Cattle,capital,and the imagination of self-expanding value

Abstract

As cattle-keeping pastoralists continue to attract the intellectual interest of anthropologists worldwide, research focuses particularly on livelihood and resource management as well as on pastoral development and participation in a globalizing world. While this orientation implies an epistemological division between acting subjects (people) and managed objects (cattle), this article goes back to the earlier anthropology of pastoralists to ask how a society of humans constitutes itself through the ownership of herd animals. To this end, the concept of capital is adopted to dialectically integrate the material, the relational, and the ideational dimensions of cattle and thereby elucidate the congruence of managing animals and managing people within a single form of practice. The article is a general theoretical contribution to the study of pastoralism but takes the Woɗaaɓe cattle herders in West Africa as a case in point to mobilize the ethnographic detail needed for the argument.

Introduction

In the context of pastoral development and social-ecological system research, anthropologists have made the management of cattle and grasslands by pastoral groups a major focus of research and thus part of the discipline's knowledge (Fratkin et al., 1994; see e.g., Homewood, 2008; Niamir-Fuller, 1999; Schareika, 2018).

Looking at earlier research on pastoral people, however, like that of Evans-Pritchard (1940, 1951) on the Nuer or Marguerite Dupire (1970, [1962] 1996) on the Woɗaaɓe, it becomes clear that for these scholars, rather the management (or governance) of human affairs through cattle than of the grazers themselves was key on the agenda. What anthropologists discovered in cattle was less a ruminant in need of fodder, space, and risk management. It was rather something like Mauss' (1925) hau: something that was the life force and mover of human society, a natural fact of life in no need of explanation for its members, but an enigma for its scholars. Evans-Pritchard (1940: 19) coined the term “bovine idiom” to establish the idea that the Nuer did not simply live off cattle, but made and experienced their whole social world through cattle. It is crucially important to note, though, that cattle unlike hau constitute a concept that partly refers to something firmly standing on the ground on four hooves and ruminating. This has given the anthropology of pastoralism a peculiar materialist touch that finds its felicitous expression in the words reported of Neville Dyson-Hudson: “to understand herders, one must understand herding” (Fratkin, 1997: 237). Subscribing to this methodological statement, I would nevertheless caution that it entails a second loop: When you have understood the herding, make sure you that you not forget to use this understanding to understand the herders! It is true, pastoralists struggle to build herds, but they also struggle to build society.

When looking at all the practical issues that pastoralists have with cattle, one can easily miss to see the covered side of cattle that is their twofold, but intimately connected potential of making their way into human imagination and relation building. When people like Evans-Pritchard's Nuer have represented to anthropology the methodologically ideal “other” human society (can there be a textbook without them?), it is for this reason that cattle has been the ideal “other” object feeding the discipline's methodological hunger for difference and riddles. Evans-Pritchard (1940: 16) expressed this point in matchless wording:

Most of their social activities concern cattle and cherchez la vache is the best advice that can be given to those who desire to understand Nuer behaviour.

Coming from outside the camp of pastoralist studies, Jean and John (1990:197) Comaroff have framed the social meaning of cattle in Mauss' (1925) concept of “total social phenomena,” seeing in cattle “things that contained all ‘the threads of which the social fabric is woven,’” and saying that

it is necessary to show how animals actually entered into the making of persons and things, relations and statuses. In short, we seek to explain how they took on the character of total social phenomena; how their unique capacity to store and transform value enabled Tshidi to sustain a viable social world….

The application of Mauss’ concept of total social phenomena to African cattle (see also Bonte and Galaty, 1991; Ferguson, 1985; Hutchinson, 1992) aptly reveals that the building of herds and the building of society merge in the same practical process that is social, economic, and ecological all at once. Still, there is an inconspicuous semantic slip in the use of the concept from Mauss to Comaroff and Comaroff that is noteworthy. Mauss 1925 had called gift giving a total social fact, hence he was speaking of a social institution and practice and not of an object entering that practice. Interestingly, the application of the concept to the object of cattle, while illuminating the relational dimension of herd animals, does little to elucidate why it is cattle that have this potential of binding people together.

I think this is so because the concept of the total social fact, valuable as it is, is less helpful to explore the phantasmagoric power that certain “things” assume for people under certain historical conditions. This power springs from a particular kind of ambiguity in these things: they appear as if they had “natural” inner value, but their value originates from the complex of social relations that creates itself through reference to these things all the while it sustains the very idea that these things have, indeed, “natural” inner value. The reader will already have a guess that we might have to move from Mauss’ topological concept of the total social fact into the field of dialectics. While Marcel Mauss devised the concept of the total social fact for the study of non-state gift-giving-based society (Gregory, 1982), Karl Marx [1867] 1968 designed his relational concept of capital for the study of market-based society. However, just as the total social fact is an interesting concept to study modern capitalist society even though it was devised for noncapitalist society, could it not be that capital (of Capital) was a productive concept for the study of noncapitalist pastoral society?

Its unique strength lies exactly in the dialectical language that Marx developed on the basis of Hegel's philosophy of internal relations (Bidell, 2025) and that is capable of uniting (and at the same time separating) what is and what is not, and therefore matches the uniquely human ability (of imagination, anticipation, and discursive construction) to include what is not as if it were into what is the lived reality of a social group. Needless to say that this reality could not be what it is if it had not included what is not as if it were real. (See also Miller, 2005 for a discussion of Hegelian dialectics and the subject–object divide.)

