Keynotes & Plenaries

2025 Annual Firth Lecture
Clawing Back: Redistribution in Precarious Times

Professor Deborah James, London School of Economics

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