Study title

This dataset results from an anthropological project investigating how will-making and the formal processes of inheritance shape the passing on of property and the making of socio-economic class in Johannesburg, South Africa. While the number of people making wills is rising, and will-making is a key focus of attempts to shape citizens as legally aware individual decision-makers, most people die intestate. Appeals to state processes have popular appeal as ways to seek official protection, despite popular awareness of limited state capacity. Family dynamics are often better enforced than the law. In post-apartheid South Africa, ending segregation meant including everyone in the same legal code, but this often enshrined the norms of the white elite. Intestate succession is seen as profound injustice because it prioritises nuclear family over kin group, and asset over patrimony, even as custom norms are often used to justify male control and marginalise widows. This is made more complicated by patchy regulation and enforcement. People’s unequal abilities to navigate the system, and even manipulate it, become central determinants of who benefits and whose version of kinship is counted. I conducted extensive ethnographic research within this system, shadowing officials and other expert practitioners; sitting in on legal advice consultations; attending court hearings; interviewing state and civil-society employees, as well people encountering the system as members of the public. This was complemented by archival research to enable the analysis of information in deceased estates files across time. The dataset consists of 1) anonymized example case studies from key Johannesburg Institutions – the Master’s Office (where deceased estates are processed), the High Court, the Magistrate’s Court, legal clinics – and from interviews with practitioners and members of the public; 2) an Excel database aggregating information about inheritance from around 500 deceased estates...