The idea, therefore, is to try to adopt the dialectical method of analysis as it is established—but not explicitly explained as an analytical approach (Harvey, 2010)—in Capital by Marx ([1867] 1968) and used to elucidate the workings of capital in capitalist society. To be clear, though, by using the relational concept of capital from Capital, I do by no means want to say that cattle in pastoral society are capital in the sense it is analyzed for industrial capitalist society in Capital. That would be exactly the fallacy against which this whole opus is a warning: of dehistoricizing and using out of proper context concepts composed of relations that result from specific historical processes (e.g., the relations between “employer” and “worker” or between “use-value” and “exchange-value” contained in Marx's concept of capital).

I try to take the dialectical method as it is contained in and conveyed through Marx's use of the concept of capital to heuristically project upon cattle those of its features that are sufficiently abstract to be possibly valid in a context of pastoral lineage society and outside that of modern capitalism. While a methodological discussion of Marx's dialectical approach is beyond the scope of this paper, I shall briefly mention the elements that were particularly instructive to it but then rather integrate them into the analysis of my specific subject matter (elaborate and specialized theoretical discussions of Marx's dialectics can be found, for example, in Bidell, 2025; Harvey, 2010; Ollman, 2003). There is first and foremost the understanding, taken from the philosophy of internal relations, of anything, specifically of anything in the social world, including capital, as relations and processes of interaction rather than given, stable things, of becoming rather than states. This understanding implies the notion of a whole or system that needs to be studied, but where the part of the whole be viewed as already containing that whole of which it is a part. A thing does not exist in itself but by its relation to other things. As anything is seen as relations, there is a distinction being made between these relational dynamics and the only apparently stable, but variable forms they take on.

This translates into the conception of capital as a social relation and, more generally, the notion of an underlying social character of apparently nonsocial things. This idea is complemented by the notion of a reification or naturalization of social relations as nonsocial things or external factors and the concomitant idea of appearances or forms that disguise the qualities of social relations, particularly those of uneven appropriation of value and exploitation. The notion of opposition as well as contradiction within relations of interdependent elements that keep a whole or system (capitalism) in motion is a well-known key element in dialectics and leads to a questioning of clearcut classificatory boundaries as well as to the assumption of shifts in qualities (inter alia contained in the notion of “metamorphosis”). Instructive to this study are furthermore the notion of material relations between persons and social relations between things; the idea of a future as contained within the present and correspondingly the past as working in the present; the distinction between “C-M-C and M-C-M”; and the conception of exchange of commodities as key to the realization of surplus value through the use of capital. Against the backdrop of the statement that cattle were naturally fecund, Marx's universalist claim of human labor as generator of value and of products of human effort as forms of congealed human labor is also of interest.

I confine myself to these admittedly cursory remarks on the dialectical method and concentrate on putting them to work to the specific study at hand. A good rule of thumb for this undertaking is contained in this citation:

Dialectics forces us to always ask the question of every “thing” or “event” that we encounter: by what process was it constituted and how is it sustained. (Harvey, 1996: 50)

People of and through cattle

The theoretical analysis of cattle as capital made in this article is highly abstract in the sense that it is applicable to pastoral and lineage-based society in general. Furthermore, it shall contribute to the understanding of how a domain of human practice is constituted by the concomitance of material, social, and ideational processes that are divisible only in the analytical language of anthropology, but not in the social practice and common-sense knowledge of the people concerned. However, while the analysis builds on the wider anthropological literature of pastoral society, I shall point out that the ethnography of one particular pastoral society, the Woɗaaɓe in Niger, has been of quintessential importance to this work. Not only does this group offer a suitable case; rather the long-term participant observation I was privileged to do with the Woɗaaɓe (and not with other pastoralists) allowed me to experience and document the daily flow of social interaction and verbal communication within a group of nomads in the way necessary to develop the following theoretical propositions.

The Woɗaaɓe are extremely mobile pastoral nomads living in the arid savannah lands of Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Chad. They are part of the Fulani societies that extend over most of West and parts of Central Africa. ¹ In the anthropological literature, they are known by the ground-breaking work of Dupire (1970, [1962] 1996), Stenning (1959), and Bonfiglioli (1988). The Woɗaaɓe specialize in the keeping of Zebu cattle herds and form highly flexible, and independently deciding family households (wuro) that stay in the bush (ladde) in order to avoid farmer settlements and fields. In eastern Niger, these households do not have huts or tents and own minimal equipment. During the rainy season from June to September, families and herds may move every day, even at night when considered necessary for the herd's well-being. During the dry season, they gather around pastoral wells and shift camp about every 10 days using the surrounding pasture (Schareika, 2001, 2003).

While the family household is a basic social institution, many factors make higher levels of social integration important. Protection of animal property and the family members’ well-being, social control of group members, and the sharing of information on herding conditions among others are requirements making co-operation within more inclusive groups a crucial concern to the Woɗaaɓe. Just as with most pastoral nomads, patrilineages and clans are the relevant organizational forms for this task (Bonfiglioli, 1988; Dupire, 1970, 1996; Schareika, 2010a, 2010b, 2024).

I have to point out that the first-hand ethnographic knowledge on the Woɗaaɓe I use is from a time period between 1996 and 2010. Since then, high levels of insecurity related to Boko Haram and predatory violence (Köhler, 2021) have led me to discontinue visits into the area of south-eastern Niger. Reports over telephone and personal meetings in the capital city of Niamey have shown that the pastoralists have been suffering from constant menace, destruction of property, cattle theft, kidnapping, and most brutal killing. Secondary effects of the pervasive violence particularly include high prices for agricultural produce (millet). As the pastoral families seem to see few viable alternatives to do otherwise, they continue to use the pasture lands west of Lake Chad and expose themselves to the enormous risk of being attacked. While this situation needs further inquiry, I have to point out that here I am arguing from ethnographic material covering times that were by no means easy, but surely far less unhappy for the Woɗaaɓe than those of today.

