Current Anthropology Volume 56, Supplement 11, October 2015 S97

Raw Life and Respectability

Poverty and Everyday Life in a Postapartheid Community

by Fiona C. Ross

Through close ethnographic attention to modes of world making among people living in a very impoverished com-
munity in Cape Town, South Africa, in this paper I explore the histories of two key concepts—rouheid and ordentlikheid
(Afrikaans; rawness and respectability)—and the social practices they enjoin. These distinctions and the modalities of
living they generate produce relations between living and dying that complicate the prevailing theoretical picture of
power over life and death, particularly that posited by Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) distinction between bare and quali-
fied life. They also foreground the ways in which gender is implicated in practices of world making that James Holston
(2008) describes as “insurgent” and “differentiated” citizenship. Exploring the ways that people seek to craft lives in con-
texts that undermine many possibilities, I demonstrate ethnographically both the forms of exposure that poverty pro-
duces and the ways that these are countered. I propose a genealogy of bareness that, contra Agamben’s emphasis on
sovereign power, is deeply embedded in local ways of understanding persons, relationships, history’s effects, and life’s
possibilities.

James Holston’s (2008) account of struggles for urban land onstrate that the terms in which people envisage everyday life’s
rights in São Paulo, Brazil, offers a historically nuanced argu- possibilities themselves are shaped by historical processes and
ment about how peripheries are settled and potentially secured give rise to particular ethical horizons and forms of life. The
through the indeterminacies of legal processes. Demonstrat- account thus extends and challenges Holston’s argument, de-
ing the entanglements of “differentiated” and “insurgent” citi- manding that we situate the politics of the urban poor through
zenships, his account is persuasive in demanding attention to an understanding not only of law and its exigencies, or of his-
the historical processes that have given rise to the particular torical processes alone, but also of the ways that norms settle
production of social life in Brazil and elsewhere. Drawing from into accepted understandings of what it means to make urban
Agamben (1998), he suggests that the ancient Greek distinc- life.
tion between polis and oikos is reformulated in the demands Under colonialism and increasingly under apartheid, the
of formerly rural populations to “a daily life in the city worthy domestic realm was the site of much state control. By the mid-
of a citizen’s dignity” (Holston 2008:313). His account suggests 1980s, politics was enacted through law’s hold over the house-
that it is in the everyday, and particularly in its entanglements hold and its relations,1 and the law was brought cruelly to bear
with law, that politics takes form. Here I extend this notion on the possibilities of social life. Before the implementation
by exploring how, in the making of everyday life, norms are of the Group Areas Act of 1950, Cape Town (South Africa’s
formed and reformed, complicating our picture of resistance oldest colonial city) was also one of the most integrated in
and entanglement. the country (Besteman 2008; Western 1981). Admittedly, that
Apartheid’s exclusions, building on those of the colonial and is not saying a great deal given the prevailing class and race
Union periods, meant that people’s modes of life making as
they inhabited the urban periphery were overtly a struggle
against the classificatory power and effects of law. In Cape 1. This is an important point of difference between political orders
Town, the city in which I live and about which I write, it was founded on the separation of household and politics as described by
also a profoundly gendered process, an encroachment—of Agamben (1998) and those of Britain’s southern African colonies and
land, law, classifications—performed in what I would call “the their subsequent political structures (see below). For example, apart-
domestic mode.” Here I offer an account of this mode to dem- heid’s Separate Development was predicated on ethnicity and race
(the latter defined by the Population Registration Act of 1950 in
terms of descent for whites, Africans, and Indians; Colouredness,
Fiona C. Ross is Professor of Social Anthropology in the School of until the 1970s predicated on assumptions about miscegenation
African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics at the [Adhikari 2008], was defined on exclusions—being not obviously
University of Cape Town (P Bag Rondebosch, 7701 South Africa white or black—and associational ties). Other acts, such as the Prohi-
[fi[email protected]]). This paper was submitted 4 VIII 14, ac- bition of Mixed Marriages Act and the Immorality Act, were de-
cepted 27 IV 15, and electronically published 19 VIII 15. signed specifically to address questions of racial purity in the family.

q 2015 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2015/56S11-0011$10.00. DOI:10.1086/682078

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 S98 Current Anthropology Volume 56, Supplement 11, October 2015

