Households can be taken for granted in the West because the nuclear family system with its bilateral descent ensures a fairly standard pattern of coresidence, with predictable patterns of pooling resources. In contemporary southern Africa, the tradition ofpatrilineal descent in blackfamilies entails a much wider set of options for co-residence as relatives disperse to make a living in the new global economy. The agnatic idiom continues to give coherence to volatile. contingent black households. The paper traces the distinctive historical roots of Western and African households and argues. against the assumption that black South Africans are engaged in some sort of transition to a Western pattern.
‘Household’ is not the neutral, universal category that census‐takers have lulled us into believing, but a culturally‐loaded, historically specific, Western term, like ‘family’. This article demonstrates its inappropriateness in capturing the nature of domestic organization in Swaziland through a critical examination of attempts to reduce the indigenous domestic unit umuti (rural homestead) to various constellations of household. The patrilineal homestead on traditionally tenured land persists as the dominant domestic group despite urbanization and the deep penetration of the economy by market principles. The relationship between this homestead and the more ephemeral urban households, into which many of its members are continually dispersed, underlies the linkage between urban and rural areas. Without grounding our understanding of contemporary Swazi society in the rural homestead we fail to understand female‐headed domestic groups, domestic cycles, and the location and dynamics of poverty and wealth.
There are unwritten rules for the distribution of money in all societies, notably about from and to whom it is appropriate to give and receive money, and when. These rules differ from one society to another, and we err in assuming otherwise. This article examines some reported practices in the redistribution of earnings and other cash in Swaziland. It arises out of a reading of transcriptions of 118 recorded interviews, 49 with wage-earners conducted at their place of work, and 69 with earners or their dependents in the rural areas. These wide-ranging interviews covered many topics besides the giving and receiving of sums of money between kinsmen. From this evidence I attempt to spell out the detailed nature of these rules. To ignore or to be ignorant of their strength and complexity is to fail to recognise a powerful mechanism for redistribution, which goes some way to modify alleged inequalities between town and country, and between one homestead and another within Swaziland. Similar rules probably affect income distribution elsewhere in Africa.
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