Anthropology Southern Africa

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Beastly whiteness: Animal kinds and the social

imagination in South Africa

Hylton White

To cite this article: Hylton White (2011) Beastly whiteness: Animal kinds and the
social imagination in South Africa, Anthropology Southern Africa, 34:3-4, 104-113, DOI:
10.1080/23323256.2011.11500014

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104 Anthropology Southern Africa, 20 II, 34(3&4)

Beastly whiteness:
Animal kinds and the social imagination in
South Africa 1

Hylton White
Dept cf Social Anthropology, University of the Witwatersrand
I Jan Smuts Avenue, Braamfontein 2000, Johannesburg
Hylton. White@wits.ac.za

How do animals enter into the constitution of differences in human affairs? I address the question by showing how, in Zulu
households, animals themselves are marked as beings with ethnic properties. If animals can be understood as being ethnically
distinguishable, this forces us to reconsider what we take to be the implicit imagination of difference that is at stake in
commonplace ethnic categorizations. Ethnic categories do not point to differences between separate human kinds. Instead
they nominate differences between co-existing kinds of social ties. Most saliently. in the case at hand, 'Zuluness' and
'Whiteness' name two different ways of metabolizing money into topologies of connection and distinction in households.

Keywords: ethnicity, animals, value, kinship, sacrifice

How do animals enter into the making and marking of differ-
ences in human affairs? I want to address that question here
by drawing on some observations regarding the lives of ani-
mals in homesteads in South Africa's northern KwaZulu-Natal
province. I am interested above all in the ascription of racial
or ethnic labels to animals themselves in this setting: the
marking of, say, chickens as being either "Zulu" or "White". If
labels such as Zulu or White can be said to name the forms of
difference not just among human beings but in the realm of
animal life as well, this forces us to specify precisely what dif-
ference is in such a context. And that is my major aim in this
piece: to make a specific claim regarding the nature of differ-
ence itself. To put the case very briefly, my argument is that
the labeling of animals as Zulu or White is based on different
vectors for the metabolism of money into forms of kinship.
The marking of animal life as either Zulu or White is a gesture
based, as I demonstrate here, on a complex series of underly-
ing domestic operations whereby animals animate variations
on models or patterns of social life in households. In Zulu
households, to put it more emphatically, the content of the
difference between being Zulu or being White is not a differ-
ence between two kinds of human beings so much as a differ-
ence between two patterns of social connection and
disconnection. That is why it can also be a difference
between kinds of animals. Animal kinds do not represent the
differences between human kinds, in other words. Instead
they materialize differences between kinds of social relations.
In addition to this main claim about the nature of differ-
ence, I also want push against and beyond another way of
approaching relationships among animals, humanity and dif-
ference. To push beyond the sense, that is, that ways of treat-
ing animals distinguish the humanity of different ways of
organizing human life - and thus of the people who follow
these. In South Africa and elsewhere (certainly in the United
States) this informs a whole array of racist assertions that gra-
dations of humanity express themselves in more or less
humane regard for animals. The analysis I offer here recasts
the connections of difference, animality and humanity in a
totally different analysis: one that turns to social form instead
of ethical posture. In doing so, I am fully aware that my treat-
ment also risks offending views and sensibilities developed
around the "animal turn" in our discipline in the last few years
(see, e.g. Candea 20 I 0; Kirksey and Helm reich 20 I 0; Raffles
20 I 0). In the varieties of post-humanist or multi-species eth-
nography emerging from this development, the aim is to por-
tray the lives of animals in all their rich material complexity,
and thus not to make them mere "symbols" of the issues of
human existence. In other worlds, what this now-substantial
literature seeks to avoid is the sort of impulse that has gov-
erned anthropological treatments of animals at least since the
famous structuralist formulation that in beasts we have beings
good not just for eating but for thinking (Levi-Strauss 1971 ).
As far as it goes I have no complaint with moving beyond the
culturalist exaggeration of treating animals simply as the sym-
bolic means of human thought. But as I show in the following
pages, animals can also be made into vectors of difference in
human affairs in ways that far exceed the symbolic or cogni-
tive. Comprehended in all their materiality, animals can still
be regarded as media for the pragmatic mediation of social
relationships. And social relationships, lest we forget, can also
not be comprehended fully through the register of symbols,
signs and meanings. My feeling is thus that the "animal turn"
has focused its sights incorrectly. By counterposing culturalist
reduction on the one hand to the material complexity of

I. Versions of this paper were presented at the Yale Anthropology Seminar, the Cornell Anthropology Seminar, the CUNY Graduate
Center Anthropology Colloquium, the Columbia University Seminar in Politics, Society, the Environment and Development, and the
Stellenbosch University Seminar on New Social Forms. For help with earlier drafts, my thanks to two anonymous readers for Anthro-
pology Southern Africa as well as to Jean Comaroff, Thomas Blom Hansen, David Graeber, Steve Robins, Robert Thornton, Julia Horn-
berger, and especially Andrew Sartori.
Anthropology Southern Africa, 20 II, 34(3&4)
multi-species assemblages on the other, it has failed just as
much as did the culturalists to grapple with the problems of
non-cognitive, impersonal social form. For reasons of space
and emphasis, though, I leave this critique of post-humanist
ethnography to other interventions. Here I raise it only to say
that my object is another one: to understand neither animals
as such nor (at least not primarily) their uses for cultural
thought, but rather how their entanglements in human affairs
become vectors for the constitution - and therefore the
imagination -of different social ties.
Culture, race, humanity
Since one of my aims is to push beyond the racialization of
human difference in terms of the treatment of animals, let me
find my way sideways towards my topic by discussing a public
controversy along exactly these lines.
On the 20th of January 2007, the weekend edition of
Cape Town's Argus newspaper sparked a fierce debate on
the place of ~fi"ican culture' in contemporary South African
society. Covering almost half the front page, a photograph
captured Tony Yengeni - one-time struggle hero turned flam-
boyant populist, just paroled that week from a term in prison
for fraud - in the act of spearing an ox on his father's lawn.
