Abstract
This article explores crucial decisions made by Sylvia, a Xhosa woman living in the townships of Cape Town, during a period of approximately thirty years. These decisions involved large sums of money and had important consequences for her own life, for those of her son and grandchild, and for the relationships she had with her first and second husbands and in‐laws. Sylvia's decisions continued to be influenced by gendered ways of belonging to ancestors and descendants but also show important changes in connecting wealth and people. The wealth‐in‐people approach offers important insights into how Sylvia's decisions are guided by power and control over people as well as by prestige. However, it also becomes evident that the wealth‐in‐people approach does not sufficiently explain or theorize the agency of people. By drawing on the philosophical notion of practical rationality as a complementary analytical perspective, I explore agency in relation to aspirations and the acquisition of new open‐ended values. The perspective offered by practical rationality increases our understanding of how individual decisions, especially complex decisions around money, are made because of their transformative potential and the aspiration to cultivate oneself.
Highlights
Drawing on Miers and Kopytoff (1977), Guyer explores the connections between self-realization, the meaning of exchange, and different political and economic hierarchies in equatorial Africa (Guyer 1993; see Guyer 1995)
The way objects circulated within transactional systems was part of gaining rights-in-people, often the ability to mobilize them to particular acts or to lay claim to their loyalty
Guyer concludes that wealth-in-people offers important insights into the “contingent cultural and political process by which, in both capitalist and non-capitalist economies, some things and some people may be realized as assets” (1993, 261; see Guyer 1995; Guyer and Belinga 1995)
Summary
This article explores crucial decisions made by Sylvia, a Xhosa woman living in the townships of Cape Town, during a period of approximately thirty years. In Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming, Callard (2018) focuses on the notion of practical rationality She argues that decisions are a result of people’s aspirations: people make certain decisions because they aspire to transform values and identities. The web of relationships that underlie decision-making and decision-making that attempts to shape one’s web of relationships in specific ways are left underexplored This significantly contrasts with the wealth-in-people approach that offers greater theoretical depth to these more structural and societal dynamics of personhood. Kinship adds a crucial dimension to decision-making in that one of the things it does is reveal how personhood is inherently tied to kinship relations Both the wealth-in-people approach and philosophical practical rationality approach have their theoretical strengths and limitations, and in this article, I attempt to set up a conversation between the two. I do this by analyzing the decisions—not exclusively financial—made by Sylvia, an African woman who lived part of her life in what today is the Eastern Cape Province and in Cape Town. I have known Sylvia for more than twenty years and have had the privilege to share many conversations about how she, over a period of thirty years, made crucial decisions regarding becoming a mother, building a house, cosanguinal and affinal ancestors, and aspirations for herself and her son, none of which, sadly, prevented her son from eventually committing suicide
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