For the Woɗaaɓe, the ownership of wealth and being rich are core elements of the moral system and ultimate guides to individual and social conduct. Everyday conversations among herders and speeches at special occasions such as meetings of elders are replete with allusions to wealth (risku), wealth in animals (jawdi), gain (keɓndam), being a rich man (diskuɗo), becoming rich (riska), getting animals (heɓa na’i), having (many) animals (na’i o woodi), being the one who owns them (jeya na’i), and having not a small, but a huge herd of cattle (na’i ɗuuɗa). These items are not just positively seen; rather they are the very direction the Woɗaaɓe's moral compass is always giving. When they are presented as the result of an envisioned management strategy, a pastoral decision made, a man's character, a family's habits, or a course of events, they ultimately prove the rightness and goodness of these.

The Woɗaaɓe call themselves to strive for the ideal of being rich on a daily basis and connect this theme to almost any other concern they have: a good tree species—makes you rich, choosing a good migration route—makes you rich, having children—makes you rich, having respect for and of others—makes you rich, adherences to the lineage values (pulaaku; see Schareika, 2010a)—makes you rich, being a good and handsome dancer—makes you rich. There is a lot of publicly expressed admiration for the cattle wealth of others, but no boasting of one's own achievements that are rather presented as imposing the duty to preserve and increase them.

The ideal of possessing a huge herd of cattle stands next to a couple of other ideals such as beauty, lineage life and rituals, proper conduct according to lineage standards, nomadic life, pastoral and environmental knowledge, honesty, contempt for theft, and hospitality. Wealth acquired in compromising these ideals can become a wealth of bad renown that potentially loses its value as a social currency within the lineage.

Poverty (sooynde), the death of animals (na’i mbaata) and being without animals (na’i ngalaa) is the horror scenario that the Woɗaaɓe use—also on a daily basis—to judge their own and the behavior of others as well as their total environment. To the Woɗaaɓe, poverty due to the loss of animals looms behind every pastoral decision and any ecological or political event that is harmful to the animals’ well-being or imposes costs on the herding family. There is a sort of methodological pessimism to be heard in many statements that mostly seems fairly exaggerated. The Woɗaaɓe are explicit about the fact that in the long run the possession of animals is necessary for being part of and partake in their social and moral universe. Loosing animals, therefore, means losing one's ability to actively participate in Woɗaaɓe social (lineage) life (Schareika, 2024).

Strictly speaking, the Woɗaaɓe are not so much interested in the state of having wealth or being rich, but rather in the process of generating and increasing wealth in cattle. Just as capitalist production (Schumpeter, 2005), Woɗaaɓe pastoral nomadism cannot keep a steady state: either there is growth or there is decline. The enormous array of uncertainties and possible failures in pastoral production create a situation where not increasing the herd necessarily means that it diminishes. Just as capital owners, Woɗaaɓe herd owners are thus doomed to grow if they only want to keep their possessions. There is no zero-growth option, and this translates into a number of attitudes and strategies with regard to herd management:

First, herders are keen to optimize through nomadic movement the animals’ environment in such a way that their natural fecundity peaks (i.e., ideally one calf per cow per year). They monitor herd performance on a daily basis and measure it against the goal to make their cows ready to receive (na’i ko’osa) so that they will calve (na’i ndimma) and increase in number (na’i mbaɗa). The aim and need to increase the herd is often expressed in the verb ɓesda “to add to,” as, for example, in this blessing of a nomadic camp's moving.

jowi, jowi

kosam e nebbam

Alla ɓesdu sawru ngaynaaka

Alla rimdina min jam

Alla ummina min jam.

Move, move

Milk and butter

That God add to our herding stick

That God make us pack our things in peace

That God make us set off in peace.

The second direction is toward minimizing through care, attentiveness, foresight, surveillance, and restless intervention, the possibility that animals be lost due to lack of grass, disease, straying, theft, or payment of fines. Woɗaaɓe herders constantly dwell on the necessity of being physically and with all senses focused on and standing by one's herd (daroo e na’i) if it is to prosper (na’i mbooɗa) instead of going down (na’i njana). Being capable of this kind of hard work for the animals is presented as the quality of a person who comes up to the standards of a herder (heƴa gaynaako). It is opposed to the physically and morally weak man who is looking for distraction and will never own a herd.

The third complex of economic attitudes and strategies is the herder's frugality and self-control to minimize expenditure and therefore offtake of animals from the capital stock. Woɗaaɓe cattle are capital in the sense that their definite consumption through slaughter or sale, and hence use in the present, is avoided for the sake of future benefit, as explained in the subsequent quote:

Capital is inherently inter-temporal. It is the factor of production that links economic decisions over time. People form capital when they withhold resources from present consumption and use them instead to augment future consumption possibilities. The result of these acts of savings and investment is that present consumption is constrained in order to make possible higher levels of consumption in future time periods. (Bates, 1990: 153)

Condemnation and indignation at consumption is a current theme in daily discourse aimed at controlling and instructing, particularly the young generation (Schareika, 2014). It is also easily visible in the abstinence from expenditures, the mending instead of replacing clothing, hardware, and equipment, and even the readiness to silently suffer from hunger or pain in order to avoid expenses when there is still a chance of sidestepping them.

Returns from a stock of animals depend on the provision of pastoral labor. In the Woɗaaɓe herding system, this labor is not separated from capital ownership. To the very contrary, labor is predicated on the chance to acquire ownership of capital. The boys and young men in a family who drive their father's cattle to pasture or draw water from a well do so knowing that some of the animals had already been given them and that the rest of the herd will be distributed among the brothers after the father's death (sennda). It is, therefore, the future splitting of the herd (by allocation to the nomadic family's sons) that makes it grow at present (by thus motivating the sons’ work and effort for the herd). Given that Woɗaaɓe families usually have more than one son, this means that there is a systematic barrier to capital concentration.