The picture had been shot the previous day, when Yengeni
and relatives gave the animal up to their ancestors at the start
of a weekend's ritual and feasting to cleanse him from the
polluting effects of his sentence. Along with the accompany-
ing article, the image exemplified what has become a staple of
the post-apartheid press: reporting on the practice of indige-
nous custom as news (Fordred-Green 2000). Such articles
often include pop-ethnological exegeses, interpreting 'deep'
African culture for readers presumed to be distant from it,
either because they are white or because they are members
of the new black middle classes. Normally the effect is to
domesticate difference as lifestyle, the reception of which is
governed by curiosity or irony. This time the public response
was explosive. Outraged white readers fired off letters
denouncing the scene as savagery. A local branch of the SPCA
announced it would press for Yengeni's prosecution under
the Animal Protection Act. Seeing ethnocentrism (and no
small touch of racism) in this, black officials and commenta-
tors came to Yengeni's defence as the public divided. The
chair of the Human Rights Commission urged the SPCA to
reconsider, noting that the performance of such ceremonies
"goes to the very heart of how people define themselves and
how we construct our identity." 2 Less politely, the head of
the Congress of Traditional Leaders dismissed white com-
plaints as the "noise of colonial arrogance," and welcomed
Yengeni's action as a sign that long-Europeanized black elites
were at last returning to their roots. 3
Superficially, the obvious point was just how deep division
still ran in the post-apartheid nation. Sacrificial slaughter is a
common enough event in black communities here, so the fact
that white readers found the image shocking showed how
unfamiliar other lives remained. Just as clear was the depth of
2. "Yengeni animal slaughter 'goes to heart of our identity"' Mail and Guardian 23 January 2007.
3. "Africans still forced to listen to noise of colonial arrogance" Business Day 5 February 2007.
4. "Yengeni criticism is 'selective racism"' Mail and Guardian 23 january 2007.
5. "Cultural Conflict" Cape Times january 26 2007.
105
affect the photograph inspired among white readers. It is easy
to see a measure of hysteria in this, and not just in the looser
sense. At a time when the racial compromise of the Mandela
years was already coming undone, Tony Yengeni incarnated
much that white South Africans had come to resent in those
they were no longer able to dominate or ignore. It was not
too hard to imagine how the combination of racist stereotypy
with anxieties about the loss of political power might lead a
section of white opinion to states of personal empathy with
the animal under his spear.
But here there is something surprising. As readers of the
classics of South African ethnology will know, it is Africans,
not their white compatriots, who by cultural grounds are
supposed see their personal states configured in bovine
images. Nor was that all. While white commentators stum-
bled about in the logic of the inchoate concrete, African
defenders of custom turned to the terms of a relativistic func-
tionalist anthropology. Insisting on "the constitutional right of
all indigenous families ... to perform rituals that they believe
reconnect them to their ancestors," a spokesman for the
Ministry of Arts and Culture explained that such rituals had
valuable effects upon the secular experiences of practitioners:
"promot[in~] peace of mind and harmonious existence in
their lives."
My aim is not to turn tables, but to focus a skeptical eye
on the kind of difference presumed at stake here. Both sides
agreed that sacrifices marked the contradiction of the (West-
ern) modern, for good or ill, by (African) culture. Whatever
their sympathies, few people would have disputed the edito-
rial of the Cape Times a few days later: "Tony Yengeni's
cleansing ceremony has revealed, fascinatingly, some of the
faultlines in our society. The first is the relationship between
humans and animals; the second the relationship between
our many cultures." 5 But that is where I demur. Fault lines it
revealed, and animals were of the essence. But so much
about the making of difference through animals is left in the
dark when the focus is reduced to the ways that "cultures"
clash concerning the treatment of beasts.
In the argument I offer here, relations with animals func-
tion not as indices of given cultural differences, but rather as
social practices aspiring to create particular forms of differen-
tiation. I end with a reanalysis of Yengeni's act of sacrifice, but
my aim is not to offer a more accurate comparative picture of
differences between diverse South African communities' rela-
tionships with animals - a project of dubious reference.
Instead I look at particular ways the consumption of animal
life in African households in one part of the country makes for
forms of reflexive differentiation between different kinds of
social ties. The area of which I speak is northern KwaZulu-
Natal (KZN), but much of what I offer could be said about
other parts of South Africa too, particularly its countrysides.
Practices of everyday life vary just as much in KZN as any-
where, but Zulu householders tend to organize things
domestic with reference to a distinction between two assem-
blages: isiZulu (Zuluness) and isiLungu {Whiteness). As I say,
this is not unique to the region. Other South Africans draw
106
such distinctions too, opposing indigenous ethnoculture to
ways and means that are marked by their imagined culture-
historical association with white colonizers (Comaroff and
Comaroff 200 I). But the point is not that people are engaged
in a form of racial or ethnicist boundary work here. On the
contrary. For in this domain, Whiteness does not name the
things that other (i.e. white) people do. Instead, it denomi-
nates a practico-cultural repertoire with which all Zulu
householders are intimately familiar, since they understand
themselves as enacting lots of cultural Whiteness every day
(see Bashkow 2006). The point is that domestic life is imag-
ined as being bipolar. Within Zulu homes there are beings,
techniques and objects of Whiteness, and then there are
those of Zulu ness.
Food is an especially salient sphere for this distinction, and
particularly food derived from animals. Animals themselves
partake in the qualities of Whiteness or of Zuluness: a distinc-
tion that inflects how they are cooked and eaten, and what
effects they have on those consuming them. I discuss those
effects in more detail below, but those I wish to emphasize
concern the creation of different structures of personhood
and relatedness. Eating animals marked in terms of Zuluness
produces commensal signs distinguishing persons by gender,
generation and marriage. As a practice it arranges forms of
substantial difference among persons linked by kinship. Eating
animals marked in terms of their Whiteness leads to quite
another arrangement, though, where persons individuate as
separate but substantially similar subjects. Each way of eating
makes the same household appear to itself for a moment as if
it were governed by one or the other of these two different
social topologies.
