Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• COMAROFF, JOHN L.

Titel

Goodly beasts, beastly goods: cattle and commodities in a South African context

Ist Teil von

• American ethnologist, 1990-05, Vol.17 (2), p.195-216

Ort / Verlag

Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

1990

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Among the 19th-century Tswana, we argue, cattle were like commodities; they linked processes of production and exchange, embodied an order of meanings and relations, and had the capacity to reproduce a total social world. They were, in sum, prime media for the creation and representation of value in a material economy of persons and a social economy of things. But they also had particular historical salience. As the Tswana were colonized, the encounter between periphery and center, local and global economies, was played out--materially and ideologically--in the contest between beasts and money, a contest which has given rise, also, to such token currencies as "cattle without legs." The double character of cattle--as icons of a "traditional" order and as weapons in the struggle to assert control over modern life--has significant implications for our understanding of commodities in noncapitalist, non-European contexts. [cattle, commodities, money, colonialism, South Africa]