Original citation:James, Deborah ( Deborah James Dept of Anthropology, LSE Abstract: The broker, a key concept in 1960s and 1970s political anthropology, merits revival in settings of rapid social transition. In South Africa, where state planning directs the course of change while attempting to privilege the market, brokers do not merely negotiate between fixed positionalities of 'state/market' and 'people'. Instead, they embody and bring into being socioeconomic positions and identities. They blend together the egalitarianism and rights-based character of post-liberation society with the hierarchy of re-emerging traditional authority. Drawing on notions of consensus they embody 'the people', drawing on ideas of free choice and enterprise they embody 'the market'. Simultaneously they bear the bureaucratic characteristics of 'the state'.Settings of rapid transition, where state planning attempts to direct the course of change but does so in a way that foregrounds the influences of the market, have laid the grounds for a reemergence of brokerage. Brokers and mediators use assets furnished by the state and provide the means for others, less able, to gain access to these. They benefit materially while simultaneously developing followings of others who hope to do so. New forms of identification are produced even as brokers mediate between old ones. These key figures emerge in social situations which they, in part, have helped to mould. Particular styles are drawn on and new socio-economic positions brought into being.

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Considerable attempts to create a single economy of credit, in part through regularizing microlenders (especially the much-demonized loansharks or mashonisas), have been made by the South African government, notably through the National Credit Act. This article explores how borrowing and indebtedness are seen from the point of view of consumers and of those who aim to protect them. It suggests that we should speak of moneylending rather than moneylenders; that lending is often done by groups rather than by individuals (in a variant of the well-known stokvel); and that it may represent a response to so-called ‘formalization’ (Guyer 2004) of financial arrangements by those who have considerable experience of this, rather than being a bulwark against it. Based on research in Gauteng and Mpumalanga, the article critically explores prevalent stereotypes of the ‘overindebted consumer’ and the ‘black diamond’, seeking evidence both in support and in refutation of them. It discusses those factors which are conducive to and those which obstruct the achieving of the status of upwardly mobile – and simultaneously overindebted – person; demonstrates that aspiration and upward mobility, and the problems of credit or debt that accompany these, have much longer histories; and that these matters can give us insights into the contradictory character of the South African state. Its ‘neo-liberal’ dimension allows and encourages free engagement with the market and advocates the freedom to spend, even to become excessively acquisitive of material wealth. But it simultaneously attempts to regulate this in the interests of those unable to participate in this dream of conspicuous consumption. Informalization intensifies as all manner of means are devised to tap into state resources. Neo-liberal means are used to ensure the wide spread of redistribution.

African economies have long been a matter of concern to anthropologists, not least in the pages of Africa. These economies are situated, somewhat contradictorily, between global settings of financialized capitalism on the one hand and impoverished local arenas where cash-based economic transfers predominate on the other. The more such economies appear to be tied to wider global arenas and operations that place them beyond the reach of ordinary people, the more necessary it is to explore the logics and decisions that tie them inexorably to specific everyday settings.The articles in this volume aim to undertake such an investigation by exploring popular, local economies in the case of South Africa: a setting which many writers have justly regarded as 'exceptional' but which, at the same time, has significant continuities with other African contexts. The authors draw for their theoretical inspiration on concepts developed elsewhere in Africa, specifically those relating to the way state-regulated and legal/formal economic arrangements interpenetrate with those less visible and less regulated (Hart 1973;Guyer

Original citation:Forbess, Alice and James, Deborah (2014) Acts of assistance: navigating the interstices of the British state with the help of non-profit legal advisers.

Under recent reforms, the UK Government has eroded state funding for civil legal aid. Funding cuts affect asylum and immigration law as produced, practiced and mediated in the course of interactions between case workers and their clients in legal aid-funded Law Centers in South London. The paper explores the contradictory character of one-on-one relationships between caseworkers and clients. Despite pressure to quantify their work in "value for money" terms, the empathy which often motivates caseworkers drives them to provide exceptional levels of aid to their clients in facing an arbitrary bureaucracy. Such personalized commitment may persuade applicants to accept the decisions of that bureaucracy, thus reinforcing a hegemonic understanding of the power of the law. The paper, however, challenges the assumption that, in attempting to shape immigrant/refugees as model-albeit secondclass-citizens, case worker/client interactions necessarily subscribe to the categories and assumptions that underpin UK immigration and asylum law.

Dealing with excess death in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the question of a ‘good or bad death’ into sharp relief as countries across the globe have grappled with multiple peaks of cases and mortality; and communities mourn those lost. In the UK, these challenges have included the fact that mortality has adversely affected minority communities. Corpse disposal and social distancing guidelines do not allow a process of mourning in which families and communities can be involved in the dying process. This study aimed to examine the main concerns of faith and non-faith communities across the UK in relation to death in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The research team used rapid ethnographic methods to examine the adaptations to the dying process prior to hospital admission, during admission, during the disposal and release of the body, during funerals and mourning. The study revealed that communities were experiencing collective loss, were making necessary adaptations to rituals that surrounded death, dying and mourning and would benefit from clear and compassionate communication and consultation with authorities.

Contemporary attempts to govern 'the state of the welfare state' are as much about moral endeavours as they are about political and economic imperatives. Such is the argument put forward in this Introduction, which focuses on the work that advisers perform in settings of austerity across Europe. Advisers are often the last call for help for their clients/dependents who find themselves increasingly at the mercy of local authorities, immigration regimes, landlords, banks and debt collection agencies. But competing visions of moral worth and social justice continue to permeate the everyday deliberations of those who administer, support and advocate advice. Struggles and dilemmas over how best to provide assistance and balance individuals' moral judgments against the collective good frequently occur. We explore both the dovetailing of and divergence between domains and roles, in disrupting as well as reproducing dominant logics of extraction and accumulation.