Seeing African 'culture' in this is patently unsatisfactory, as
is the use of 'identity' to label the Whiteness and Zuluness
distinguished here. Instead, I propose, Whiteness and Zulu-
ness nominate social imaginaries. They are sociological kinds,
that is, not human ones (see Hirschfeld 200 I). They mark
two different structures of kinship and separateness that
emerged in the 20th century as Zulu households formed
themselves from contradictory potentials in the structure of
South African society. But both of them are now best
approached as nostalgic aspirations, increasingly at odds with
forms of domestic life in the post-apartheid era. This discrep-
ancy gives something of an insistent edge to elaborate ritual
performances of either of them, mixing critical wishfulness
with a hollow sense of performative infelicity. I show this,
below, with reference to the sacrifice of cattle. But first let
me demonstrate some of what I have outlined by exploring
practices focused on a creature that is far less often the
bearer of anthropological wisdoms: that is, the chicken. The
lives of chickens embody on a more modest scale the ways
that animals enter into the making of kinds of difference here.
Fowl humanities
Chickens are generally said in KZN to be of two kinds (and as
we shall see, of two minds). There are "chickens of White-
ness" (izinkukhu zesilungu): battery chickens, in other
words, also known as foolish, fake or artificial fowl
(olamthuthu). And then there are "chickens of Zuluness"
(izinkukhu zesiZulu): free range domestic fowl, also known as
"chickens of the people" (izinkukhu zabantu). The distinction
Anthropology Southern Africa, 20 I I, 34(3&4)
is multidimensional, so I would rather trace it out than boil it
down. It might help to start by dealing with what it is not.
It certainly is not a question of separating indigenous and
exotic birds in an abstractly biological fashion. Chickens were
kept in precolonial settlements - reportedly for their feath-
ers, not their flesh - but the aftershocks of colonial conquest
broke apart any semblance of an organically independent
Zulu agriculture. The chickens now kept in Zulu households
descend from imported varieties as much as they do from
indigenous ones. Chickens of Whiteness and Zulu ness do dif-
fer biologically, but not in the sense of types that correspond
to discrete geographical origins. This is why I prefer to trans-
late the Zulu terms directly as "chickens of Whiteness" and
"chickens of Zuluness." "Zulu chickens" and "White chick-
ens" are less awkward phrasings but fail to capture the sense
that this is not a distinction of breed but of two essences that
also cross the line between the animal and the human.
Inversely, though, I think it would be just as much of an error
to see them as abstractly cultural constructs: as 'folk' biologi-
cal categories, structured by grammars extrinsic to the
objects that they nominate and organize (see Berlin et a/.
1973). The differences between the chickens of Whiteness
and of Zulu ness are real enough, biologically and otherwise.
Take phenotype. Zulu householders often remark on the
fact that chickens of Whiteness all look exactly the same.
They come with uniformly white or light brown feathers,
making it hard to distinguish one from another. This bland-
ness is all the more salient because the chickens of Zuluness
offer such striking contrast. Both sexes of the latter vary dra-
matically in their outward appearance. Colours, mottlings,
combs, plumes, and other properties make it relatively easy
for people to recognise particular birds as individual beings.
This guides us to a first framing of what Whiteness and
Zuluness actually are here. The contrast that is remarked
upon in this setting is between the existence and non-exist-
ence of variation itself. At stake is something recursive, then:
the difference between the absence and presence of differ-
ence as such. As we shall see in discussing sacrificial feasts,
this same recursive motif appears in other commensal
domains as well. In the terms of modernist anthropological
theory, one might be tempted to see a structuring cultural
logic within it. The recursive structural form of the contrast is
not in fact determining but determined, however. Distinc-
tions of Whiteness and Zuluness assume this similar form
across a range of commensal registers because that form
congeals or sediments aspects of the organized social prac-
tices that produce the materials, contexts and subjects of dif-
ferent ways of eating (see Turner nd, 1995; Munn 1986).
But here I am getting ahead of myself. In an even more
immediately visceral way, the appearance of difference in
chickens results from an intertwining of social and biological
forms. The biology of the difference between non-variation
and variation is premised on these animals' lives among
humans, that is. Chickens of Whiteness are factory farmed
from restricted sets of breeding lines, finely tuned to meet
precise biological specifications. Their phenotypes reflect the
main motivation behind their evolution by capitalist agro-
industry: the motivation to standardize, to convert dissimilar-
ity into equivalence, to maximize exchange-value through the
manufacture of animals that move along production lines and
Anthropology Southern Africa, 20 II, 34(3&4)
value chains with as little inefficiency and unpredictability as
possible. The chickens of Whiteness render the abstracting
force of capital in concrete material form. The chickens of
Zulu ness likewise breed in a socially structured ecology -the
household yard - but the forces guiding their reproduction
are different. Domestic flocks change composition continually
as people slaughter, exchange and sell birds while introducing
new ones acquired either as gifts from kin or as purchases
(from other rural householders or from large-scale free range
poultry farmers). Genetic material circulates in and out of
these flocks in a way that facilitates visible variation within and
among them.
But visible form is by no means the only distinction that
comes into human experience of these types. The behaviour
of the chickens of Whiteness also affords observations about
what they lack that their domestic counterparts manifest.
This goes down as far as the making of life itself: compare the
role of the cock in the yard to the lightbulb in the incubator,
goes the dark induction; not for nothing are chickens of
Whiteness olamthuthu ("fakes"). Not only are their origins
strange, they lead strange lives in distinctly strange environ-
ments. Immobilized in rows of cages, they lack the territorial
and defensive habits that chickens of Zuluness demonstrate.