Labor created by the conversion of cattle-capital into family members though (through marriage and filiation of sons), is not systematically geared toward capital accumulation. Every additional son is just as his elder brother, trained to be a herder, even when additional labor can no longer increase the family herd's productivity. For the Woɗaaɓe, capital growth is coterminous with herd growth, and the limits to herd growth are the limits to economic growth entirely. When a herd needs the labor of, say, three and can support the needs of five sons, the redundant workforce will rest idle instead of seeking other capital sources to generate value from (e.g., land to cultivate or formal education).

Competition is key to Woɗaaɓe pastoral production. Herders constantly compare the state of their animals and the pastoral decisions held responsible for it. At the end of the rainy season, this is even institutionalized in a practice called mbeefi when nomads look at where the proportion of covered cows is highest. Comparison in the form of separating the relatively better from the relatively worse pervades Woɗaaɓe pastoral and indeed social practice such that it motivates a constant search and striving for the better (raara to ɓuri) as in Schumpeter's (2005) notion of capitalism. As competition frames communication among herders, it allows for the integration of a large pool of experiences and ideas in the pastoral system and leads to its perfection.

The gain of competition can be capitalized through reputation that may translate into others willing to enter or deepen relations (marriage, bond friendship) that entail the exchange of animals. Competition, however, does by no means aim at a direct crowding out of opponents (as in market competition). Closeness as lineage mates is rather the common and unquestioned basis from which to oppose each other in competition.

The Woɗaaɓe are hoarders of wealth in the form of cattle. While they minimize sales for daily consumption as much as possible, they are ready to part with animals for future benefit. Although the range of investments is rather limited and in many ways preassigned (thus not “free”), there are some interesting structural parallels with capitalist investment, particularly investment of financial capital.

An established herd owner among the Woɗaaɓe mainly “invests” cattle by giving out defined rights in cattle, thereby establishing or strengthening social relationships with people, especially from his lineage. Granting these rights does not necessarily mean parting with the entire animal or complete control and ownership of it. Cows given to sons, for example, remain in the household head's herd until the sons have established their own households. In the meantime, a father can use such cows in many ways and even sell them in case of need.

The rights in cattle a man gives out to others do not pay back in a specified and quantified good or service (as in conventional financial arrangements), but in the institutionalization of a social connection whose value is, on the one hand, potentially limitless, but on the other, highly uncertain. Cattle have been called a “special purpose” in contrast to “general purpose” money (Dalton, 1965). This is valid for a conventional market context where it is easier to pay with coins or paper money than with cattle. Seen from another perspective, however, the cattle of pastoral nomads are far more abstract a form of value than any other currency in that they are able to pay what no conventional market offers—the potential of human beings to reproduce, produce, and unite under a common lineage identity. Whether this potential can be realized is to be seen and depends on a number of further variables. A woman married to a herder may become mother of up to 12 children who later will add grandchildren to the family and lineage. Or she may remain childless. A man bound through a given cow in a bond of trust (amaana) may be a loyal friend and supporter in times of trouble or fighting. Or he may dishonor the bond.

Thus, although the mechanisms of creating returns on investment are quite dissimilar, there is a very important parallel to a capitalist economic system. The Woɗaaɓe orient cattle wealth of the present toward other people and the future, thereby turning it into a highly abstract form of value (an obligation or indebtedness). In the process, tangible wealth—the presently living and therefore vulnerable cow—converts into or adds on intangible wealth—the promise and claim of humans’ potential to reproduce, produce, and be loyal—expected to materialize and return in the future according to needs that will only then be known. The scenario is not only one of securing wealth by making it abstract (the first kind of profit), but also of increasing it by allowing one's social universe expand through children, grandchildren, paternal and maternal kinsmen and friends (the second kind of profit).

The concept of capital in the study of people of cattle

Paul Spencer (1977, 1998) has already made extensive use of the concept of capital for the study of East African cattle herders. His emphasis thereby is on the idea that cattle constitute a means of exchange and thus are at the heart of a system of conversion of wealth from one of its possible forms into another. Just like in capital investment, cattle would be strategically converted into those forms of wealth that offer the best opportunities for growth—and through growth, increase of wealth.

To coin an analogy with a family business, it is as if the family has a fund of capital that is invested alternately in brides and in cattle through an exchange aimed at perpetuating and with luck increasing the size of their venture: cattle bring in wives, wives breed children, children bring in cattle—as herdboys and as brides. (Spencer, 1998: 11)

Spencer's analysis contains a number of important elements for the study of herd management as congruent with social group management that we also see among the West African Woɗaaɓe: the merging of animals and humans within one and the same regime of value, the maximizing and growth motif, and the strategic investment outlook. However, waiving the dialectical approach to which the concept of capital as developed by Marx invites, Spencer faces difficulty to fully move from an economic analysis of the social to a social analysis of the economic. This is particularly evident in the fact that he takes growth as a natural occurrence found in cattle and humans (“wives”), which is then harnessed through the clever and strategic asset management by individual herders. This leaves the capital concept's potential to integrate the material, the relational, and the ideational dimension of African cattle largely untapped.

I therefore suggest to extend the surplus to be gained from applying the concept of capital to cattle in pastoralist social systems by including into it the component that dialectically unites the relational (social) and the material dimensions of growth within one and the same object. This component is primarily ideational. It is the illusion that an act of payment is equal to an act of exchange; it is the idea that the token of exchange “given” in payment belongs to the same order of “things” that it stands for. The difference between exchange and payment, though, is formidable. Exchange is plain and direct as objects change sides and are immediately ready to be put to use there. Payment, by contrast, is the most fascinating practice where a promise to give or serve (the relational dimension) materializes in a token of the thing promised (the material dimension including words uttered in talk) and where the receipt of this token creates satisfaction (Graeber, 2012).

