Cattle, Pearls and Coins
This essay explores the mechanisms that render equitable and negotiable different orders of value – in the production of society and history. While equilibration, standardization and conversion are implicated in most theories of money and commodi?cation, their nature as social processes has not been adequately speci?ed, above all in the construction of universalizing ideologies and modernist political and economic regimes. We examine the ways in which different regimes of value, brought up against one another in the encounter between the southern Tswana peoples and European colonizers, became the subject of both con?ict and complex mediation. Cows, coin and contracts – which had the capacity to construct and negate difference – soon were invested here with magical qualities. But colonized peoples were also sensitive to the capacity of such currencies to enable or impede convertibility and to the forms of abstraction and incorporation they permit. Which is why, in South Africa and elsewhere, those currencies often became metonymic of the contestations of value on which colonial struggles, tout court, were played out.