ideologies of the time, but it is worth remembering in the era “Coloured” and “African” residents with different residential
we problematically denote as “postapartheid,” when Cape Town histories and claims to city and rural lives. Residents of the
remains the most segregated and racialized of all South Af- poor, largely Afrikaans-speaking community frequently use
rican cities. In addition to the gamut of apartheid laws that a powerful metaphor of bareness to describe their everyday
applied in South Africa, a number of special regulations were lives. The term rou is variously translated as “raw,” “rough,”
specific to the Cape Province, including those pertaining to the “crude,” “indecent,” “vulgar,” “incomplete” or “unformed,”
Coloured Labour Preference Area (which provided for racially and “inexperienced.” It stands in contrast to an ideal of cul-
based job reservation) and stringently enforced influx control tured, developed, respectable. In common usage, rou denotes a
measures.2 Much of the struggle of urban residence in Cape form of exposure to life’s violence and pain. People juxtapose
Town was made in the name of the African family (Cole 1987; rou with ordentlik, a term connoting decency, respectability,
Wells 1993), the coherence of which had been sundered by reasonability, and proper conformity to the social norms of the
long colonial histories of land alienation and dispossession, elite. Its connotations of gentility and restraint offer a version
migration, and the separation of families. of life markedly different from the stuttering rhythms and
Simultaneously, long-standing state and religious concerns everyday inconstancies that often characterize everyday life
over the “dysfunctional Coloured family” saw the apartheid in extremely poor contexts. Local usage of rouheid (rawness)
state intervening in family life in numerous ways, including and ordentlikheid echo the Levi-Straussian distinction be-
social support grants and housing allowances made largely tween raw and cooked; people described as rou are consid-
to women.3 This enabled women classified “Coloured” to take ered uncultured, undisciplined, not fully incorporated into
responsibility as homeowners, respectable mothers, and leaders appropriate modes of comportment and behavior. Raw cir-
in their communities (Salo 2004), a pattern that is shifting in cumstances are said to produce raw lives. In what follows, I
the postapartheid democratizing context (Versfeld 2012). The pay attention to the ways that these distinctions and the
struggle for residence in the city was thus not only racially dif- modalities of living they enjoin produce relations between
ferentiated, as many commentators have pointed out, but pow- living and dying that complicate the prevailing theoretical
erfully gendered. picture of power over life and death, particularly that posited
Women’s roles in patiently and courageously (re)settling by Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) distinction between bare and
the outskirts of the city or navigating state ideologies of qualified life.
the family suggest that it is important to think through the
shifts in relations between urban residence and gender over
Rawness and Respectability
time and the forms of life to which this gives rise. I examine
these matters through close attention to everyday life in The Historically, the idea of respectability was an important mode
Village, a former shanty settlement on the outer perimeter of structuring unequal social relations in African colonial worlds
of Cape Town (F. Ross 2010). Established in the last years of (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; R. Ross 1999). It carried—and
apartheid, the settlement consisted of a mixed population of continues to carry—particular weight in the Cape (Jensen 2008;
F. Ross 2005, 2010; R. Ross 1999; Salo 2004), where, as Robert
Ross (1999) describes it, under both Dutch and British colonial
2. How this segregation came about is largely the familiar story of regimes it became a central structuring principle in demar-
the production of racially based class structures in South Africa and the cating social status and shaping interpersonal relations. Its
creation of distant ethnic “homelands” for Africans and their exclusion
underpinning racial dynamic, partly predicated on the dis-
from “common South Africa” under any but the most exigent of con-
tinction between slave and free, shifted and solidified over
ditions until the repeal in 1986 of the infamous pass laws that governed
African access to cities. These processes gave rise to the production of an
the nineteenth century as religion (particularly Christianity) be-
African laboring class concentrated in labor reserves (Wolpe 1972) and, as came a core element in the definition of respectability, back-
Mahmood Mamdani (1996) notes, a differentiation between “citizens” and grounding other criteria (R. Ross 1999; see also Jensen 2008).
“subjects.” That distinction was complicated in the case of those classi- While the content of what counted as respectability altered
fied Coloured, who, post-1983, were afforded some citizenship rights while over time, the term and the actions instituted in its name—
still enduring the subject status Mamdani describes. In Cape Town, the such as temperance societies and legislation curtailing in-
Group Areas Act of 1950 was emphatically imposed, quickly giving rise dolence, drunkenness, and amoral relations, among others—
to a city stratified by class and race—a legacy that, 20 years into a dem- established its opposite, which was heavily predicated on
ocratic political regime, it has scarcely undone (Besteman 2008). The appearances, public behavior (particularly drinking and licen-
Coloured Labour Preference Area (1954, repealed 1985) further limited
tiousness), and destitution (especially among whites; see R. Ross
African influx to the city by securing the area south of the “Eiselin Line”
1999:158). It is in this matrix that rou and ordentlik emerge
for people classified Coloured. Notwithstanding these pressures of exclu-
sion, people classified African continued to come to the city, establishing
as one another’s others.
what were then called “squatter camps” along the city’s periphery (Cole In some uses, respectability implies an ethical stance in
1987; Dewar, Rosmarin, and Watson 1991; James and Simons 1989). the world. Manifesting as reliability in the conduct of social
3. Colonial and apartheid imaginaries posited “Coloured” men as prob- relations, it involves caring for appearances (respectability)
lem figures (Adhikari 2008; Jensen 2008; Salo 2004; Steinberg 2005). and caring for persons (decency), molding relationships so that

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Ross Raw Life and Respectability S99

