The Centre for Social Sciences Research (CSSR) and the  Institute for Democracy, Citizenship and Public Policy in Africa  (IDCPPA) at the University of Cape Town invite you to join us for a lunchtime seminar on 20 February 2024 at 12:45pm. The seminar will be presented by Leslie Banks.

About the Seminar:

The spirit of gifts: Public housing, citizenship and the ambiguities of home in South Africa

The paper explores the ‘spirit of the gift’ as a framework for the analysis of the moral and political economy of public housing delivery in South Africa since democracy. The paper compares the gifts of Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) houses delivered by the state to ‘beneficiaries’, selected from long waiting lists in cities, with the homes built by families as gifts for their ancestors in their former homelands and rural areas. One of the central features of gifts, according to anthropologists, is that they are meant to be inalienable possessions, things that should not be sold or commodified. They are also assumed to carry a spirit, an aura or identity that binds them to the givers and communicates a relationship with those who receive gifts. In post-colonial societies scholars tend to discuss the delivery of public goods and infrastructures within a framework of rights and entitlements. What they overlook is the extent to which public goods are also sometimes conceptualised and received as gifts that carry a sense of expectation, obligation, and the spirit of social exchange. The paper focuses on what happens when the ‘spirit of the gift’ of public housing is not honoured and the gifts develop their own social lives, undermining the purpose for which they were created. The ethnographic and historical evidence presented in the paper is drawn from numerous research projects undertaken by the author in Cape Town and the Eastern Cape.

Speakers

Leslie Bank is a Researcher at the HSRC in Cape Town, South Africa, and an Extraordinary Professor of Anthropology at Walter Sisulu University. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at Emory University, a Ford Foundation Scholar at Cambridge University, and a Harry Oppenheimer Scholar at Oxford University. His recent books include Covid and Custom in Rural South Africa (2022), Migrant Labour After Apartheid (HSRC Press, 2020), City of Broken Dreams(2019) and Placing the Smart City (2022).

 

 20 February 2024
 12:45 - 14:00 SAST
  CSSR Seminar Room, 4.29 Robert Leslie Social Science Building, UCT

Hosted by the Centre for Social Science Research and the Institute for Democracy, Citizenship and Public Policy in Africa