One of the toughest questions facing Africa – and the world – is how to share wealth. That conflict coalesces around a controversial choice: to buy cars or cows.
In much of sub-Saharan Africa, cattle have played a central role in maintaining social cohesion by binding people of various means into mutual obligations. Today, among South African Zulu communities, as in much of the world, the social obligations attached to wealth are fiercely contested. To trace conflicts in emerging moral economies, I compare in this article the social roles of cows versus those of another wealth good: cars. Unlike cattle, cars are not given to in-laws, are not shepherded in communal pasturelands, and do not multiply communal wealth through reproduction. Both cattle and cars measure status, but cars measure an individualized status that protectively hedges itself from others’ demands. As a minimally fungible investment, a vehicle for independent movement, and a tool for financial independence that is increasingly accessed by both women and men, cars offer a vantage point onto the ways that people navigate between diverging old and new moral economies.
How will the world’s new moral economies affect social network dynamics and the politics of redistribution? To address these questions, we can turn our attention to an object that has captured the desires of new generations of South Africans: the car. Like cattle, cars have become a highly coveted wealth good and status symbol in Southern Africa, particularly among men. The similarities largely end there, however. The ways that people attain and use the wealth and prestige of cars differ dramatically from those of cows. As they seek and use cars, people call upon and build new moralities to legitimize their behaviors. By comparing the strategic uses of cars and cows, we gain an analytical lens for studying conflicts surrounding new moralities of wealth both in South Africa and elsewhere.
This is an excerpt from my article published in American Anthropologist. You can find the rest online through academic libraries, or contact me to request a copy.