Abstract
ABSTRACTEconomic anthropologists often look to goods that resist commodification to understand how culture determines what can be exchanged and on what terms. Livestock in Africa have served as prominent examples of such “recalcitrant commodities.” In this article, I argue that goods that do not resist commodification—what I call “clean‐break commodities”—also illuminate the culture of the economy. Drawing on fifteen months of fieldwork in Lesotho, I contrast the reticence to sell cattle in African societies, long the focus of anthropologists as well as experts in conservation and development, with the prodigious sale of sheep and goats (i.e., ovicaprids). Narrow focus on charismatic cattle cultures obscures both the historically shifting commodification of ovicaprids and the economic dreamworlds in which they become enrolled. Ovicaprid cultures morphed over time as rural Basotho navigated their country's structural transitions in the regional political economy—from recently colonized ethnostate to labor reserve for South African mining industries and to defunct labor reserve. Just as the resistance of cattle to commodification described by James Ferguson as the “bovine mystique” opened a window into social life in the labor reserve, the facile commodification of ovicaprids that I call the “ovicaprine mystique” does the same throughout Lesotho's history. [bovine mystique, livestock, commodification, postindustry, sub‐Saharan Africa]
Highlights
The room slowly filled with people, most of whom did just as this man did: they entered, handed a letter to the chief, and waited
I asked him how these young men could afford the livestock, and he explained that most would not keep the animals. They would take them in the few weeks over the border to Qwa-Qwa, the former “Bantustan” or “ethnic homeland” that formed part of apartheid’s system of segregation until South African independence, where the livestock would be sold to butcheries
Since Melville Herskovits (1926) described the “cattle complex” in eastern and southern Africa, anthropologists have drawn attention to cattle’s imbrication in a variety of social institutions, including religion, politics, economy, and more (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 1990; EvansPritchard 1940). This imbrication complicates their rendering as straightforward, capitalist commodities for market exchange (Ferguson 1994; Hutchinson 1996; see Gudeman 1986; Murray 1981; Piot 1991), making cattle a key site for understanding social and symbolic systems, as relationships to cattle are reworked by shifting political economies (Jeske 2016; Turkon 2003; White 2015, 2017)
Summary
In the anthropological literature on commodification, there has been a tendency to focus on those commodities that resist commodification. Land pressure increased with substantial population growth, loss of lowland Basutoland territory to Afrikaner farmers over the eastern border, and the South African Land Act of 1913, which pushed South African Basotho into Basutoland This pressure encouraged livestock owners to establish highland cattle posts, which later morphed into permanent villages. Lesotho’s structural position vis-à-vis South Africa has shaped the ways that rural Basotho relate to livestock, including both cattle that resist commodification and ovicaprids that do not. This is consistent with other ethnographic literature on Basotho social relations in the wake of shifting political economies (Turkon 2003). I give a fuller account of the ovicaprine mystique and its relationship to the bovine mystique from the perspective of livestock owners
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