people will be considered moral beings. The creation of proper the hard edges of decency: he had been beaten for failing to
personhood is thus part of the stakes of ordentlikheid. And, show the appropriate forms of “respect” (read: subservience)
as Elaine Salo (2004) notes, ordentlikheid marks the critical to the farmer. Children are often beaten for not showing ap-
mode that separates people from the wildness of “the bush”:4 propriate respect. Drawing on models that have their historic
“Ordentlikheid refers to the intense, lifelong social and phys- roots in slavery and exploitation, ordentlikheid is shot through
ical work that women have to do to keep the natural order with traces of violence and injustice.
of the bos or the wilderness at bay” (172). Working in both middle- and working-class contexts in
On the face of it, ordentlikheid offers positive imaginative Cape Town, Stefan Jensen has described ordentlikheid as an
horizons; a way of escaping or at least envisaging an alter- empty signifier (2008:147), its forms and referents unstable
native to the harshness of everyday worlds of poor people over time and in different contexts. Never firmly anchored
in South Africa and the structural violence that shapes them. or finally accomplished, it has to be “fought over and . . . per-
Recent work (Jensen 2008; Salo 2004) sees in it a means formed again and again” (Jensen 2008:147). And, for many with
through which moral worlds can be forged from the scur- whom I worked, life and work on the Cape’s commercial farms,
rilous conditions of everyday life in poor areas; through or- with their symbolic associations with baaskap (mastery) and
dentlikheid, people—particularly women—are able to make the bush, is counterpoised to a form of life characterized as
proper persons in immoral conditions. And yet, ordentlikheid ordententlik. Thus, while people behave as though the terms
is overdetermined and contradictory. The binary between de- rou and ordentlik are objective indicators of social status, they
cency and rawness, which appears as a moral statement about are the materialization of terrible histories of oppression and
social standing, belies the political-economic relations that subjugation, exclusion, and marginalization.
produced it in the first place. It references a pernicious evo-
lutionary ranking system set in place early in the colonial en- The Bush, The Park, The Village
counter and consolidated in the Victorian era (see R. Ross
1999) that differentiated the “civilizable native” (subject to These distinctions and the world-making practices they in-
recognizable laws) from “bushmen.”5 volve came strongly to the fore in the late 1990s and early
Ordentlike mense (decent people) “know their place.” That 2000s as residents of a shantytown, The Bush (later called
injunction so firmly embedded in colonial society is an instruc- The Park), readied themselves to move from their organi-
tion to adhere to the implicit “law of the proper” (de Certeau cally formed shack community, slowly built over the pre-
1988:103)—the rules of hierarchy that express and maintain ceding decade, into a residential estate, The Village, funded
power relations—including those of class, gender, and age. It through a public-private partnership. The estate offered the
involves conformity to gendered ideals in which women are approximately 1,000 residents of The Park formal accom-
subservient while at the same time masking the central role that modation in a planned suburb, with simple houses and basic
they play in the maintenance of households. It also insists on amenities (tarred roads, indoor sanitation, electricity, and
forms of respect that border on subservience to those in au- running water). In the lead-up to the move, residents were ex-
thority—real or imagined. In other words, respect practices cited about the possibilities this offered not just to live more
themselves are shaped by other modalities of stratification— comfortably, protected from the elements, but to live modes
class, race, gender, and age. For some people, the forms of ap- of life that others would recognize as decent.
propriate behavior glossed as ordentlikheid are learned through The Park had been established by bosslapers (literally, bush
bitter experience. One man, explaining to me how to behave sleepers; the homeless, vagrants)6 in the late 1980s. At night
with propriety and to recognize respectability in others, com- the small group built small shelters among the trees, demol-
mented that he had learned proper form at the end of a sjam- ishing them by day. Several had come to Cape Town from the
bok (a rawhide whip) wielded by the farmer on whose wine central interior, the desert lands of the Karoo; others soon
farm his father was employed. The sjambok here represents joined them from Cape Town and surrounds. The diminution
of influx control in the late 1980s and the increasing inabil-
ity of the state to provide housing for Coloureds as well as
4. Ironically, the settlement was made on the edges of a farm called Africans meant that the settlement quickly consolidated into
“Die Bos” (the bush), and when I first lived there, that was how residents a small “squatter camp,” home to several hundred people,
knew it. Later they decided to change its name to The Park precisely to most of whom the apartheid state classified Coloured, with
avoid the previous name’s connotations. a small number of isiXhosa-speaking Africans. Defined by lo-
5. Indeed, during the early period of Dutch and later British and
cal authorities as an illegal settlement (what would now be
German colonization in Southern Africa, indigenous peoples, particu-
called a “land invasion”), by the time that I began living and
larly the San, were considered vermin, subject to indiscriminate killing.
working there in 1991, the settlement had already been razed
Killers could be prosecuted but were leniently treated (Gordon 1986).
The hierarchical racial model has become deeply embedded in everyday
social relations such that recent Khoisan cultural resurgences notwith-
standing, it is considered a great insult to call someone n boesman (a 6. Residents use the term rather than the more common pejorative
bushman). term bergies—see discussion below.

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 S100 Current Anthropology Volume 56, Supplement 11, October 2015

several times by agents of the state and was again under threat ers), while bringing in less income than men’s, was more re-
from local landlords. liable, and women were generally the core around which
To describe life there as precarious is an understatement. households formed. Many people were ill and, especially in the
African people’s lives in nonhomeland cities had already been late 1990s and early 2000s when antiretrovirals (ARVs) were
rendered precarious by legalized exclusions; section 21 rights, not available, died young. (In this sense, one might argue that
pass laws and influx control regulations, the Eiselin Line,7 state the South African state was biopolitical in the ways that
violence, detention without trial, and so on; the full range of Agamben [1998] describes.) Drugs and alcohol, as in earlier
apartheid’s legal accoutrements of exclusion along with ex- eras (see R. Ross 1999) were important means through which
tralegal practices of terror. The everyday lives of poor people people escaped everyday trials. Interpersonal violence, espe-
classified Coloured, too, was unstable, albeit in different ways, cially domestic violence, was common. Everyday rhythms and
and despite the relative protections of state grants and hous- routines were hard won and fragile. Striving to develop and
ing subsidies offered by the apartheid state, many—including remain in meaningful relationships in conditions of material
those resident in The Park—fell outside its interventions. want that militated against them, people, particularly women,
In 1991, the Human Sciences Research Council recom- generated widespread networks of care and dependence that
mended the formation of a “transit camp” to consolidate crosscut conventional household or family units and linked
“homeless people” in the Hottentot’s Holland into one large residents into relationships that secured the basic means of sur-
camp before their removal to a designated informal settle- vival. One might characterize these as processes of con-viviality.
ment. The female leadership of The Park resisted attempts Hyphenated here to emphasize the relation, it is an ethic that
at evictions by a variety of means, mobilizing church groups, seeks to secure life, both life itself and “good life” as it is made
journalists, civic associations and rights NGOs, and human through relationships. Used in this sense, con-viviality antici-
rights lawyers. A leadership NGO offered legal training and pates that being alive is at stake in social worlds and that it is
support for the leadership. A community committee was es- accomplished alongside and through others. It does not nec-
tablished, consisting largely of women, that negotiated with essarily anticipate peaceableness in or enjoyment of everyday
landlords and the council when the new postapartheid state relations as much of the literature on the topic (Illich 1976;
policy regarding provision of housing to the poor was made. Overing and Passes 2000) suggests. Rather, it extends a notion
Negotiations included what they called “blackmailing” the of alertness and liveliness to life’s contingency. Con-viviality
council by refusing to leave the site designated for a high- thus includes awareness of the limits of life making, includ-
end gated residential estate until housing nearby was secured. ing violence of many kinds—interpersonal, symbolic and struc-
Eventually, with strong support from the then-minister of tural. In these conditions, residents strove to accomplish decent
the state’s Reconstruction and Development Programme, they lives, to be (seen as) decent and respectable, to be responsive
were able to win rights to residence and to move “as a com- to and responsible for others in contexts that erode life’s pos-
munity” into The Village at the turn of the millennium. A sibilities. In this way, despite terrible hardships and death’s
story of refusals, resistances, and accommodations made in closeness, people crafted social life in the organic “messiness”
community’s name, the process produced access to houses of an illegal shantytown, struggled for and won residential
and sanitation for most residents of The Park and with it in- rights, and moved to state-sponsored formal houses. They an-
corporation into new forms of subject life as rates-responsible ticipated that “proper” housing would render them legible to
citizens of the metropolis. Within a few months, most peo- respectable others in terms that would materialize their own
ple were in arrears with the city, owing amounts for water, decency and affirm their dignity.
refuse collection, and sanitation provision that have quickly The Reconstruction and Development Programme, the early
compounded, rebates notwithstanding. Interestingly, despite blueprint for the postapartheid state, recognizes housing as a
campaigns to Do the Right Thing, indebtedness to the state basic need. The model for recent housing provision has been
seems not to be considered a relation of indebtedness per se, informed by Hernando de Soto’s (2000) ideas about provid-
and the obligation to pay these bills seems not to carry the ing the poor with capital for development. Given the broadly
same moral weight as settling one’s local obligations. neoliberal context into which South Africa transitioned, it
The residents were very poor. Few had regular work, re- is not surprising that such ideas have been powerful, but
lying on “piece work” (odd jobs), casual work, seasonal work, they are contentious, not least for their emphasis on capital
extended networks of often fraught relations of debt and rec- and individual property ownership (see Cousins et al. 2005;
iprocity within the settlement, and state grants.8 As elsewhere P&DM 2007). In 2000, the state was found to have a consti-
in the Cape, women’s employment (usually as domestic work- tutional obligation to provide adequate shelter on precisely
the grounds of dignity, itself the first founding value of the

