She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Clawing Back: Redistribution In Precarious Times, and shared the following:
“People will come in with one issue, but it usually turns out to be several”, says London-based volunteer adviser Yusuf, a few lines down on page 99. People needing help because they are in debt or have lost a job, or because a state benefit is not forthcoming or has been withdrawn, seek help from intermediaries and volunteers working in a range of charities. Page 99 discusses the interaction between these tangles of diverse issues (called “problem clusters” by those working to help UK residents in the low-wage sector), and shows how advisers like Yusuf separate them into discrete strands. The term “clusters” suggests an embroiled knot, the solution to which requires pulling apart its component parts. In the process, advisers help clients— in order not to feel overwhelmed—demarcate resources as separate from one another. What prompts a person to seek help may appear to consist of just one of these strands. Often it is not the most serious, but it is the one that causes them most fear or anxiety.Learn more about Clawing Back at the Stanford University Press website.
Adviser–advisee encounters involve sifting through letters from creditors or different welfare departments and agencies, often in search of a single all-important document that, if left undetected, would undermine the fine balance between constantly readjusted sets of income and outgoings. In a face-to-face encounter with a client, the adviser lists the client’s expenses and establishes what her income is. This includes ascertaining which welfare payments the client is receiving (and at what levels), suggesting others that might supplement that income, and liaising with agencies that may have failed to fulfil their obligations in providing these. If the client is in debt, she may be referred to a debt specialist. The adviser seeks to help the client compartmentalize problems, but without ignoring what caused them to “cluster” together. These intersections shape, and are shaped by, the complex interdependencies of householding, but knowing when to pull them (and keep them) apart is key to the boundary work that advisers do. And, in turn, advisers also know how and when to recombine these elements, creating a holistic picture of householders’ quandaries and recognizing them as real people with families.
This page gives a partial, but important, glimpse into the book. Clawing Back is about how householders in both the UK and South Africa make a living by patchworking together these three income sources: work, welfare and debt. Each on its own can appear as providing an important resource, but in combination they often turn into “problem clusters”. What is as important as earning a wage, getting paid a benefit, or securing a loan, is seeking to avoid having one or all of these taken away, once procured. “Clawing back” often involves sidestepping automated repayments that use high-tech financial instruments. In South Africa, people often find themselves involuntarily subjected to the settling of loans provided by private creditors, while in the UK it is often to the public welfare benefit system that they owe money, because of what are called “overpayments”. As page 99 shows, people in the UK are able to seek expert (if often unpaid) advice in dealing with one or all elements in these “problem clusters”. In South Africa, the other case study, those with similar difficulties face a more uncertain advice landscape, with unevenness between areas that are well-served by paralegals and those where people are often left to their own devices: “I advise myself” as one woman told me.
The book gives an ethnographic accounts of how this happens, illustrating how “distributive labour”, as it was called by the late lamented James Ferguson, has become increasingly important. If by “labour” we mean strenuous activity and effort in negotiating socioeconomic relations, then the endeavours undertaken by people in these low- income settings certainly qualify: they are time-consuming and relentless. In an era where the boundaries between (public) welfare and (private) debtfare are increasingly blurred, people (and women, in particular), must exercise ingenuity in seeking access to resources that support their reproduction and their future plans for greater stability and well-being.
--Marshal Zeringue
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