I
Three recent entries in Ian Scoones’ blog, Zimbabweland, raise for me a way of rethinking the longstanding notion in pastoralist studies of “in-kind compensation,” now within the current settings.[1]
One entry talks about contributing goats instead of cash to a rural rotational savings group. Another spoke of parents who contribute their management time and skills to rural projects whose laborers are paid by the parents’ children. A third entry talks about people repaying their creditors with tobacco rather than cash.
Those who point to the relentless spread of the cash economy can and do point to herders who were once compensated in the form of, say, a calf or lamb, but are now paid in the monetized form of wages. I want to suggest that the payment-in-kind in the preceding paragraph need not be seen as reversion to past practices because the cash economy has somehow failed, but because in-kind transfers practiced in the past are fit-for-purpose in the cash economy as well.
II
I work in the field of infrastructure studies. A shift from automated (electronic, digital) operations to manual, hands-on operations triggered by an incident is often described as reverting to the older practice or earlier technology. The telemetry shows an automatic shut-off isn’t working; a crew member is sent into the field to turn it on/off by hand or other means.
But it is misleading to think of that example as reversion to past practices. Why? Because the shifts from (more) automated to (more) manual operations are with respect to the today’s system and their standards of system reliability, not the earlier ones. The system in my example hasn’t failed because it resorts to manual operations. Indeed, the latter are instead an essential part of keeping today’s system continuously reliable, even during turbulent events.
III
A perfect example of in-kind transfers having this function in the cash economy comes from one of the blogs: “The flow of food and other agricultural goods (vegetables, meat and so on) from land reform areas is significant, and essential for food security and social protection in urban areas of Zimbabwe, as well as in communal areas where many settlers originally came from.”
If I am reading the blog entry correctly, food security won’t be as reliable as it is without these in-kind transfers–even leaving open the question of whether food security in the past was more or less reliable than now.
IV
But what about rural herders and pastoralists in particular? Of course, there is increased commodification and monetization of practices from the rural past to the rural present. But that is not to the point here.
Even where there are waged herders, it still may be, e.g., women or others provide unpaid labor with respect to caring for pregnant, calving or injured livestock.[2] More generally (and I could be wrong), the persistence of in-kind transfers within a cash economy may be more about local justice than it is about the global injustices of the cash nexus.[3]
[1] See “Financing agriculture: what are the challenges and opportunities in Zimbabwe?,” “Managing money: savings and investment in Zimbabwean agriculture,” and “The changing remittance economy in Zimbabwe” (accessed online at, among other links, https://zimbabweland.wordpress.com/2024/01/29/managing-money-savings-and-investment-in-zimbabwean-agriculture/)
[2] Linda Pappagallo (2024). Recasting tenure and labour in non-equilibrium environments: Making the case for “high-reliability” pastoral institutions. Land Use Policy 138: 5 (accessed online at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837723005008)
[3] I touch upon how the practices of local justice systems remain highly salient in globalized settings in http://When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 