7. An imaginary line that secured the Western part of the Cape Prov-
ince for “Coloured” labor.
8. South Africa has an extensive grant program that currently sup- were disbursed in various forms of child assistance, mostly the Child Care
ports some 16 million people. In December 2013, almost 11,500,000 grants Grant of R300 (ca. US$30; Children Count-Abantwana Babalulekile 2014).

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Ross Raw Life and Respectability S101

constitution.9 In residents’ imaginations, as in that of the court key facet in how people recognize kinship) and residing in the
and the state, housing was central to creating individual dig- same household might have quite different networks. Some-
nity and reconstructing society. times children may be completely absorbed into a household
for many years, becoming in effect kin and treated as such. At
Representation and Life other times, older children, particularly teens, might work their
networks, shifting constantly.
For residents, ordentlikheid thus offered both a critique of the These strategies are not uncontentious. Conditions are
erosions of dignity in everyday life in The Park and an aspi- fraught, means limited, and often tempers fray. But the fact of
rational horizon. Leaders took ordentlikheid seriously: it of- their existence suggests that there is tremendous social in-
fered a means to secure a sense of dignity in the face of dis- vestment in “making live” and that investment does not rest
paragement by those who lived outside the community, often solely in kinship or the state. This was clearly demonstrated
including their own families. As one leader, Sandra, put it, in The Village in mid-2010, when a new social worker began
“People will see that we are not our houses [i.e., shacks].” to implement measures to remove children from homes where
The difference between representation and life that Sandra they were exposed to neglectful or abusive situations. The in
describes exercised many people. Conversations often circled situ state-backed organization Oog op die Kind (Eye on the
around it, and the trope of decency became a central model child), run by two female volunteers resident in the com-
with which people imagined their futures as respectable and munity, had identified several children as being “at risk.”
accepted members of society. (That their status as such was They were responsible for monitoring such children, provid-
even in question is indicative of the ways that they had in- ing backup social and emotional resources and a place of
ternalized the negative judgments of others.) The difference safety, and referring them to the state’s social development
took concrete form when they completed application forms workers. However, direct intervention by social workers and
for state subsidies that would secure their place in The Vil- the removal of several children from their homes to state
lage. Household formation in impoverished contexts is, as I facilities or “better” homes elsewhere had led to accusations
have suggested above, often contingent, with households form- that the children were part of a personal vendetta by the
ing around available resources rather than, as the middle-class volunteers against specific mothers, and the entire organiza-
“common sense” that informs planning policy would have it, tion was at risk as a result of the emergent distrust.
around kinship or affinal relationships in the first instance. Community leaders were worried. They agreed that chil-
People are absorbed into one another’s households in multi- dren should not remain in situations in which they were at
ple ways—as lovers, laborers, boarders, and fictive kin, among risk, but they were concerned that the children were being
others. Children may be absorbed informally or formally. For- removed from their community and social networks. Their
mal absorption involves the state, either through practices of complete removal also meant that more stable households
state-sanctioned fosterage (in which foster parents are legally in the community could not obtain foster grants to care for
appointed and receive a state grant of R800 [approximately the children—grants that sustained their own social net-
US $80] per month, revisited every 2 years until the child is 18) works. Unlike in the models of the nuclear and extended
or adoption (in which case guardians are unassisted).10 There family that continue to inspire social work practice in South
are also many informal ways in which children are completely Africa, community leaders knew that children develop wide-
or partially absorbed into other households. From early on, ranging social relationships that link them across house-
children weave complex networks that cross-stitch institutions holds. Operating with a tangible sense of the survival skills
and relationships. They might receive food in one household of young people, leaders were clear about the responsibilities
while sleeping in another; their schooling costs might be met and failings of parents and guardians and were also alert to
by one set of people in a network while others attend to dif- the experimental modes through which children facilitated
ferent needs. These networks are fluid. They are not necessarily their access to and were absorbed into social networks. They
reliable over time. They do not necessarily overlap with those of were concerned that children should retain at least some con-
others in their homes; children borne of the same mother (the tact with caregivers, especially mothers (even where they ac-
knowledged neglect and abuse), in the name of love and be-
longing, and at the same time secure children’s well-being as
9. In Government of the Republic of South Africa v. Irene Grootboom full members of the community; as its citizens. They held that
and others, CCT 11/00 (decision, October 2000), premising its delibera- children should remain in “the community” if those responsi-
tions on the value of human dignity, the court found that the com-
ble for them failed them, thus holding relatively intact their
plainants had a right to adequate shelter and that the state was obligated
social networks while mitigating neglect or abuse. To their way
to provide such in its absence. It was a landmark case, the first time that
the state’s obligation to second- and third-generation human rights re-
of thinking, it was in the best interests of the child to bolster
ceived validation in the Constitutional Court, and it instituted the rela- rather than sever local caring relationships and to hold chil-
tionship between rights and dignity (Sachs 2009). dren within the community rather than render them to the state.
10. Foster care grants are awarded to more than 500,000 people, 20% The ensuing anxieties, debates, and discussions demonstrate
of whom are over the age of 60. the extent to which survival and well-being are envisaged as

