’s queer intersectional rave collective, ‘Room 4 Resistance’. Garcia-Mispireta is currently developing a project on “grassroots” activism and queer nightlife collectives; he also has a new monograph out, entitled Together Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor (Duke University Press, 2023).

Yael Navaro is Professor of Social, Political and Psychological Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton University Press (2002) and The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity (Duke University Press, 2012), and the co-editor of Reverberations: Violence Across Time and Space (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). Her work has been featured in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Anthropological Theory, Cultural Anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology, Postcolonial Studies, among other journals. She was the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) project Living with Remnants: Politics, Materiality and Subjectivity in the Aftermath of Past Atrocities in Turkey (2012-2016). She is a co-convener of the Archives of Disappeared: Discipline and Method Amidst Ruin research network at the University of Cambridge. 

Pat Noxolo is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Birmingham. Her research brings together the study of international culture and in/security, and uses postcolonial, discursive and literary approaches to explore the spatialities of a range of Caribbean and British cultural practices. Key publications include (2022) 'Geographies of race and ethnicity 1: Black Geographies', Progress in Human Geography, 46 (5): 1232-1240, and (2022) Noxolo, P, Patten, H and Stanley Niaah, S. (eds.) Dancehall In/securities: Perspectives on Caribbean Expressive Life. (Routledge). She was awarded the 2021 Royal Geographical Society (RGS) Murchison Award, and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Pat has led two international teams exploring Caribbean in/securities and creativity – CARISCC(funded by Leverhulme) and CARICUK(funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council) and is co-lead of University of Birmingham’s Stuart Hall Archive Project. She also commissioned the report ‘Supervising Black Geography PhD Researchers in the UK’ (2021), and is co-founder of the Fi Wi Road internships for Black Geography undergraduates. Pat is a committee member of the RACE group of the RGS, former chair of the Society for Caribbean Studies, and former co-editor of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

Dimitrios Theodossopoulos is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Kent. He has conducted research in Panama and Greece, and published extensively on resistance, populism, exoticisation, authenticity, environmentalism, and the politics of cultural representation and protest. He has also helped establish a new visual subfield—Graphic Ethnography—that brings textual and visual representation in a dialectic. His research on the anti-austerity movement led him to appreciate the work of Stuart Hall in greater depth. He now seeks to advocate the relevance of Hall’s thinking for contemporary social Anthropology. Dimitrios is currently the editor of the JRAI.

What print made possible in colonial Lagos

Chaired by Professor Insa Nolte (University of Birmingham)

A new wave of research on the history of the press in Africa and South Asia has emphasised the need to look at the texts themselves – their format, style and point of view – rather than treating them as transparent sources of information for research on other topics. It has drawn attention to the fact that in  British colonial print cultures, English often co-existed and interacted with one or more local print languages, and could act as both irritant and stimulant to new local-language creativity. Against this background, I want to ask what the local producers and readers of print themselves thought print could do. How did linguistic cohabitation in the press relate to their conception of their place in the Empire, and their construction of print as civic space and site of innovation?

In 1920s Lagos, political ferment, challenges to the colonial government and competition between the conservative and radical sections of the elite had led to unprecedented press activity, including a new effort to address a potential public that could read Yorùbá but not English. English and Yorùbá were consciously juxtaposed and intertwined. At every level, their parallel co-existence was made evident, and each language quoted or translated key expressions from the other. 

Exploration of this dynamic field suggests that participants in the Lagos print sphere were highly alert to the formal potentialities of the medium. The format of the printed page or volume made it possible to juxtapose languages – and by extension poems, personages, topics – in homologous spaces that brought to the surface their equivalence, if not equality. But while the Lagos literati treated English as a public resource, available to anyone who could read it, they maintained that there were deep registers of Yorùbá that could not be translated or appropriated. These conceptions of equivalence and inequality informed their conception of the place of Lagos (and Nigeria) as a distinctive constituent of the Empire alongside other parallel entities. The idea of uniqueness-in-equivalence also informed their idea of the print sphere as an enlightened civic space of their own construction. To them, envisaging such a print sphere and affirming its value was not mere wishful thinking. By writing about it, and into it, they were helping to bring it into being.

Karin Barber is Emeritus Professor of African Cultural Anthropology at the University of Birmingham and Visiting Professor in Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Her research focuses on Yoruba oral and written genres, and she has also done wider comparative work on popular culture and the anthropology of texts. Her work on Yorùbá oral praise poetry (I Could Speak Until Tomorrow, 1991) and on popular travelling theatre (The Generation of Plays, 2000) has continued to inform her current research on Yorùbá-language print culture. Print Culture and the First Yorùbá Novel (2012) presented a translation and contextual analysis of a key text, an epistolary narrative first serialised in a Yorùbá weekly newspaper. Her new book on Yorùbá print culture in early twentieth-century Lagos, to be published by Ohio University Press, looks in depth at the producers and publics of printed texts and investigates their experiments with language, genre and styles of address in a distinctive political and social context.  

Academic Freedoms

This plenary provides a space to explore what the discipline as a whole and individual anthropologists alike need to do to defend and exercise our freedoms to speak and act. The tremulant geopolitics of our time present us with ecological disaster, rising ethnicised nationalisms, and the effects of past and present settler colonial projects. The authoritarian creep in UK public life, compounded with anti-poor sentiments and racialised border-policing policies, are some examples of these wider shifts across the globe – and ones that demand responses from us as anthropologists in the UK. As a discipline we have, for a long time, been good at indexing and diagnosing these transformations, and exploring them with care through our ethnographies. How should we reflect on them as and when they impact us, our students, and our colleagues?

In the face of this, anthropologists have continued to speak and act from conscience, principle, and conviction. They do so where they research, where they work and in public discourse. The participants in the roundtable will reflect on academic precarity and how it relates to academic freedoms; the racialization of students and academics on campus and in public discourse, including through state policies such as Prevent and the hostile immigration environment, the policing and criminalisation of staff and student action on university campuses, and the scope and role of anthropologists engaging in public following from their convictions.

Chair: Fuad Musallam (University of Birmingham, Local Committee Member)

Panellists: Professor Miriyam Aouragh (Reader in Digital Anthropology, University of Westminster), Riccardo Jaede (PhD Student, London School of Economics), Dr Mariya Ivancheva (Senior Lecturer in Education, University of Strathclyde), Dr Ammara Maqsood (Associate Professor in Social Anthropology, UCL).