"این جوانان گاوچران فکر می کنند فقط خودشان مرد هستند": بازتوزیع مردسالاری در کافه های گاتلنگ

In the 19th century the BaKgatla polity was a chiefdom with a redistributional economy based on mixed agriculture. Sorghum beer was symbolic not only of the patrilineal core of their descent system and of the ideologies of reciprocity and redistribution, but also of masculinity and patriarchal control. With the establishment of a market economy, an industrial brewery and individual access to income, both beer and the act of drinking have been symbolically reconstructed. The ideology of redistribution was well suited to the support of the BaKgatla gerontocracy via alcohol production and consumption. The limits on production and consumption of beer inherent in the agricultural cycle and the control of young men's access by elders made alcohol an effective symbol of managerial competence from the limited context of household authority to that of the chiefdom as a whole. Today, young men's greater control of cash income has given them access to beer beyond the control of elders. As a result, the contrasting ideology of market exchange and competitive distribution of beer has contributed to the degradation of the power of seniors. After reviewing the historical background, this paper explores those changes. It argues that while the observed infrastructural changes have had a predictable impact on drinking behaviors and the symbolic structure of “seniority/masculinity”, constructions of the “masculine community” in BaKgatla bars demonstrate continuity in key areas of mens’ identities. If as anthropologists we see obvious discontinuities in behavior and ideology, the BaKgatla build selective bridges to “tradition” which seemingly ground the experience of change in relatively seamless continuity.

In 1984, at the close of my first year's research in Mochudi, Botswana, I asked the women who had tolerated hour upon hour of my interviews what topic they would like for me to pursue when I returned for further research. Repeatedly, I was told that alcohol consumption needed investigation. I was not particularly surprised. Indeed, earlier in that year I had asked questions about a growing reticence regarding marriage and was commonly told, “Why would I want to get married? A man will just drink my earnings.” (Suggs, 1987)1 It is not that the women are concerned about alcoholism becoming a huge problem. The problem is not uncontrolled drinking; it is consistent — even if moderate — drinking in a cash economy. Elsewhere ( Suggs, 1996) I have suggested that the construction of gender in alcohol consumption among the BaKgatla presents the act of public drinking as definitionally masculine behavior and that men consider drinking to be a right ascribed in masculinity even if achieved by adulthood. From the women's perspective, the maintenance of that belief is simply wasteful in a cash economy. Also in keeping with “tradition”, they see alcohol consumption as a privilege earned (albeit by income rather than by age). If BaKgatla men and women are negotiating the relevance of tradition to gendered drinking patterns today, so too are the older men and the younger men contesting the terrain of appropriate age-graded consumption within the boundaries of masculinity. If the realities of “gendered alcohol consumption” center chiefly around the tradition of patriarchy and its maintenance, those of “age-graded alcohol consumption” center around the tradition of gerontocracy and its dissolution (Suggs, 1996). The first reflects the political and economic control of women's labor in the patrilineal descent system; the second reflects the power and control of linear elders established in redistribution. This paper explores the way that “drinking traditions” are made meaningful to changes in the age structure of masculinity and the way that traditions of masculinity are re-constructed in acts of public drinking. While the cash economy is largely responsible for framing the context in which such changes occur, the economy itself is made culturally meaningful by individuals opportunistically constructing continuity to a selective past. The data for this work derive from two separate year-long research periods: 1984–1985 and 1992. Most of the material from the earlier period is based on observations recorded in personal field notes and structured interviews with 60 women in the town of Mochudi, Botswana. Since that research period was dedicated to life-course analysis, the alcohol-related materials are incidental. The data from the more recent period were collected with alcohol use as the focus of analysis. They are based on an estimated 200 h of observation and conversation in the bars of Mochudi, augmented by interviews both structured and unstructured, as well as on opportune personal conversations outside of the formal bar context. It should be noted at the outset that Mochudi, located 40 miles from the capital city of Gaborone and the administrative/legislative center of Kgatleng district, is in very few ways representative of the nation of Botswana or its people as a whole. Mochudi is quite economically developed when compared to the more westward and more rural villages and towns. A relatively sizeable portion of its population works in Gaborone; paved roads span the quadrants of the town; it has banks, law offices, a district hospital, and numerous schools of all varieties save that of a university. It has a supermarket with frozen goods and produce from South Africa, as well as items imported from throughout the world. One can find coffee from Brazil, rice from Pakistan, soy sauce from China, and a population with sufficient economic means to warrant their presence via purchase. In the future, the more rural areas would make an interesting and important contrastive study to this one.

If there is a bitterness in an old man's comment that “these young chaps think they are just [real] men, too” there is as well an irony that I think is not lost on BaKgatla men young or old. It is the simple notion that public drinking is masculine. Whether their perspective demands of “real men” deep experiential knowledge or control of deep economic resources, comparatively few would contest the notion that “real” men drink and do so for the sake of better company with other “real” men. Both young and old know the changes of the shift from a redistributive agrarian economy to a wage labored cash economy. While some of the changes are unrecognizable as “tradition” to one, they are cast as continuity by the other; but in the notion that public drinking is a right of men, they stand on common ground. In the past, full masculinity was the result of lifelong growth. As one aged, so would one gain simultaneously experiential knowledge of value to those younger and increasing control of economic resources. With their conjunction came the full power of masculinity, a power which was exercised on behalf of self and family through redistribution to those junior. As the men gathered to drink together they did so as opposed to the women who grew the grain and made the beer. All were — in structure at least — in control. But, some were more capable of control than others. Vis a vis each other, some were more masculine. So, as the elders sat around a pot of beer and distributed to those present by seniority, all would have seen that the results of one's “less masculine” labor flow upward since the “more masculine” distribution of the labor and produce flows downwards. “Less masculine” respect flowed upward as “more masculine” control flowed down in the patriline. The cash economy put a premium on formal education rather than lifelong experiential wisdom, on competition of individuals rather than the cooperation of kin. Missions and syncretic churches, as well as the secular worldview of western science have offered alternatives to the power of ancestors. The seasonality of the agricultural production is being supplanted by the constancy of commodities. And against that background, the terrain of “tradition” is selectively landscaped in multiple dimensions by the people who inhabit it. One of those dimensions is that of gendered age. Today's elders see the continuity in masculine beer consumption; find discontinuity in the lack of respect and authority, downplaying the issue of resource control and distribution. The young see the continuity in masculine beer consumption, emphasizing the issue of resource control in masculinity as the basis for respect and authority. Today, men gather around a bar. The cash which allows them patronage validates their success in resource control. Respect flows not upward, but outward to the boundary of class, around the space in which distribution is self-oriented as a collective vision. Some are more manly than others in this scenario, too. But the gradations are based on competitive gains reinforced in individual consumption among other “real men”.