Left to their own devices, they wander into the bush and
never come home. Not having learned to take cover when
the ground is crossed by shadows, they are easily swept up
by hawks. The ends of their beaks are clipped at the farms to
stop them from eating their neighbours' flesh in the madness
of the cage. This means they can neither defend themselves
nor eat food other than manufactured mash that must be
bought for them. All this makes it hard to think of keeping
them as domestic fowl. By contrast, chickens of Zulu ness are
seen to have attachments to domestic space, and to know
how to fend for themselves in that setting. They know to
return at night to roost on perches constructed for their
security. Sometimes they are fed maize, but mostly they peck
for insects, seeds and scraps around the yard. If anything it is
catching them for slaughter that is difficult, not keeping them
alive.
One might say, thus, that in chickens of Zuluness people
see a familiar sort of intelligence, while the minds of the
chickens of Whiteness are confused, deficient and passive. It
is not too hard to see in this a glimpsing of alternative possibil-
ities for the human condition. But the point need not be
made only by analogy, since chickens have quite concrete
points of connection with human existence - not the least of
which is that people eat them. Another set of distinctions
dwells on the different nutritional properties of these animals,
then. The differences between their forms of life result in dif-
ferent kinds of flesh, and these produce dissimilar effects in
the lives of humans who eat them. Texture is the most impor-
tant issue here. Chickens of Whiteness are commonly noted
to offer soft and fatty meat, while the meat of chickens of
Zuluness is "strong". With all that fat and tenderness the
chickens of Whiteness are tasty, but they enervate. Like other
foods "of Whiteness" they sap vitality, leaving people sluggish,
obese and sickly. Eating such food is said to be a chief cause of
erectile dysfunction. By contrast chickens of Zuluness have
"hot" blood that excites desire. And although the injunction is
often honoured as humour, in the breach, it is generally said
107
that women should not eat the latter, in case this give them
appetites that lead to infidelity. On the other hand, feeding
this meat to men is an excellent remedy for women who are
keen to keep a check on a wandering husband, or to re-
awaken an impotent one.
This last point is significant. It suggests that eating these
two types of animals also produces the absence and presence
of difference in persons; in this case, difference of gender. So
a more precise formulation of the contrast of Whiteness and
Zuluness might be that it marks the difference between the
absence and presence of the marking of gendered difference
in human beings. In fact it is both gender and generation: the
primary axes around which a particular set of normative
notions of human reproduction and relatedness are organized
here. In other words, the contrast of Whiteness and Zulu ness
marks the difference between the absence and the presence
of a field of human distinctions embedded in kinship.
The practices that lead up to the eating of chickens dis-
close this difference emphatically. Chickens of Zuluness are
goods of domestic estates, and in those estates they are gen-
erally included within the domain of women's property -
unlike, most saliently, cattle. Their owners kill and cook them
for adult men: for lovers or husbands, for special guests, for
people going on journeys. Plucked, cleaned, boiled intact,
they are usually served whole on a wooden platter with a few
cornmeal dumplings, a pinch of salt, some chili. The recipient
eats as much as he wants, starting with the meat along the
back. Children finish it off when he is done. Sometimes peo-
ple will also make small gifts for the dead with these birds.
They are put aside at the back of a house for a spirit to lick
overnight, and then consumed by children too. But the prep-
aration of chickens of Whiteness follows adaptations of Euro-
pean and Asian recipes. Cut into portions before being
cooked, they are steamed, fried, stewed or curried and
served with starch and vegetables. Everyone eats simultane-
ously from individual plates, and though there may be an
order for who gets what, deciding what portions are good is
a matter of preference rather than status. Chickens of White-
ness are usually purchased as butchered meat, and often not
as whole birds but in bags of massed identical portions cut
from different animals. If bought alive they are only kept a day
or two before being eaten, and no-one really owns them in
the way that people own animals as parts of domestic estates.
Their presence in a household's life is far too evanescent for
that. Sometimes they do not enter the household at all, for
these are the animals served deep-fried at fast-food joints as
well.
In other words - and here is the most important point -
the chickens of Wfliteness travel quite directly from market
to mouth. They are products of mass society made available
to individuals for relatively standardized and undifferentiated
forms of consumption, with all the pleasures and dangers
attached. They represent the immediacy of the mass social
world from the vantage point of the household. But chickens
of Zuluness make their way to the stomach through a field of
distinguishing domestic interactions. Entering households in
various ways - as chicks, gifts, commodities - they become
the bearers of local mediations and exchanges that distinguish
quite concretely among the types of subjects involved.
To understand the salience of this distinction, then, we
108
need to take a closer look at arguments about the organiza-
tion of domestic life itself in this part of the world.
Kinds of kinship
The life of rural African households has long been a promi-
nent topic for South African social thought. It is a 'topic' in the
literal sense, for the issue at stake is the crisis-ridden place
these households hold in the wider landscape. Since this
spans a tremendous space of discourse, ranging from the ver-
nacular to the academic, the civil to the religious, I do not
locate my discussion in terms of any pcltticular literature, but
rather point to common themes. Those who are familiar with
the discussions will surely recognize them. In showing how
this discourse as a whole is structured, I lay the grounds for a
fuller understanding of exactly what the distinction of White-
ness and Zulu ness denominates in terms of social forms.
Images of the African household tend to gather round one
of two poles: constructivist and culturalist. Broadly put, the
culturalist claim is that households locate the persistence of
the precolonial past on present terrain. The icon of this
anachronism is the round hut built with mud and thatch.
More than any other sign in South African public culture, it
stands for the past tense of Africa while manifesting Romantic
notions of custom: Africanity rendered not as disease or vio-
lence but rather as an earthy shelter, a warmly welcoming
house. The fact that it is a house is of the essence here.
Implicitly it always contains a traditional African family life.
The round enclosure shelters a form of solidaristic kinship
that is then understood as being at odds with the modernising
forms of the wider society.