This sort of satisfaction, though, is different from the satisfaction gained in naturalistic scenarios of exchange. It is a second-order satisfaction that is contained in the idea that the first-order satisfaction coming from a certain thing or service will be realized in the future. Possession of the token of this thing or service is the security that the imagined future is indeed going to happen. As embodiment of the future satisfaction, it is at the same time a source of happiness: Only looking at it already makes for shiny eyes in the beholder. The token form of the promise of being given in the future and of the promised thing makes for the unique ideational and relational constellation that materializes in capital. Its double nature of being social meaning inscribed into a material object and an object that carries social meaning makes the putative miracle of self-expanding value possible.

Joseph Vogl dates the shift away from a naturalistic to a capitalist regime of value in Europe to February 1797 when the Bank of England annulled the obligation to give metal currency for circulating bank notes. When this was done,

the notes became both at once: as legal tender, they were mere substitutes for circulating coinage; as bonds, they served only to document that there was presently nothing to hand for which they could be exchanged. On the one hand, then, they guaranteed the right to redeem deposited assets and sums of money; on the other, they functioned as currency only if that entitlement was waived. (Vogl, 2015: 51–52)

A comprehensive “temporalization of the system” makes this regime of value work:

The circulation of something that is by its very nature absent can only be explained as the effect of an endless deferral, ruling out full, universal compensation for the debts in question. Chains of payment had now become chains of payment promises; every operation seems to anticipate an open future and break up a formerly closed circle of reciprocity. Solvency and insolvency, the capacity and incapacity to pay circulate to the same extent and guarantee the continued functioning of the system by ensuring that every transaction raises the prospect of an indefinite number of further transactions. (Vogl, 2015: 53–54)

As possession of the token brings satisfaction, there is, on the one hand, high demand and readiness of giving things and services for such a token. And as the token's core is not its material substance, but the presently non-material entities of an imagined future for its receiver and the promise of this future made by the giver, the token itself can easily be multiplied and spread. The important point is that people driven by such ideas relate toward each other and toward the outer world in a completely different way than people without them. They are part of an economy of promises, where promises are inscribed (Akrich, 2000) into tangible objects such as cash or cattle and where these tangible objects are not simply treated as the carriers of these promises, but as the agents fulfilling them.

The effect of this inscription is twofold: it is described in Marx's analysis of money as capital, but it is present in the cattle of pastoral societies, too. First, the tangible objects swallow up the social relations that are inscribed into them. Second, as its relational content is thus hidden in the object, the multiplication of this object is attributed to its alleged quality of self-expansion, which thus defines the future as the ultimate meaning of the present.

Beckert (2016) explores the impact of “imagined futures” on the dynamics of capitalism and coins the term “fictional expectations” in order to argue that the fictional is by no means the absence of something in actual social “reality.” Quite to the contrary, fictional expectations are highly effective forces through which actors orient themselves to each other to produce the present reality of capitalism.

Actors act as if the future were going to develop in the way they assume it will, and as if an object had the qualities symbolically ascribed to it. (Beckert, 2016: 10)

The people who actively participate in an economy of capital hold or at least emphasize and tell each other that their capital's quality of self-expansion lies in the nature (or “materiality”) of the capital object. Marx's analysis of capital's hidden social nature, by contrast, sought to elucidate how such an idea of capital's self-expansion concealed a whole configuration of social relations within which some appropriated the fruits of work of others. Growth generated by use (i.e., investment) of capital thus did not stem from the supposed miracle of self-expansion, but from exploitation.

The two perspectives seem to sit in polar opposition, but there are two questions calling for their combination. First, the level of growth that can be generated from a certain capital object depends on the system of social relations within which it is contained, but that it disguises. The productivity that a capital object exhibits thus depends on the relations of property and exchange that are built around it. How can this connection be grasped?

Second, any object, regardless of its material qualities, can become capital when people succeed in building a certain system of exchange around it—a system of exchange that makes at least some feel they are profiting from a seemingly miraculous capacity of self-expansion. In the case of fiat money or other kinds of promises, even intangible objects represented by symbolic forms can become capital. However, the objects that actually become capital under specific historical circumstances do so—that is the assumption here exposed—because their object qualities make them suitable for such purpose under then prevailing technical and social conditions. They do not do so, because they have the capacity of self-expansion, but because they appear or are made to appear as having this quality. How this works exactly is a matter of social analysis.

The concept of capital I would like to use for this purpose contains eight key elements:

tangible or intangible objects that people tell each other are capable of self-expansion;

tangible or intangible objects that are acquired for their own sake and hoarded;

the capacity of self-expansion in objects being a matter not of the objects themselves but of their entanglement in social relations of property, work, and exchange;

the movement of such objects in space and time as the practice that creates the social meaning of these objects, hence their relevance to social actors, hence their seeming capacity of self-expansion;

a method of rationalizing or accounting for the assumed capacity of self-expansion by a system of belief that “depoliticizes” growth by emphasizing either an object's inner generative power or forces outside society;

a socially shared conviction that striving for self-expanding objects is a principal road to happiness;

a lead function of self-expanding objects upon which the economy and society depend more generally;

a scale effect by which the total number of individual acts of exchange create an external world (of obligations, pressures, products, etc.) that the actors perceive to be the world in which they live and in which they have to live.

