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

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.