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 S102 Current Anthropology Volume 56, Supplement 11, October 2015

community activities and responsibilities, not merely those of enduring legal consequences. The stakes of the paperwork were
individual parents or guardians or of the state alone. high. People who did not qualify for housing subsidies were
The question of responsibility for making live and letting literally rendered homeless in the process because the shanty-
die became even clearer in relation to care for the dying. At a town was razed when the move was effected.12
time when ARVs were not available, rates of death, already Enormously complicated sets of social relations that were
high among the poor,11 rose dramatically, putting the ques- both melded and fractured by people’s prior histories of re-
tion of care squarely on the table. In one terrible instance, lationship and need were reformulated by the demand to be
one of my assistants, Robyn, was called to a house in which legible to the state in order to enable them to live a desirable
lay a man, Billy, suffering terminal cancer. He had been sent form of life. These processes have caused their own difficul-
home from the hospital to die. His family was revolted by ties in property’s afterward: as people die or terminate their
his illness. Slowly they withdrew their care, eventually leav- relationships, the question of what to do with and about for-
ing him alone and unattended. When Robyn found him, he mal property relations is complicated by prior, sometimes so-
had not been cared for or cleaned for many hours. He was cially inadmissible, histories and complex social forms that
alone, soiled, scarcely coherent, and in great pain. She called are not recognized by the state in ways that residents hold to
for assistance from Janine, another assistant, and some neigh- be moral.13
bors, and they began to clean him. He died an agonized An example demonstrates all of the issues described above.
death some days later. Many were incensed at how his fam- Meidjie was one of the two girls to whom Raw Life, New
ily had treated him, abandoning him to death. “Where were Hope (F. Ross 2010) is dedicated. Small and fragile, I suspect
the people who were supposed to look after him? It was their she had foetal alcohol syndrome,14 a common affliction in a
duty to look after him. . . . If you are going to leave that per- population that has lived and worked on the Cape’s wine
son to perish, then he’ll die for sure” was how one neighbor farms—a legacy of the dop system. Her father had left her
put it. Neighbors were furious and embarrassed that strang- and her mother, Susan, when she was small. Susan had moved
ers—Robyn and Janine—had to take on the burden of care. in with an older man, Price, whom Meidjie came to call “Pa”
Members of his family were avoided when news of their (Dad). Susan and Price separated, and Susan left the settle-
failure emerged. His wife (who died a few years later) and ment, leaving Meidjie in Price’s sister Baby’s care. Baby, upset
stepdaughter (who left The Village under duress) were both that Meidjie might become a weggooikind (throwaway child,
alcohol dependent. This was common in the settlement, but abandoned child), took her in, and Meidjie’s status changed
the fact that they were drinking in a shebeen (an informal to grootraakkind—someone “grown big” by the efforts of non-
tavern) while Billy was dying in the private space of the kin, here, Baby, whom she called “Ouma” (Granny; note the
home infuriated neighbors in its flagrant disregard for ideals differentiation—Price and Baby are siblings, yet socially they
of care, of gendered comportment, of the proper division of appear to Meidjie as of a different generation). Price lived
public and private and the gendered activities associated with alone. Meidjie lived with Baby.
each. The women of Billy’s family were widely disparaged for When it became clear that people from The Park were to
their failure to care for him, and many considered them in- move to The Village, Price and Baby, both of whom were
decent, rou, or, as one woman put it, “unfit to live in a house.” two of the original bosslapers who had established the site,
Being “fit to live in a house” involves the conversion of having come there from Aberdeen in the Karoo, found them-
life’s rawness and the “messiness” of living “in the bush” to selves at risk of dispossession. They did not qualify for hous-
modes of proper appearances and sociabilities. It is strongly ing subsidies because—technically—neither had dependents.
gendered work, and, as I have shown above, it involves prac- Baby’s children were grown and had households of their
tices of care that extend beyond biological relatedness (which own, and Price lived alone. Community leaders solved the
people consider to be the ideal basis of obligation even though problem creatively by listing Meidjie as Price’s dependent
it frequently fails as such). People’s emotional, social, and
economic relationships thus tied them into social networks
that extended beyond the ostensible household boundaries 12. Note the contradiction here: the process of providing shelter and
that were the measure for the allocation of “housing units.” dignity and producing a population “fit to live in a house” generated
Nevertheless, residents had to fix the flows of life in and out homelessness as its remainder. People who did not receive subsidies had
of households and render them schematically in order to limited alternative options, and several of them ended up living and
qualify for housing subsidies and thus the opportunity to working on “Busy Street”; i.e., they became “vagrants.”
13. For example, a woman’s current partner may not necessarily
materialize their dreams of living respectable lives in proper
know about children born from her earlier relationships, especially if
houses. Doing so required creative ways of working with the
they were born when she was still attending school. The latter are often
flexibility of their circumstances and relationships to repre- raised by the birth mother’s mother as though they were her own off-
sent arrangements that were legible to the state. These have spring. It can cause considerable social and emotional complexity when
these relationships are revealed.
11. In 2000, average life expectancy at birth was estimated at 52% for 14. The Western Cape has one of the highest rates of alcohol use and
men and 54% for women (Bradshaw et al. 2003). foetal alcohol syndrome in the world.

