Articulations of kinship and capital in Southern African anthropology: revisiting Wolpe and his critics

Abstract

In the 1970s and 1980s, the anthropology of Southern Africa produced rich concepts and debates on the relationship between kin-based domestic groups in rural peripheries and the core dynamics of capitalist development. These issues were later sidelined by the culturalist turn away from systematic social analysis. Here I revisit (a) Harold Wolpe’s seminal 1972 piece on the articulation of capitalist and precapitalist modes of production, and (b) contemporaneous anthropological critics who insisted on a more granular and diachronous understanding of articulations of capitalist and domestic-group dynamics. Those debates have continuing relevance for understanding articulations of capitalist social forms such as wages and labour- power with the dynamics of household and kinship. I approach those articulations by attending to questions of time at various scales, with a focus on the structuring mediations of the wage as a capitalist social form.