Without contesting the specificity of capitalism and its capital as a historical formation, the concept of capital shall here be used heuristically and exploited for the anthropological understanding of pastoral society and its cattle. The goal is explicitly not to make an argument for an allegedly universal economic logic within humanity across all time and culture (Schareika et al., 2021), but to enlighten the diversity of economic logic by using “capital” as a “sensitizing” concept. ²

For the case of pastoral nomads in Africa, it is too obvious what has to count as their capital: cattle. When Marx would say, “Every owner of money ‘carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket’” (cited after Dodd, 2014: 51; Marx, [1857/58] 1983: 90), we can state for pastoral nomads: Every pastoralist owner of cattle carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, at the tip of his herding stick. I will use the term cattle-capital in order to specify this social and ideational dimension of cattle in pastoral societies.

A word of caution needs to be considered before moving along this line. According to Hart and Sperling (1987), it would be an ironic lapse (of vulgar materialism) if money-capital's seeming capacity to increase by itself were identified with cattle-capital's capacity to increase by itself because cattle did not multiply only seemingly but in actual numbers by sexual reproduction. Money-capital, by contrast, would not be fertile as bull and cow; it would be seemingly fertile by masking social relations of exploitation, hence a mechanism for its unequal redistribution.

Hart and Sperling's point is tricky because they thoughtfully hint at a logical pitfall only to ignore it the next moment. They are perfectly right in making the argument that cattle's capacity to naturally increase by sexual reproduction has nothing to do with money-capital's property of self-extension that, in reality, is a social arrangement. The problem with the argument, however, is that the sexual life of beasts, too, is not a social or economic affair among humans anyway. A pastoral nomad's problem is not simply that animals multiply; his problem is that they multiply as his property where “his property” denotes a particular social relation between this herder and other social actors and not between him and cows roaming and multiplying in the bush. It is the capacity of cattle to increase as property within a system of social relations that makes them cattle-capital. ³ This capacity, in addition to depending on cattle's natural reproduction, also crucially depends on their function as a medium of exchange and payment or unit of sharing within a group of social actors. The practice of exchange, payment, and sharing of cattle creates the very system of social relations within which cattle can exist and multiply as the property of successful social actors. Cattle-capital's capacity of self-extension in pastoral society, therefore, builds on an “illusion” similar to that of money-capital in capitalism: It is the effect of a social system of wealth and labor distribution.

The work of cattle-capital

To understand how cattle-capital thus conceived, works in pastoral society, one has to look at its specific relation with human beings. Let us start with money-capital in capitalism, though, to develop this point. It has been pointed out that, in capitalism, human workers are reduced to cost factors. The connection of a worker to an enterprise is a solvable contract that covers a well-defined and partial realm of that worker's existence: his capacity to work (physically and mentally) within a certain timespan. The contract may put further rights and obligations into the employer–employee relationship, but there is always a part in the worker's existence that the contract does not cover. In this part, he can enjoy freedom or edge on the limits imposed by obligations from other sources. His social identity and his accountability, therefore, are highly variable.

Money-capital in capitalism thus does not appropriate human beings in their entire social existence. There is a strong moral reaction and at times legal action when money-capital poaches into the territory of freedom, justice, dignity, or governance schemes outside “the economy.” Well-known examples are organ trafficking, paying surrogate mothers for babies, conversion of prison sentence into monetary penalty or buying of offices that only election, knowledge, or spiritual learning can legitimately secure.

Cattle-capital in pastoralism, by contrast, does appropriate the entire social existence of human beings (here, the concept of cattle as “total social phenomena” fits very well again). The social system of sharing and exchange and hence of conversion of cattle-capital into humans and back is the segmentary lineage. And the segmentary lineage embraces the human being entirely. Anything a person does, regardless of the sphere of social activity, constitutes what his or her lineage does. Any act of social practice, therefore, transcends the individual actor and becomes the act of his lineage mates as well. When your brother is a liar or a sluggard, you risk to be seen as a liar or a sluggard yourself. This social force creates an emotional pressure (of shame—semtuɗum) that makes people constantly monitor the behavior of their fellows and take action to bring it in line with the values of the lineage (Schareika, 2024). As a last resort, people are put under boycott or are definitely suspended from the lineage to make their “misbehavior” no longer that of the group (Schareika, 2010a). Other than money-capital in capitalism, then, cattle-capital in pastoralism does not produce a relation of contract and partial overlap of two people's social lives, but one of unity and identity (Hutchinson, 1996).

The segmentary lineage mirrors the idea of capital's self-extension and growth in another language: A lineage cannot be, it can only expand. Whatever past glory a lineage name may stand for, the day you cannot see it expand, it is dead and gone; only the weakest members of the lineage, the new-borns that are announced through daily talk and ritual to the group, invest the strongest, the elders, with their ultimate power to act—the certitude that “they” will still be around in the future. Just as with capital, expansion is not simply the potential and option of a lineage, but its necessity. And just as cattle-capital cannot extend by sexual reproduction, lineage-people cannot do so either. It is here that we come to the core of the pastoral social system with cattle as its capital. Cattle-capital is invested into the conferment of a lineage identity onto human beings, thus allowing the lineage to expand. In the very process, born and to-be-born grass-eating ungulates are turned into the social state of property as which they can increase in a socially meaningful way.

To summarize, money-capital is the medium of social practice in the market as a social system of contract making. Cattle-capital is the medium of social practice in the lineage as a social system of unity and identity making. As the lineage has to expand in order to exist, also its capital, cattle, has to constantly expand.

The capitality of cattle

Now, what is it that makes cattle an asset, allowing the ownership and control of humans within a lineage structure (note that this ownership and control is not absolute; it is over humans as long as they are part of the lineage—but they can leave or be made to leave the lineage)? Just as with money-capital, it is the combination of private property and a fragile and suspense-packed relationship between its potentials of use in exchange and a stubborn abstention from that use.