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Ross Raw Life and Respectability S103

(though she bears no formal relation to him and was not re- in The Park had come from former homelands during the
siding with him) and naming one of Baby’s grandchildren as last years of apartheid, seeking better opportunities in the city.
Baby’s dependent. Both received houses. Meidjie moved with In so doing, they were already struggling against apartheid’s
Baby; Price moved into his own home and was soon joined definitions of the urban, entitlement, and belonging. Afri-
by his new lover, a woman widely regarded as being ordentlik. kaans speakers, defined as Coloured in terms of the Popula-
Meidjie meanwhile, by now teenaged, “became wild.” She tion Registration Act of 1950 and entitled by the provisions
left school, “liked good things,” and was “stubborn”—a com- of the Coloured Labour Preference Area Policy of 1955 to
mon complaint about youth in the settlement and often a first priority in work opportunities in the Cape Province, were
signal that adults will no longer take responsibility for them. nevertheless subject both to forced removals in terms of the
Within a short time, she stopped living at Baby’s full time Group Areas Act of 1954 and to loss of security on the com-
and began sex work on a stretch of road some distance away, mercial farms in the fruit-growing region of the cape or the
returning intermittently. sheep-rearing dry interior regions in addition to discrimina-
When Price died not long after the move to the new houses, tory regulations. Women in particular had bitter experiences
Meidjie came home. The community was split over her rights: of expulsion from farms. It was common practice only to em-
legally as his “dependent,” she was entitled to the house Price ploy men permanently and to use women and children as
had shared with his lover. The latter, however, was a “decent casual laborers during the harvest. When men died or left
woman,” and Meidjie’s actions were considered shameful. farms, women and their children often lost access to the houses
Community leaders sided with Price’s lover in her struggle to that were part of men’s employment contracts. Some women
remain in the house and to inherit. also found themselves expelled from social networks when they
At the same time, Meidjie’s father Michael was released from became pregnant “too early.” For all of these residents, the
jail after serving a term for gang-related murder. He came to experience of being weggegooi thus rested on highly gendered
the settlement and demanded access to Price’s house on the social processes.
grounds that Meidjie was yet too young to inherit despite Many of the residents had already fallen through the (often
the fact that he had played no active role in Meidjie’s life and exceedingly thin) social networks of family and state sup-
indeed had been absent from most of it. port and, with limited employment opportunities, were per-
Meidjie left The Village, and some years later she was found ilously close to a form of life by which an elite would mark
having been raped and gruesomely murdered; an object in a them as weggegooi. A few had lived on the streets, or more
gang war. Michael identified her body and arranged for a accurately, alongside the city’s storm drains and in bush areas,
burial, cruelly denying Baby any opportunity to attend a fu- surviving on occasional handouts and skarelling (of which,
neral and grieve. In retaliation, community leaders denied more below). Highly stigmatized, street life is the negative
Michael access to the house and “reallocated” it—for a fee— pole on decency’s scale, a physical reminder of the closeness
to Price’s lady friend, on condition that she offer assistance of rouheid. In Cape Town, people who live on streets are
to the dying. generally defined as homeless even where they have resided
in an area for a long time. They are commonly called bergies
Abandonment and Care (shortened from bergbewoner, mountain dwellers), a dispar-
aging reference to their apparent lack of settled accommo-
That Meidjie was absorbed into Baby’s household and care dation and their reliance on whatever the environment af-
network is indicative of the efforts people make to care and fords. They eschew this term, referring to themselves rather
of the deep anxieties that surround the possibility of being as “drifters.” A mode of urban life one might characterize as
weggooimense; abandoned, discarded people, a stereotype that experimental, even the very poor abjure it, seeing it as mor-
quickly attaches to those living in informal housing.15 Weggooi ally degenerate. The assessment has deep historical roots.
indexes deep social fears shaped by personal and historical South Africa, as other colonies, has long seen homelessness
experiences of the nearness of exposed living despite, at least and lack of formal employment as a problem to be solved
in the case of “Coloured” people, the interventions of the (see Iliffe 1987). Indeed, in terms of the Caledon Code of
apartheid state in the relational spheres of work and family. 1809, implemented to counter native “indolence” and trekboer
Under apartheid, as Laurine Platzky and Cheryl Walker (1985) “barbarity” toward slaves and Khoi (Dooling 2005:53), Khoi
have shown, the imbrication of racial classification and cap- people were required to have a fixed abode and carry a pass
italism produced “surplus people,” the cheap labor source showing their employment should they move. The code was
on which South Africa’s economy was (and remains) built one of the precursors to the various acts that culminated in
(Wolpe 1972). Many of the people about whom I write had apartheid’s infamous influx control mechanisms. Those in
intimate experience with being categorized and produced in breach were classified as “vagrants” and could be set to work
this way. The small percentage of isiXhosa speakers resident (see Dooling 2005). In effect, the code made some forms of
mobility crimes and rendered additional labor for the colo-
15. The metaphor is very powerful; e.g., a weggooi-ooi is a ewe that nial regime. As Dooling (2005) notes, beyond this, the code
refuses to suckle her lamb. “marked the final step in the transformation from an inde-

