Rights and responsibilities in rural South Africa: implications for gender, generation, and personhood Kathleen Rice University of Toronto In the rural Eastern Cape, South Africa, contests over the meaning and merit of human rights feature prominently in intergenerational and intergendered conflicts. In this article I identify and analyse a tension between amalungelo (a socially embedded and relational form of rights) and irhayti (a Xhosaization of the English ‘[human] right’) as a means of exploring the interpersonal tensions that arise through the production and contestation of the subject positions that human rights set in motion. Using the examples of elders’ complaints of neglect, and of young men’s accusations of human rights violations on the part of women, I ground this investigation in men’s and elders’ explanations of how human rights enable morally reprehensible actions, and are implicated in what they perceive to be a climate of interpersonal neglect. In analysing these claims, I show that gendered and generational conflict in this region is grounded in uncertainty about the content of gendered and generational subject positions themselves, and speaks to the relative moral value of autonomous versus relational forms of personhood. Moreover, I show that where inequality and interdependence are intrinsic to the ways in which gendered and generational subject positions are constituted and understood, human rights serve both to destabilize the content of these subject positions in ways that render appropriate gendered and generational sociality unclear, and also to bring into question the relative moral value of autonomous versus more relational forms of personhood. ‘The problem that we are having with rights’, said Mbeko, 1 ‘is that people are exercising their rights but ignoring their responsibilities’. Mbeko, a man in his mid-twenties, was one of my most insightful acquaintances in the rural Xhosa village where I have carried out fieldwork since early 2011. We had discussed human rights many times before, and I was well aware of his ambivalent feelings about them. ‘What do you mean “ignoring their responsibilities”?’ I asked. Mbeko explained by way of example: children have a right to education, and parents have a responsibility to care for their children and to ensure that their child is attending school. Moreover, as a condition of their right to education, children likewise have a responsibility to their parents and teachers to do their homework and to attend school regularly. This, according to Mbeko, is as it should be. However, problems arise because children have the right not to be beaten by parents and teachers even if they skip school. This is reprehensible, according to Mbeko, because the teacher is fulfilling his responsibility to the child by teaching her and her parents are fulfilling their Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 28-41 C  Royal Anthropological Institute 2016