The value assigned to this being-at-odds varies. Segrega-
tionists once saw customary kinship as an enclosure to con-
tain the whole of African social existence - to hold it in
margins of family and culture far from the centres of urban
political and economic hegemony. The fact that African
labour was essential to civil society initiated the crisis of the
family in this story. Drawn too close into urban orbit, house-
holds threatened to decompose into individuals full of new
desire and thus of political discontent (Gillespie 20 II). To
ward that off, South Africa's apparatus of rural reserves and
policed labour migrancy was meant to anchor African souls in
traditional family values. Segregationists did not hold the
monopoly on this idea, however. Welfarist discourses shared
across the racial divide have depicted households as sanctuar-
ies of traditional aid for the indigent, ill, and incapable. African
conservatives have regarded rural households as redoubts of
proper authority and morality, contrasting them to cities
where unruly youth and women stake too many claims to
their rights (Spiegel 1994). And much of the modernist left,
though valuing this inversely, has agreed.
Variations on this logic circulate widely, then, even though
its segregationist version has ended in ignominy. Counter-
posed are various types of constructivist and instrumentalist
reasoning, most often found in progressive academic and pol-
icy circles. Instead of custom, the force that governs life in
this conception is a will towards survival, adaptation and
invention. Not cultural values but calculating actors shape the
forms of rural households, here. From this perspective it
does not really make sense, in fact, to contrast rural house-
holds with urbanity. If the starting point is not the home as
Anthropology Southern Africa, 20 I I, 34(3&4)
such but its inhabitants, then the obvious point is that millions
of South Africans lead mobile lives that span rural-urban divi-
sions (Coplan 1994; Murray 1987; White 20 I 0). They shuttle
with extraordinary speed and frequency among the multiple
nodes of private networks that are even more complex and
open-ended than notions of rural-urban interconnectedness
suggest. Insisting on the essential difference of rural house-
holds seems in this view an ideological gesture, inadequate to
empirical complexities. If the people in such households think
about them in terms of difference, that is itself a motivated
construction. Much better, then, to think of households as
fluid resources: fields composed of symbolic and material
constructs assembled by actors who use them in their strug-
gles for daily survival, their efforts to resist or create forms of
power, their quests to fashion identities (Bank 20 I I). The
archetypal image here is not the hut but the shack: doggedly,
creatively constructed from found materials. Struggle is the
mode in which the crisis of the family appears here, and
households are spaces where individuals battle with the
forces of the wider social world (Ross 1995, 2009).
Between these two imaginaries of domestic life one can
already glimpse some analogies with the Zuluness and the
Whiteness possessed by chickens. No accident, that, but how
can we ground the connection? What I want to show now is
this: that just as ideas about chickens correspond to actual
fleshly forms produced by commensal practices, both these
ways of thinking about rural households correspond to actual
aspects of the reproductive processes involved in producing
the contexts where commensal practices happen.
In other words, while the two models of domestic life I
have outlined here appear to be competing, incommensura-
ble alternatives, there are good grounds for considering them
two moments of a single formation. Since the culturalist per-
spective sees rural households as the vestiges of precolonial
social arrangements, it might be good to start with some
thoughts on kinship in the 19th century Zulu kingdom. From
what we know of life in that society, it seems the making of
human lives and relationships was essentially a political affair.
Royal power waxed and waned, but when kings were able to
exercise it, control of the reproduction of the life course was
among the most important objects pf sovereignty. Royal
power determined when its subjects entered adulthood,
when and whom they married, with whom they made new
life and kinship. At times the kingship achieved this work
through men's and women's age-grade regiments, paired by
royal command, and permitted by royal indulgence to marry
each other's members en masse (see Wright 1978). But most
importantly, royals, chiefs and elders had the largest herds of
cattle and controlled the circulation of this bovine wealth,
particularly as the means of bridewealth payments to institute
marriage (Guy 1979).
What marriage did was to make a woman the mother of a
house - an estate composed of her children and her other
dependents along with the fields, animals, goods and dwell-
ings that supported them - inside her husband's agnatic
homestead (Gluckman 1950; see Comaroff and Roberts
1981:47-53; Oberler 1994). Only by being husbands to the
mothers of houses - mothers who thus bore children named
for them - could men secure their own progress through the
course of masculine adulthood: from paternity to patriarchy
Anthropology Southern Africa, 20 I I , 34(3&4)
and ancestorhood (see White 20 I 0). But only as the depend-
ents of elders and others with cattle could men acquire the
means to enter marriage and to build such a homestead (Car-
ton 2000). One might think of 19th century African society in
this region as a three-tiered organizational formation, then.
First the house, where mothers made persons. Above it the
homestead, where men were made into fathers. And above
that the realm of gerontocratic and sovereign power, medi-
ated through cattle that facilitated control over subjects' mar-
riages. Note the bidirectional dependence of the second tier
on both the first and the third. Men could not become patri-
archs and ancestors without being joined by marriage to
women's houses, but they could not join such houses unless
they were subjects of those who had cattle. The processes
forming homesteads were contingent, then, on the interac-
tions between the spheres of activity above them and below
them. Men progressed through the life course as a result of
the interactions of maternity and sovereignty.
The decades around the turn of the 20th century saw this
whole formation shattered (Guy 1979, 2005). Subsequent
assertions of 'Zuluness' cannot be taken transparently to
refer to continuities with the kingdom, then. The grounds for
modern concepts of cultural Zuluness must be sought instead
within the forms of an overarching South African society
where many Zulu men became the providers of migrant
labour-power for wages. Along those lines, a range of studies
show how 20th century concepts of Zuluness spoke to the
intersections of class formation with gendered and genera-
tional dynamics in African households (Carton 2000; Hunter
20 I 0; Waetjen 2004; White 20 I 0, forthcoming). For my pur-
poses here, the question is how to conceptualise these
dynamics in a way that shows how both constructivist and
culturalist accounts of households might each represent
aspects of their making.
What seems most fundamental to me is how relations of
marriage and reproduction were reconstituted in colonised
Zulu communities. The power of gerontocratic elites was
weakened not just by conquest but by the growing power of
young men who acquired wages through migrant labour
(Carton 2000). Wages allowed young men to buy their own
cattle, thus circumventing the gerontocratic monopoly on the
means of marriage payments. Young men could acquire the
means of marriage payments directly, and thus control their
own marital prospects. Assessing this development in terms
of the three tiers of precolonial social organization, the his-
torical effect of proletarianisation here was to sever the
lower two tiers from the top one. Applying wages to
bridewealth payments, men could independently relate
themselves to the houses of women and institute the proc-
esses distinguishing them as fathers, grandfathers, ancestors.