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 S104 Current Anthropology Volume 56, Supplement 11, October 2015

pendent peoples into ‘Hottentots’; that is, subjugated Khoi- a different household in each. Sakeena pays R300 per month
khoi in the permanent and servile employ of white settlers” in rental and estimates her water and electricity usage to cost
(53). While Ordinance 50 of 1828 abolished the code for the about R200 per week. She receives a state child grant of R300
free and the Khoi, it nevertheless allowed colonial authori- each for the three older children but has not yet registered
ties to put “vagrants” (including Khoi) to work. Thus, the link the twins. She has tried to breast-feed the babies but strug-
between homelessness, respectability, and work has a long gles. New state policy on exclusive breast-feeding means that
and violent history in colonial governance. This endures in she can no longer access free formula from the clinic. Both
stereotypes that anticipate that radical material deprivation she and Jonathan, like many others in the area, are habit-
hosts the social depravities of idleness, addiction, and lust ual alcohol users, although Sakeena is trying to stop drink-
and that overwrite both the complex relations and dependen- ing. For the preceding few days there had been no food in
cies that drifters create in their seminomadic urban lives and the house, and Jonathan had had no work. Their oldest chil-
the historical processes that have produced this form of life. dren, two boys, attend primary school, and in the afternoons
Abjuration may also serve as a mode of distancing. For many and evenings they visit friends and neighbors who give them
of the residents of The Village, the ultimate degradation is food. Their 5-year-old daughter and the twins stay with her
to end up as a bergie—someone they characterize as unable to throughout the day. Their sixth child died of kwashiorkor
care for themselves, whose primary dependence is thought 5 years ago. Sakeena is well known to the clinic staff, center
to be on alcohol or drugs rather than on people, and whose staff, and social workers.
mode of life brings “the bush” too close. While sometimes On the day in question, she said, the twins were hungry,
accurate, these are incomplete accounts. Nevertheless, res- and as she only had water and weak tea to give them, they
idents describe this as having life but not fully living. In other were querulous and she was tired, hungry, and anxious—
words, a life worthy of the name is created by being depen- senuweeagtig (nervous, jumpy), as it is locally known. She had
dent, albeit precariously, on others. Such dependence must been around the neighborhood looking for “a char” (domes-
be nurtured through extremes of passions and circumstances. tic work) for which she would be paid about R100. She had
Maintaining relationships is central to survival, to a sense of had no luck. In the past, she had run “a credit” at the little
oneself as a person, and to one’s sense of belonging. People shop her husband’s cousin ran from a shelter at the main
thus exerted considerable effort to conform to hegemonic so- house, but they had become overindebted, and the facility
cial ideals of propriety, attempting to mark their distance was closed. She felt she could not ask her immediate neigh-
from destitution. This was so even where doing so undercut bors for food or the R70 (approximately US$6) to register her
their own well-being, as, for example, when employed women daughter for preprimary schooling because she was already
married and left their jobs in order to conform to a highly in debt to them and could not ask for more without pay-
valued model of respectable wifehood (F. Ross 2010:114–115; ing off at least some of what she owed. Asking for assistance
Versfeld 2012; Waldman 2007:199). Whereas an elite would from neighbors was usually her last resort because she feared
characterize such behavior as a foolish waste of resources and the resultant gossip.16 “Ek gaa’ skarrel,” she said, wearily.
possibilities, the women saw themselves as crafting dignified Skarrel is a rich term. It means to scrabble, rummage, and
social worlds for themselves and, by extension, their kin and in local use, to hustle. It has strong negative valences, car-
affines (see also Bank 2011). rying associations with the actions of rats rather than the
con man model familiar to many through American gang-
ster movies. It is the verb people use to describe the actions
Destitution and Dependency
of going through rubbish bins, a despised activity associated
Despite wide-ranging poverty and the diverse forms of state with life on the streets and undertaken largely by young men.
assistance offered by the postapartheid state, overt expres- When used by a woman, the term is still more negative: it
sions of destitution were experienced as humiliating, asso- is a sign of failure to conduct the work of a “proper” woman,
ciated as they were with a disparaged mode of life. Given this the gendered effort of holding and sustaining relationships.
symbolic context, the hand-to-mouth nature of everyday life As people say, “die man is die dak, die vrou is die vloer” (the
was something to be managed and disguised if possible. The man is the roof, the woman is the floor; that is, women are
failure to do so is read as a failing of decency, as the following the base on which the household’s social status—its pro-
example demonstrates. priety—is built). This work is part of the process of creat-
Sakeena came into the community center despondent. A ing ordentlikheid and holding the rawness of the world at a
27-year-old mother to five children, including 5-month-old distance.
twins, neither she nor the children’s father, Jonathan, is em-
ployed. Jonathan works as a casual laborer, intermittently find-
ing “piece jobs” that bring in about R300 per week if he is 16. A means through which social opprobrium operates to limit de-
lucky. They live in a “wendy-house” (colloquialism for a small pendence, gossip is a terrible leveler. It undermines personhood and
wooden house in a backyard) in Jonathan’s grandmother’s may even produce violence when people take others’ words at face value
yard. Five other wendy-houses fill all the available yard space, and react accordingly (F. Ross 2010:160–163).

