Money from Nothing

Indebtedness and Aspiration in South Africa

Deborah James

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780804792677, 9780804791113
• eBook ISBN: 9780804793155
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

Money from Nothing 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 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 Nothing uniquely captures the lived experience of indebtedness for those many millions who attempt to improve their positions (or merely sustain existing livelihoods) in emerging economies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Non-English Words and Phrases
• A Note on Currency
• Introduction: The Wellsprings of Consumption and Debt in South Africa
• 1. Indebtedness, Consumption, and Marriage: The New Middle Class
• 2. Regulating Credit: Tackling the Redistributiveness of Neoliberalism
• 3. “Ride the Camel”: Borrowing and Lending in Context
• 4. “You Don’t Keep Money All the Time”: Savings Clubs and Social Mobility
• 5. South Africa’s Credit Crunch: Narratives and Neighborhoods
• 6. “The History of That House Keeps You Out”: Property and the New Entrepreneur
• 7. New Subjectivities: Advice, Aspiration, and Prosperity
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index