Money from Nothing Indebtedness and Aspiration in South Africa [Hardcover]

Money from Nothingexplores the dynamics surrounding South Africa's national project of financial inclusiondubbed banking the unbanked which aimed to extend credit to black South Africans as a critical aspect of broad-based economic enfranchisement.

Through rich and captivating accounts, Deborah James reveals the varied ways in which middle- and working-class South Africans' access to credit is intimately bound up with identity, status-making, and aspirations of upward mobility. She draws out the deeply precarious nature of both the aspirations and the economic relations of debt which sustain her subjects, revealing the shadowy side of indebtedness and its potential to produce new forms of oppression and disenfranchisement in place of older ones.Money from Nothinguniquely captures the lived experience of indebtedness for those many millions who attempt to improve their positions (or merely sustain existing livelihoods) in emerging economies.

James is attentive not only to the class dynamics of post-apartheid indebtedness but also to the competitive dynamics of status and distinction . . . [The book] emphasises the complex logics of her informants as they seek to navigate the frustrations of contemporary South Africa . . . Scholarship on the post-apartheid state, and intersection with private capital and its discourses, will benefit considerably from engagement with James's ethnographyas will economic anthropologists working in other parts of the world. Credit, and its flip side, debt, emerges as a fundamental lens to understand the workings of both social mobility and economic disenfranchisement, precariously inter-twined in the New South Africa. James makes complex theory accessible, combining it with page-turning ethnographyutterly captivating! This book explores South Africa's crisis of consumer indebtedness, set against the longer history of exploitation of black people by the forces of capitalism, and shows the complex ways thl32