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Ross Raw Life and Respectability S105

Although in common use among poor Afrikaans speak- about dependence and indebtedness and the possibilities
ers, skarrel retains its rough edge, a term that cuts not be- and constraints they offer as people craft life from state and
cause it indexes poverty per se but because it is a marker that household resources.
one is no longer properly able to maintain the webs of re-
lationships on which everyday care, and indeed survival,
Raw Life, Bare Life
depend in such conditions. A clear indicator that one is
“on the edge,” desperate, one’s welcomes worn thin and rela- In conditions of dire poverty such as those that character-
tionships eroded, skarreling puts one’s personhood into ized The Village, physical and social deaths are close. Hunger
question. Undertaken by women, it brings one—and by im- and want shape bodies, capabilities, relationships, and pos-
plication, one’s family—close to rouheid, a state understood sibilities. Poverty and desire rub against one another, pro-
to be an attribute of the person, not a consequence of a ducing inflammatory and corrosive contexts in which life
cruel political economy that shapes social circumstances. Vi- itself is at stake. Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of power, in par-
olence is compounded when women are abused for having ticular, his understanding of the distinction between “zoe”
“failed” to live up to social expectations. (bare life) and “bios” (qualified life), offers one way to think
Personhood is central to the management of debt and de- through the ethnographic particulars described here, espe-
pendence. Dependence on the state (e.g., for social grants and cially as there seems on the surface to be a correspondence
indigence assistance) and indebtedness to it (e.g., rates ar- between the modalities of life people describe as “raw” and
rears, school fees, hospital bills, etc.) are differently weighted Agamben’s “bare” life. In the model of power Agamben de-
to dependence on and indebtedness to one’s neighbors. It is scribes, living and its limits are less by human life cycle and
tempting to assume that this is simply a function of proxim- relations of dependency than by biopolitical practice.
ity: face-to-face versus more distant relations. And indeed, As Rabinow and Rose (2006) point out, his argument has
this does seem to be part of the picture, but it is not all of it. been taken up in a wide range of ways in the literature in
Questions of personhood are central to securing life. Peo- recent years. However, as they also argue, it tends to exclude
ple attempt to manage carefully their relations so as to dif- the range of biopower’s effects that Foucault identifies and
ferentiate “borrowing” from “being in debt.” Borrowing and to overestimate both the prevalence and centrality of bare
lending involve judicious assessments of the quality of so- life and governmentality in modernity. This is not to say
cial relationship and the likelihood of repayment. A borrow- that the notion of bare life is necessarily lacking in analytic
ing relationship, even if persistently one sided, assumes that value. João Biehl (2005) has argued that practices of what
the partners are at least potentially equals. Overborrowing he calls “social triage”—both formal and informal—in Brazil
produces indebtedness, a relation to be eschewed because it do render some lives more valuable than others and do pro-
both sets up a formal hierarchy of obligation and erodes the duce an “excess population” that is relegated to the margins,
possibilities of restoring a more equal relationship over time. abandoned to a form of life that, he suggests, carries no politi-
Extended indebtedness to neighbors is considered humiliat- cal or indeed social meaning; lives to which no rights attach.
ing and shameful. Drawing on Agamben’s notion of “zones of indistinction,”
Where one is unable to establish or maintain borrowing re- he describes one such site, Vita, as a “zone of abandonment.”
lations, recourse is limited. Many use their state grants as surety Inhabitants of Vita are those whom society cannot absorb,
for loans offered by local loan sharks (often linked to gang abandoned at the outskirts, left to live through and with the
structures) that, despite the National Credit Act’s regulation limited possibilities available in contexts where one’s body, re-
of interest rates,17 may attract very high rates of interest, often lationships, and language—and therefore the meanings one
enforced by (the threat of ) violence. can make and that are made about one—are unreliable. Vita
James Ferguson (2013) argues that given radical inequal- is a horrifying demonstration of the processes and effects of
ity, where limited work opportunities undercut possibili- social triage, in which human relationships, histories, and con-
ties of crafting valued forms of social personhood, there is nections are rendered bare and exempt from ordinary pat-
a need to rethink the liberal discomfort with dependence. terns of care. Carefully tracing this process as it materialized
He suggests that as men’s labor becomes less central to the in the life of his interlocutor, Caterina, Biehl shows how these
economy and their roles in social reproduction become in- processes render her life utterly precarious. Indeed, with trep-
creasingly insecure, an alarming “in-dependence” (Ferguson idation and horror, he identifies both her and those similarly
2013:230) is produced along with radical transformations in relegated as “ex-humans.”
gender and generational roles, the latter facilitated in part Many of the people with whom I have worked have expe-
by access to state grants. While I broadly agree with the rienced similar forms of social triage, but there is one con-
thesis, the data I present above suggest that we need to think siderable difference between their experiences and those
of the residents of Vita. In the cases I have described, people
17. There are 10.3 million registered taxpayers in South Africa and sought to expand their repertoires of care and to absorb loss
20 million recorded credit-active consumers, almost half of whom have and suffering in relation to a concept of “community” oper-
impaired credit records (NCR 2013:5; 1.5 million people are blacklisted). ationalized through the ideal of respectability set in distinc-

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 S106 Current Anthropology Volume 56, Supplement 11, October 2015

tion to raw life. In the context of postapartheid reforms, this mittee. I am grateful for their support. Any opinions, findings,
has enabled them to attract and receive state care, especially conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material
in the form of state-sponsored housing grants and more re- are those of the author, and neither the NRF nor UCT URC
cently in access to life-saving medicines such as ARVs. In accept any liability in regard thereto. I am grateful to partic-
other words, the material suggests that the simple binary be- ipants at the Wenner-Gren Symposium “Politics of the Urban
tween bare life (zoe) and political life (bios) needs revision, Poor,” particularly the organizers, Professors Veena Das and
particularly in former colonies, where politics was founded Shalini Randeria. My thanks to Thomas Cousins for generous
on control over the domestic rather than on the exclusion of insight and his gift of time; to Anna Versfeld for support; and
the domestic from politics as in the model Agamben describes. to two anonymous reviewers.
Indeed, as Veena Das (2006) notes, the apparent bareness
of life represented by the writ of habeas corpus that Agamben
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