Paper short abstract:

Chronic economic uncertainty has seen social relations reach breaking point. One response is a turn to ritual: through a relentless schedule of ritual invoking the ancestors and other deities, Xhosa people attempt to secure investment in the rural home and sustain ties of reciprocity with urban kin.

Paper long abstract:

In the Eastern Cape, chronic economic uncertainty has seen social relations stretched to breaking point. Informants speak of a 'war between men and women'. While poverty, death in the shape of the 'axe' HIV/AIDS and suspicion stalk the land, and the project of building the umzi (homestead) falters, hope for the future and with it, trust between people, leaches away. One response to such uncertainty is a turn to ritual. Through a nearly relentless schedule of ritual activity which invokes the ancestors and the Christian deity in various forms, Xhosa people attempt to dam up trust, secure ongoing investment in the rural homestead and sustain ties of reciprocity both among rural people and between them and their urban kin. In this paper, I explore how - through their selective engagement with specific cultural norms - it is especially rurally-resident male heads of cattle-holding homesteads who endorse the use and exchange of cattle for consumption in ritual slaughter. I show that it is by rhetorically and practically linking ritual to the central cultural tropes of ukwakh'umzi [to build the home] and masincedisane [let us help each other] - and specifically by emphasising the 'homestead-strengthening' consumption of traditional beer and animals slaughtered in rituals - that older men and women seek to exercise some ritually sanctioned control over the differentiated, fragmented and fragile social and economic relationships at homestead and village levels.