Wealth‐in‐people and practical rationality: Aspirations and decisions about money in South Africa

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.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 also Guyer 1995). Using museum collections and archival records, she analyzes how material objects in precapitalist equatorial Africa constituted personal qualities. 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. These rights-in-people could then be mobilized for economic or political purposes. The wealth-in-people approach highlights that these purposes can be individual pursuits as well as collective-particularly kinship-pursuits. Such pursuits were not (only) material but also forms of self-realization that shaped personhood. This approach shows how regimes or systems of circulation increase people's status and respectability and have far-reaching implications for power dynamics within and between communities. 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 also Guyer 1995;Guyer and Belinga 1995). By carefully examining museum collections and archival records, the wealth-in-people approach offers a comprehensive analysis of how people in precapitalist West Africa established connections between material wealth, possibilities for political mobilization, and the valuation of people.Within the wealth-in-people approach, self-realization refers to the building of personhood. It shows how people try to gain status and prestige by how they are situated...

“Paint it black”: Wealth‐in‐people and Early Classic Maya blackware pottery

“…For the Early Classic Maya, it was absolutely critical that a king be able to recruit not only large masses of people to participate in his funeral and subsequent veneration as an ancestor but also skilled artisans with the specialized knowledge to produce the material objects needed to guide him safely through the underworld in anticipation of his resurrection and apotheosis. The importance of the funeral as a time when a life is assessed and valued as wealth‐in‐people is a theme found in other wealth‐in‐people studies (Bähre ; McGill et al ; Mulder ). Here, as elsewhere, wealth‐in‐people as wealth‐in‐knowledge can inform politico‐religious behavior in contemporary and ancient cultures.…”

Embodied value: Wealth‐in‐people

“…The wealth‐in‐people logic can explain the endurance of a commitment to hierarchy, and to the moral obligations of superiors to their subordinates, in many parts of the world (Ferguson , ), even as ideologies and political forms that prize human liberty and egalitarian citizenship come to the fore. The contribution of conference keynote speaker Erik Bähre () examines the life of a Xhosa woman, Sylvia, as a struggle to acquire wealth‐in‐people. The pathway to belonging and incorporation is barely visible for many South Africans, and in the context of widespread despair and unemployment, the performance of kinship obligations may provide little security.…”

“…Importantly, many of the instances of wealth‐in‐people in this volume invoke this sense of wealth that began in a specific past, endures, and makes claims on the future. Franzen's () farmers claim as inalienable their land, equipment, and cattle as “gold” and “real wealth.” Life cycle rituals build wealth‐in‐people and extend belonging to ancestors and the dead through their position of supernatural social power (Bähre ; Callaghan ; McGill et al ; Mulder ). Bähre () and Mulder () both discuss how funeral insurance guarantees that loved ones become venerated ancestors through a well‐attended and well‐appointed funeral.…”

“…Franzen's () farmers claim as inalienable their land, equipment, and cattle as “gold” and “real wealth.” Life cycle rituals build wealth‐in‐people and extend belonging to ancestors and the dead through their position of supernatural social power (Bähre ; Callaghan ; McGill et al ; Mulder ). Bähre () and Mulder () both discuss how funeral insurance guarantees that loved ones become venerated ancestors through a well‐attended and well‐appointed funeral. For African Americans connected to Oberlin Cemetery, the life stories of those interred are told and retold as geneology to “reclaim our stories that are specific to us” (McGill et al , 186).…”

Wealth in people and the value of historic Oberlin Cemetery, Raleigh, North Carolina

“…Wealth in people touches on these intimate subjects, as was evidenced in the presentations at the 2019 meeting of the Society for Economic Anthropology (and in this issue). For example, a wealth in people lens helped to clarify the complex interactions of life, death, and economics for topics as varied as the social relations of life insurance policy salespeople, holders, and beneficiaries in South Africa (Bähre ); the funding of funerals in New Orleans (Mulder ); and the payment of reparations for the death or disappearance of family members in Nepal (Billingsley ). More broadly, these studies demonstrate the relevance of wealth in people to a wide range of social phenomena, such as familial and reciprocal obligations, personhood, and collective memory.…”