Herders are hoarders par excellence and masters of one of humanity's most fascinating contradiction in terms: by accumulating wealth (capital), they produce relative scarcity. While incessantly roaming through the bush, economically speaking, nomads immobilize the purchasing power of their cattle to the extreme. Actually living animals, therefore, are always scarce when they are needed for some kind of exchange. Nomads do not use their herd primarily to take animals of blood and bones from it. They rather create from it the likes of financial tools in modern capitalist markets in the form of shares and promises in animals within the pastoral lineage.

A cow is a particular kind of asset in that, for one, you can take it as a presently existing grazer and give it away in exchange. What you can do for two, however, is to invoke an imaginary future where this presently existing grazer has converted rains that are still to fall and grass that is still to grow into a big herd of many, many cows. The second is the nomad's major business. His herd is capital because it is a fund from which imaginary cows can be generated and given out as promises to people. The capacity of cattle-capital to extend by itself and make a person rich does not simply lie in its capacity to exponentially multiply by sexual reproduction, but by providing a basis for the generation of promises on that exponential multiplication as a means of social exchange.

At this point, we have to note a most important feedback loop that links the ideal realm of an imagined future with the material realm of present cattle wealth such that the former can become an effective social force. The nomad's presently standing herd of cattle, its presently observable level of performance, and its embodied testimony of successful herd management in the past is a necessary condition for the acceptance of promised instead of actual cows from it. In the end, a perfect contradiction appears as the basis of contract in nomadic lineage life: The less a herder is willing to give out living animals from his herd, the more frugal he is, the more confident potential partners are that the “animals” he gives out on promise for the future will turn into the animals they eventually shall receive. Thus, the less you give in the present, the higher rated are the promises that you will give in the future.

Gazing at a cow, a stereotypical university scholar intellectually leaning toward positivism and socially interacting not through cattle will discern one animal body standing on four hooves. Possibly, he or she also notices features in her environment that constitute a risk or a chance for her physical well-being. A pastoral nomad, by contrast, intellectually focusing toward the signs of hidden potentials and socially tethered to a lineage, will see this cow together with its ramifying progeny.

In a social world where everybody sees presently standing cattle as a source and therefore credible token of an infinitely expanding future world full of calves and great-grandchildren, this airy stream of collective imagination becomes an extremely hard currency. When nomads within the lineage social system use cattle in social exchange, they gain access not simply to animals standing in their herd, but to an immense pastoral mirror maze where the imagined clones of a cow—representing her to-be-born calves (the Woɗaaɓe name the calves after their mother)—are tradeable assets. For nomads, the ordinary marketplace is not such a fantastic mirror maze, because only the social force of the witnessing lineage and not a (written) legal contract constitutes a validation for articulated promises of cows (Schareika, 2010b).

To work as capital, an object has to be perceivable at two mutually reinforcing levels of reality. The one is a bodily existence of that object, accessible to the senses and facilitating positivist methods of verification (particularly seeing and touching it). The second is the infinitely cloneable image of that object accessible to the imagination of people and facilitating commercial methods of selling dreams. The two levels are systematically connected. The bodily existing object is produced because the people who give something for its image finally want to see that image materialize. The imagination by which an object can expand by itself and incessantly multiply can only fly when examples and experience prove that such flight has a real destination and point of grounding.

This seems, by the way, why capitalism is often discussed in the idiom of magic (Moeran and Waal Malefyt, 2018). For a conjuring trick to work, there must be something that is so indisputably real that the magician gets the chance to make the transformation process and the effect the indisputably real object is supposed to cause, appear as equally real.

Cattle are quite convincing as a form of capital, as their ramification and therefore exponential increase in the future is a scenario immediately accessible to the mind. Imagine two herders, as I have encountered them in the Woɗaaɓe savannah lands, sitting before the herd of well-fed, digesting, and moaning cattle, one saying toward the other: “You see the cow with its calf over there? When this calf gets pregnant for the first time its calf is for you.” The message refers to an event 3–4 years from its utterance, but its socially binding effect is instantly there.

The material profit out of capital, thus, is neither the images of wealth (although the saying goes: anticipation is the greatest joy) nor the materialization of these images in the future. It is rather the things and services the capital owner gets in exchange for the promises that he can generate from his stock of animals in the here and now. At times, these “things and services” are also their virtual clones in the form of promises. Think of Woɗaaɓe animal friendship. A man gives another man a heifer as a so-called attachment (haɓɓaye). With the animal goes the promise that its original owner bestows its next two or three calves on the recipient. In accepting the attached heifer, the recipient, in turn, implicitly reciprocates by the promise, not uttered on this occasion, that with the mother of by then three calves that stay for good in his herd, another calf or heifer will enter the herd of the original giver.

The day the original giver makes his words of friendship and trust to the recipient, nothing in terms of body mass is actually mobilized. The recipient has to go and fetch it, and a considerable delay can be between the 2 days, projecting the whole scenario even farther into future. But even when one heifer eventually changes herds for real, the two herders have, in their imagination, already mobilized something in the range of 10 image-animals (the heifer, its three calves, the heifer that returns with the original heifer, the three calves of that heifer, and the first-borns of the calves of the original heifer). We can start to think of a price tag for each individual lineage link in the currency of image-cattle or, to use our technical term, cattle-capital. Interestingly, foresight (hakkiilo) and patience (munyal) are Woɗaaɓe core virtues.

To summarize then, cattle are capital not because they are a stock that naturally grows by reproduction. They are capital because their progeny can be drawn from a distant but well-imaginable future into the present to be traded there in various forms of social exchange. The meaning of capital as things capable of expanding by themselves does not lie simply in these things but in the ability of humans to imaginatively anticipate this expansion by producing imagined clones of capital and using them as a means of exchange in the making of trades or social arrangements.