Marriage was no longer a directly political matter, then.
Instead it was a social one: it derived its means not from sov-
ereign power but rather from the circulation of value in a
capitalist society. Not only did this cost elites dearly, it also
changed the position of husbands in households. Their mar-
riages were signs of their own capacities now. Or more pre-
cisely, marriages grew from the sale of men's own labour-
power, not from their political subjection. Notions of the hus-
band's domestic sovereignty (see Horkheimer 1972) point
much more to the wage form, then, than they do to 19th
109
century lives where husbands stayed the 'children' of their
elders for most of their adulthood.
For male domination, though, the wage is a Trojan horse.
Money can be earned by women too, and a wage can just as
easily support consumption within existing households as it
can their reproduction and expansion through new mar-
riages. These different possibilities spurred conflicts for a cen-
tury and more between proletarian men and women
throughout the southern African countryside (Ferguson
1990). Who leaves home and earns? How does money
return? Do wages go to food or to cattle, to school fees or to
marriages?
Depending on the answers- this is the crux of my argu-
ment here - different organizational outcomes result. On the
one extreme, if men monopolized wages and invested them
in polygamous marriage, while keeping their dependants in
the countryside, a two-tiered, differentiated, specifically rural
household form emerged. In it there were house and home-
stead: realms of maternal activity encompassed under the
cattle herd of a husband. But if wages went to daily consump-
tion, by choice or by need, then classically proletarian forms
of life developed. Households became matrifocal rather than
marital; distinctions between the countryside and the city
diminished; men and women alike were propelled into highly
mobile quests for private income. Instead of becoming a
tiered and differentiated institution, the household becomes
an open-ended horizontal network.
Three points follow. The first is that constructivist and
culturalist conceptions of households are not competing
truths but complementary ones. Each is a partial image,
freezing particular outcomes or moments of larger dialectical
possibilities. The second is that the wider social sphere of
South African capitalism is not external but internal to the
making of households. Since it is the disposition of money
that lays down the channels by which these outcomes
emerge, the totality of the social world, as embodied in the
money form, is the substance from which all kinds of kinship
are made. The third point follows directly: the consequential
turning point, the 'crisis' in domestic life, is not in how it
relates to the external social world, but rather in the ways the
social world that is materialized in money might take different
concrete forms within domestic relationships.
With these three points in mind, let us go back to the
matter of Whiteness and Zuluness, and the question of their
embodiment in relationships with animals.
Bovine modern
Cattle, too, are of Whiteness or of Zulu ness, and the differ-
ence between t~em enters human experience quite dramati-
cally. Unlike chickens, cattle are too expensive and hard to
husband for most Zulu households to have their own herds,
and this makes a curious paradox out of the 'presence' of cat-
tle in everyday life. There is no other non-human species that
is more salient in the collective imagination. Cattle in the
abstract are the subjects of endless idiom; they populate dis-
course in multitudes. At the same time, though, they are not
especially familiar in the concrete; at least not in the majority
of households. When people want to involve them in
bridewealth or sacrifice, then, they buy beasts and have them
delivered. Mostly they buy them from large-scale farms, and
110
these are the cattle of Whiteness. Like their feathered co-
essentialists they have led strange lives, and they carry the
marks of those weird existences with them when they arrive.
What is most remarked is two-fold: compared to the cattle of
Zuluness, they are huge, and they are stupid. They come off
the truck full of fear and outsized aggression, and even
though they are tethered people shy from them like they
would from wild animals. Inevitably that stages embarrassed
discomfort. Cattle stand at the heart of what a properly Zulu
household is known to be. Quite literally so, for the ideal plan
for a homestead has a cattle kraal at the centre. And knowing
how to handle cattle distinguishes stren&th and skill in rural
character. Or more precisely, it manifests robust manhood,
for most women are supposed to avoid these animals. Nerv-
ously trying to feign a casual mastery provokes a discord of
habitus, then. The cattle of Whiteness threaten to make rural
men seem indistinguishable from city folk or women.
By contrast the cattle of Zuluness are habitually unafraid.
They are used to being around people, and this puts men at
their ease. They are also physically slighter; not so much
because they are different breeds- like household chickens,
domesticated cattle have been hybrids for generations here -
but because they have grazed on the poverty of bare reserva-
tion hillsides. Sometimes one can buy such cattle, but nor-
mally their owners are reluctant to sell them, and anyway,
they offer much less meat and what they have is tough and
stringy. If one must feed a great number of guests at a feast,
much better to slaughter an ox bought from the farms. There
is possibly an issue with that, for the dead to whom one sacri-
fices might not recognize cattle of Whiteness as cattle. But
the dead can be lulled into confidence (White 2004). An ani-
mal is kept at home for a day or two before being killed; a
make-shift kraal is erected around it: creating all the prag-
matic contexts within which bovine Zuluness exists in com-
mon experience, the thing itself can be mustered by ellipsis.
So here there is something different from chickens. In
bovine form, beasts of Whiteness can turn into beasts of
Zulunes~ - not unlike the way that money transmutes into
kinship and culture when it is used for bridewealth
exchanges. Of the essence here is not how such animals are
acquired, but how they are given up. In the case of their con-
version into food, what matters is the where, the why and
the how of their killing. Only the very richest people will
slaughter cattle at home for profane consumption. Usually
when cattle are killed in households there is ritual purpose
involved. But cattle enter households much more commonly
as animals already slaughtered: as packs of beef brought
home from shopping in town. Bearing a slightly different
sense than Whiteness in cattle as such, this beef is meat of
Whiteness. The most important thing about it is how it has
been processed: cut up into slabs, chunks, mince and so
forth. All these are standardized portions that come pre-
divided and massed, any particular instance or fraction being
much the same as another. This meat is mostly stewed or
fried indoors, like vegetables and chicken pieces, and meals
are made from similar portions served to individuals on
plates. Quantities of food may vary, often corresponding to
gradations of status based on sex and age. But what is at stake
then is different degrees or developments of one kind of
human personhood: one hierarchical scale of personal stand-
Anthropology Southern Africa, 20 I I, 34(3&4)
ing, not a structure dividing and linking different kinds of per-
sons. What marks the latter is eating meat of Zuluness, the
product of a different way of giving up animal life.
