Anthropology’s commitment to embedded ethnographic research means taking a broad view, led by how social phenomena are connected up on the ground. How can we understand economic transformation through the everyday workings of legal bureaucracy?

Property inheritance in South Africa offers a window. The end of apartheid was known the world over as an end to brutal racial government. A new system meant a democratic dispensation, a progressive constitution – and, of course, wealth redistribution. Frustrated hopes produced fears of crisis in the world’s most unequal country. Less headline-grabbing, but fundamental, are the state’s quieter processes of legal bureaucracy. In cities like Johannesburg, in historically segregated townships, houses were transferred in massive numbers to black tenants. Previously barred from landownership, titled residents could now pass on the property at death. Redistribution and its consequences were in important ways administrative, bringing historically marginalised people into protective regulation. But long exclusion had left people with very different arrangements. Popular ideas about the home and about family diverge sharply from legal ones. Post-apartheid South Africa reveals a distinct kind of crisis in economic transformation where its legal administration is a public good, but the law’s dictates are not supported by popular moral consensus.