The Cultural Topography of Wealth: Commodity Paths and the Structure of Property in Rural Lesotho

Discussions of poverty and wealth often assume that wealth is a measurable substance, the possession of which can be indexed on a linear scale, from high to low. This article contests this implicit assumption, arguing that wealth‐holding is always complicated by the fact that exchange is culturally regulated, and guided along approved paths. An analysis of domains of wealth in a rural Lesotho village illustrates the point. Wealth‐holding here is clearly unequal, but cultural, legal, and moral paths governing economic exchanges between different categories of property mean that the holdings of different households are in important ways incomparable, and that their wealth is different in kind, and not only in amount. The attempt to locate households economically in such a setting thus requires mapping a politicocultural “topography” of channels facilitating the flow of commodity exchange, dams obstructing, slowing, or filtering it, and furrows temporarily diverting the flow from one channel or dam into another. A meaningful ranking of wealth‐holding must include a cultural analysis of commodity paths and the structure of property.