Sacrifice starts with a gathering and a dispersal, a concen-
tration of forces then a division into arrangements. Kin who
live at a distance start to arrive in the days preceding a large
family ritual. Their noisy presence mixes with the sharp sour
smell of fermenting beer. On the day before the main slaugh-
ter smaller animals such as chickens or goats are killed to
"report" to the dead what is coming and why. On the day
itself people collect in the yard, where speeches are made,
the praises of the dead are chanted, herbs are burned, cattle
are herded from grazing back to the kraal where they snort
and low. The home emanates an aura of sensory richness
drawing the dead. But then things fall to hush as a senior man
goes into the kraal with a spear. Women retreat to the insides
of houses. Men who are present stand quietly alert near the
edge of kraal, while the sacrificer speaks some final words to
gathered spirits. As soon as he has stabbed, everyone
crouches down to wait in silence.
Then to the work of butchering. Loud talk opens up as
young men brace the carcass with poles. The man who has
stabbed makes shallow marks with a knife on the skin, indi-
cating exactly where to cut. Young men go to work deepen-
ing his intentions. He does so again when the flesh is
revealed, marking off the boundaries between the distinct
portions of the feast, and once again his juniors realize his
motions. He watches them sceptically, taking the smallest
slips as cues to mock their generation for its idiocy. Some-
times he steps in and takes care of an important cut himself.
The fear is that a portion will be "killed" if not divided cleanly
from others, and portions must not be killed because they
each uniquely "respect" the different kinds of people who
gather at the feast the next day to eat them after men have
cooked them outdoors. The four main such commensal kinds
are mothers, fathers, daughters and sons. Householders and
their neighbours and guests divide into these four groups as
they arrange themselves around a yard for feasting, each kind
coalescing first around its own pots of beer then around its
own meat. Other portions represent other distinctions -
clanship, affinity, residence- but these four are the most sub-
stantial, consuming by far the greatest part of the sacrifice.
Divisions among these groups are as sternly disciplined as
divisions among their portions, and particularly the line distin-
guishing junior men from senior ones. When the status of
particular men as fathers is contested during a feast, violence
haunts the scene as much as insult hunts ambiguous cuts in
the butchering work of the previous day.
This brief description should make it clear that whatever
else is intended in the makings of feasts, they entail aggressive
productions of human difference. Feasts differentiate people
into kinds, the four main such kinds corresponding to cate-
gorical statuses people might occupy in the kinship arrange-
ments of households based on reproduction through
marriage. And the focus of that practice of differentiation, the
place where it is conducted most intensely, is the separation
of fathers from sons. In its processes and in its products, the
feast represents the production of the paternal life course by
way of relations with women and with children. In other
words, making commensal Zulu ness from bovine life affords a
Anthropology Southern Africa, 20 II, 34(3&4)
representation of domestic life that is much like the image of
rural households conveyed in culturalist thinking: differenti-
ated, articulated, governed by customary kinship arrange-
ments making men into fathers.
The mere fact that this work takes so much work sug-
gests that its stable correspondence with realities cannot be
taken for granted. Consider the charged distinction of fathers
and sons. The grounds that people invoke to argue the
boundary are inherently ambiguous. Is it marital status, gene-
alogical generation, age in years, the practice of concrete
fatherhood, or simply the fact of physical paternity? This has
always required some sort of political management to impose
particular outcomes (Comaroff and Comaroff 1981 ). And
precisely for that reason, the historical disarticulation of patri-
archy from concrete spheres of political power has made the
issue even more open-ended. Not just because there is no
longer any transcendent centre of sovereign resort. Not just
because that shift displaces the gravity of biopower to scat-
tered proletarian households, in which its production and
contestation is 'immanent. But most of all because that revo-
lution casts the form of domestic life itself into doubt. As I
argued above, the forms that proletarian households assume
in places like northern KZN are based on the variable disposi-
tion of money in their making. This means it is not just the
drawing of the line between fathers and sons that is ambigu-
ous, but whether such lines themselves sustain any relevance.
At stake in the feast is not just who sits where, but whether
such performances of difference have any practical felicity
whatsoever.
This is not radically new. It was always a possibility implicit
in the modes of household reproduction practised on South
Africa's peripheries throughout the 20th century. But the end
of the 20th century has shifted the balance of outcomes much
more heavily from marital structures to matrifocal networks.
The end of apartheid has opened national space to rural
women much at the same time as the economy has shed
industrial jobs that once employed male migrant workers. If
marriage depends on bridewealth payments, and those
depend on wages, the marital prospects of working-class
men are just as subject to market forces as those of their 19th
century forebears were subject to sovereign favour. The mar-
ket of the last few decades has ruled to delay the age of mar-
riage indefinitely (see Hosegood et at. 2009 ) - and with it the
kind of domestic life the feast of difference depicts. There is
something of an insistence in the practice of that feasting,
then. I do not mean to suggest that this is a shift from tradi-
tional belief to modern doubt. I hope I have made it clear that
the practice of Zulu ness is a fully modern enterprise, as much
so when felicitous as not. But it does seem as if the referential
validity it might have held for 20th century households is in
decline.
