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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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The Politics of Disability in the Post-Apartheid South African State
| Panel |
34. Post-apartheid: ethnographies of the South African transition
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| Paper ID | 533 |
| Author(s) |
Macgregor, Hayley Nan
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| Paper |
View paper (PDF)
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| Abstract | In South Africa, disability grant allocation has been a contentious issue, illustrating tensions in government rhetoric stressing welfare provision on the one hand , and encouraging ‘rationalization’ on the other. This ambiguity is traced down to the level of grant negotiations between doctors and ‘clients’ in a psychiatry clinic in Khayelitsha. Here ‘having nerves’ embodies the distress associated with harsh circumstances and experiences of violence and is deemed by supplicants as sufficient to secure a grant. The paper illustrates how national discourses influence the presentation and experience of suffering and the way in which doctors mediate diagnoses. The implications of local understandings of ‘health citizenship’ for expectations of the post-apartheid state are explored.
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