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

Abstract

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