Does that mean commensal Whiteness now affords more
plausible signs of the times? It might be instructive in this
regard to follow another quite common practice of feasting I
have neglected till now. Recall the problem of "killing" a por-
tion: dividing it in such a way as to render it inadequate to dif-
ference. Among the portions produced by competent
butchering are the two hind legs, served at feasts to mothers
by men who have cooked them. But quite often one of the
hind legs is deliberately killed and removed from the feast
Ill
during butchering. It is handed directly to women, who take
it into a kitchen where they turn it into a stew, just as they
would with beef they had purchased as meat. What that stew
provides is a formal dinner, consumed in parallel with the
feast the next day. While ordinary folk divide through the
yard into groups by gender and age, a table is set indoors for
privileged guests: teachers, clerks and nurses, church officials
and lay elites of Christian congregations. Men and women,
old and young, they sit in high Victorian formality and all eat
the same plates of food.
Dinners like this mark another aspect to Whiteness as
repertoire: the aspect that is proximate not to the massed
everyday but instead to respectable Christian ways construed
as civilization {isiKholwa). Here it is the practice of Whiteness
that has the inflection of difference, of civilized distinction
from the folkish sphere of custom. To separate themselves
from Zuluness, Christian elites eat meat that is undifferenti-
ated: meat that does not mark the distinctions of kinship
marked outdoors around communal wooden platters. But no
less than the feast does this way of eating involve the commu-
nication of kinship values. It celebrates the ideals of compan-
ionate marriage, which since the 19th century have offered
South African Christians an alternative to the reconstruction
of bridewealth-based relationships. From early on this differ-
ence pointed not just to alternative forms of the moral life but
also to class distinctions inside colonised communities: Chris-
tianity the province of bourgeois aspirants, traditionalism the
protest of their proletarian peers (Comaroff and Comaroff
1997). The consequence is that the referents of this kind of
commensal practice have had almost as much of a hard time
of recent decades. In some respects the end of apartheid
made good at last on promises that liberal Christian imperial-
ism extended to South Africans as long ago as the early 19th
century: membership as free people in the international com-
monwealth of commerce (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991 ).
The forces that provide standing in that commonwealth have
turned out to be capricious, though. Mostly they have passed
over the petty bourgeoisie that waited for them in its congre-
gations in countrysides like northern KZN. Compared to the
flashy consumerism that really marks success at present, the
practice of neo-Victorian dinners can look as nostalgic and
tattered as its neo-traditionalist counterparts.
Conclusion
Let me end with the scene where I started: the frenzied
reception of Tony Yengeni's sacrifice. Here the performance
described above as being one of doubtful felicity had, if any-
thing, an extraordinarily resonant public impact. Let us look
more closely at it.
Among the many things that enraged white readers about
that photograph was a fact they learned in the text of the
story. Yengeni was not actually killing the animal. Someone
else did that afterwards. Here he was using the spear to first
make it bellow. Antagonists denounced this as an act of
superfluous cruelty - to which defenders responded that it
was vital to such practices; that the bellowing was a sound by
which the gathered dead accepted the animal sacrificed. They
would have done well to refer to Hubert and Mauss's classical
argument ( 1981) that .the sacrifice is a vehicle of mediation.
For an animal to die silently, here, is to cut that mediation
112
short - a misfortune. When a sacrifice cries out, the sound
entails attention by the dead. As many people in Zulu homes
would add, it also alerts the people in neighbouring house-
holds both to the act and to the feast that follows. In other
words, to make the sacrifice bellow is to construct the very
audience that will receive it.
In Yengeni's case that mediation played out on a spectacu-
lar scale. The act of making that ox bellow made the whole
South African public the audience of the sacrifice. By refusing
to receive it, of course, his white accusers stepped into an
eminently recognizable role. The Whiteness they embodied
in that moment was a loud refusal of kin'ship. Whether or not
he intended that, he could not have hoped for better. He
almost certainly did intend for the press to portray him spear
aloft in the practice of culture upon his release from prison.
Picking up his populist career again, he almost certainly meant
the mediation of this sacrifice to be mass mediation, his audi-
ence not just those who live after death but those who feel
themselves the living dead of post-apartheid society - those
who feel marginalized and betrayed by the path of develop-
ment in the first two decades of freedom. Yengeni's own con-
viction under the new dispensation had brought him low and
polluted him, but here he was retrieving his integrity in the
face of white accusation, embodying what multitudes of the
impotent understood to be the essence of masculinity. Per-
haps the most significant point that picture made was not the
focal image of Yengeni with spear at all, but rather in the
ordering of other persons around him: women looked from
inside the house on the one side of the photograph; on the
other side a group of men stood behind him on the lawn.
So here we have yet another transformation. There once
was a time when cattle allowed political power to organize
the making of human persons. More recently they facilitated
practices of difference in a social sphere divorced of political
sovereignty. Purchased with wages, exchanged as
bridewealth, their lives metabolised money into kinship.
Offered up in sacrifice, consumed at feasts, they became the
substance of Zuluness- but also of its counterpart in Chris-
tian Whiteness. But now once again we find bovine life con-
necting political power to matters most personal. The
sacrifice of an animal through the press offers consolations of
masculine affect to victims of frustration and alienation.
Clearly there is great and subtle potential in the consumption
of bovine life as human difference.
If we think about the moment in which the last of these
transformations is embedded, though, it is also clear that in
most households cattle are no longer quite the concretely
familiar mediations of kinship that they were, not just in pre-
colonial times but in 20th century proletarians life as well. By
no means have they disappeared from the countryside. On
the contrary, with apartheid's collapse they have even come
to town, becoming a familiar fixture along the edges of high-
ways and train lines where those who can afford them send
them to graze. But still they are not what they were. When all
is said and done, it is really the humble chicken that sustains a
plausible practice of personal life in these conditions. White-
ness may have once appeared the property of bourgeois civi-
lization. In the aftermath of South Africa's 20th century, it is
much more truly the indistinct texture of everyday life in a
world that is as colonised by commodities as by empire. Eth-
Anthropology Southern Africa, 20 I I, 34(3&4)
noculture might once have been the apportionment of differ-
ences by working-class men. Now it is a remedy for
impotence.
Fowl is the form of the present.
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