“Cattle” breed cattle

Cattle in pastoral lineage society are not simply cattle, but also “cattle,” the evocation of future cattle in speech and ritual. Similar to the financial tools of modern capitalism, “cattle” is, of course, unreal in that they do not exist materially. As a socially construed means of payment, however, they are absolutely real in that they are widely used to make social arrangements and let things and services circulate in various transactions (within the lineage) in the present. Whether a social actor is making profit from such capital investment depends on the balance of “cattle” that he has given out and cattle as well as goods and services that are coming in. The more indebted he is by giving out “cattle,” the more successful he was in squeezing other's future wealth into his present resources. In other words, he enjoys in the present what his transaction partners have set aside for delayed enjoyment in the future.

Yet, the repercussion of “cattle” (i.e., image-cattle) giving in pastoral lineage society on cattle (i.e., live cattle) keeping is crucial for the material situation and ultimately well-being of the people. Because herders make extensive use of “cattle,” they struggle to increase their actual cattle stock in real production. The connection is threefold. First, herders monitor each other's pastoral performance attentively, intensively, and hypercritically. The slightest sign of a lack of dedication to the cattle's well-being or of skills in promoting it, and a herder's credit rating goes down (paralleling the scenario in Benjamin Franklin's “Necessary hints to those that would be rich” from 1736 famously cited by Weber (2006)). Second, the giving out of “cattle” harnesses the pastoral labor provided by spouses and children as well as the security structure provided by lineage mates (brothers, cousins, paternal uncles and aunts, etc.), uterine bonds (cross-cousins, maternal uncles and aunts, etc.), and friends needed to care for cattle and protect them against loss and theft. Third, the recipients of “cattle” are around and do, of course, exercise pressure for these “cattle” to materialize.

Conclusion

In the anthropology of pastoral societies, the concept of capital has mostly been used to argue against the case of their culturally unique economy (Schneider, 1979). In this view, cattle are not different from other object-like assets; they are treated as categorically separate from human subjects who are acting upon them, and they are not seen as “one” with people (Hutchinson, 1996). The social systems within which they are, according to this view, rationally circulated are perceived as the likes of the market.

Seeing pastoralists such as the Woɗaaɓe in Niger as cattle-people rather than cattle-rearing people, I concur with the tenet that to them cattle are not simply a thing-like asset or source of livelihood, extrinsic to what makes them capable of acting and relating socially (cf. Ingold, 1986: 168). In order to overcome such dualism, I heuristically adopt the concept of capital as it holds the potential for a dialectical analysis that unites and separates at the same time the material, the relational, and the ideational dimensions of cattle in pastoralism and helps to elucidate how one translates into the other.

From this perspective one can see how cattle enter into human social practice and, through that practice, into the constitution of social actors (with their particular scope of agency as pastoralists) and of pastoral society altogether. It is of critical importance that in pastoral society, cattle are self-expanding objects (like money in capitalism), not in the sense that their sexual reproduction can generate exponential herd growth, but in the sense that from the supposition of this state of affairs, pastoralists can generate images of cattle (particularly in talk and ritual) that they give out to each other as shares and promises. Through this core element of social practice, pastoralists do not only get related to each other (within the lineage system); their working and living routines also get aligned with each other as everybody is expected to struggle for the coming into being of all those calves that, if yet unborn, have already defined the relations and statuses among their future owners. Agency is thus not simply the attribute of economically maximizing or environmentally adapting individual persons, but of a multi-stranded network of commitments hooked on the collective imagination of cattle that are yet to come.

Devised for the analysis of market-based economies, capital as a dialectical, relational, and processual concept thus helps to explore the social workings in pastoral lineage society, too, and to understand how cattle provide the material basis for pastoralists to socially construct, through imagined cattle, a future that structures their present.

For the anthropological study of pastoralism and the discipline of social anthropology in general, the argument put forward here is an invitation to find similar, alternative, or opposing ways of theorizing human–animal relations not as something that pastoralists “have,” but that constitutes what their social worlds and consequently they themselves are and are becoming. One challenge in this task is to avoid the formalistic dichotomies that the language of a management of livelihoods and resources facilitates. Pastoralists possess animals just as they are possessed by them. However, while a dialectical approach responds (avant la lettre) to the call for relational perspectives in anthropology and is a way to overcome static subject–object dichotomies, it allows doing so without switching into the elusive language of animals as actors—the other challenge. Such language may be effective as long as human and non-human “actors” are not naturalized but carefully conceptualized (abstracted) as units with symmetrical qualities that only come into existence as actors by being bound into a shared network of mutual relations (Latour, 2007). This means that the capacity to partake in the social practice of imagination and meaning-making has to be conceptually and methodologically denied all human and non-human units before they have become, through their very co-constitutive networking, “actors”; most importantly, this capacity must not be projected onto animals or inanimate objects (and this even in claiming to overcome anthropocentrism). The dialectical play with shifting abstractions and perspectives in Capital based on the philosophy of internal relations (Ollman, 2003) is possibly a helpful guide against the generation of dichotomies in the pursuit of overcoming them. Whatever theoretical language and mode of analysis be used, its value should be in getting anthropological research in touch with the empirical world and elucidating its state of being and becoming.

Another general thought conveyed by this article is that while anthropology has appropriately been turning toward the various forms, dynamics, and effects of global capitalist transformation (for pastoralism, e.g., Murphy and Ichinkhorloo, 2023, among many other contributions), it may remain rewarding to apply theory developed through the academic study of capitalism to non-capitalist societies or non-capitalist areas of social life and organization. While both perspectives shall eventually be combined, the study of pastoralism as social practice contained in the keeping of animals (and vice versa) rather than a practice of herd management alone can be seen as of continued interest to anthropological theory in general.