SMALLSTOCK AS CASH CROP, SMALLSTOCK AS HABBANAYI: FULBE EXCHANGES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Abstract

Pastoralist Fulbe have always exchanged livestock with each other as loans, and with cultivators for grain and other commodities. Today, because of their quicker growth and easier convertibility into cash, smallstock have become the slush funds of pastoralist households. Bucks and rams buy food and commodities, but young nannies and ewes still enter customary loan circuits that cement social networks and facilitate access to resources. The dialectic between communal and market systems and the growing network that connects pastoralist economies to global economies confounds old theories, and calls for more research and new theory that explains the networks and chains of these local, national, and global connections.