Rice, Kathleen. Rights and Responsibilities in Rural South Africa: Gender, Personhood, and the Crisis of Meaning. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2023. 198 pages

A rich and sensitive ethnography, Kathleen Rice’s Rights and Responsibilities in Rural South Africa: Gender, Personhood, and the Crisis of Meaning explores the question of how people may live well together amidst the social and moral contradictions which emerge in a changing world. Rice’s book begins with the established yet still urgent observation that, although South Africa has been praised for its exceptionally liberal Constitution, one which forcefully enshrines the values of human rights and equality, gross economic inequality persists thirty years after Apartheid. In a context in which individual autonomy remains precarious, Rice interrogates the enduring importance of systems of patriarchal and gerontocratic hierarchy within Xhosa communities. Set in the remote rural village of Mhlambini in the Eastern Cape, and building on over a decade of research, including sixteen months of fieldwork in 2012, Rights investigates the ways in which men and women of different ages navigate and mobilize ideas about rights and responsibility in their efforts to build a good life for themselves. The Introduction of Rights sets the tone for the chapters which follow by establishing the stakes of the text empirically, relying less on abstract theories and more on historical and ethnographic evidence to explore what Rice describes as competing “moral frames” entailed by “tradition” and “modernity” in contemporary Mhlambini. The book opens with the example of a young man who complains that children and women can mobilize the language of “rights” in order to evade their “responsibilities.” In the pages that follow, we are exposed to other typical conflicts that arise between men and women, young and old, all of which begin to illuminate how gendered, gerontocratic, and economic power dynamics intersect to shape relationships between different social actors. Such conflicts, it becomes clear, are not necessarily about tension between “old” and “new,” but rather between competing idioms of liberal independence and hierarchal dependence and the different forms of obligation they entail. In particular, Rice highlights the ways in which post-Apartheid reforms have given young women greater autonomy in a context in which they have been historically disempowered vis-à-vis men and elders. The first chapters of Rights build a contextual base on which Rice is able to set in motion a strong argumentative arc that begins in the second, titular chapter, “Rights and Responsibilities.” Drawing on transnational studies of neoliberalism, Rice emphasizes how the forceful imposition of democratic human rights frameworks in previously non-democratic contexts can disrupt established moral sensibilities and hierarchies. In Mhlambini, understandings of the Xhosazition of the term “rights” (irhatyi), which speaks to individual rights, often challenge the longstanding notion of “responsibilities” (amalulengo), which speaks to “moral rightness.” This is particularly the case when it comes to issues surrounding the moral personhood of young women. Returning to the claim which opens the book—that children and young women can mobilize the language of “rights” in order to evade their “responsibilities”—Rice systematically debunks the assertion that women mobilize legal rights in order to evade obligations to boyfriends and husbands. Rather, she asserts, women might discursively invoke the idea of equal rights as a way of complaining about or commenting on the widespread inability of men to fulfill their responsibilities to others, particularly in an era of widespread poverty and unemployment. In Chapter 2, Rice raises a key problem which animates many of the debates on which her work centres: the fact that most men in Mhlambini are unable to fulfill traditional obligations under conditions of economic scarcity. As we see in the following chapters—which discuss social grants, female labour, and marriage—this problem has not only created a crisis in masculinity, but also …