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A Cultural Analysis of the Economy of Affection and the Uncaptured Peasantry in Tanzania

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Extract

Is the ‘economy of affection’, as suggested by Goran Hyden, the key factor determining social relations in East Africa and elsewhere? According to this thesis, both villagers and city-dwellers are tied together in webs of kinship and tribal obligation that mitigate against the accumulation of wealth or capital necessary for the formation of either industrial modes of production or class-based societies. Hyden claims that the high values placed on personal relationships are dependent upon ‘a peasant mode of production’, and that, in the case of Tanzania, their persistence and perseverance has been the most significant factor inhibiting economic development. In short, the ‘smallness’ of the peasantry is a source of power.

Type
Review Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

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25 The newness of the city in East Africa means that it is not possible to say whether the generation now being born there will maintain social networks rooted in a peasant lifestyle–or, in reverse, whether the economy of affection can persist in an urban environment without strong rural-urban migration.

26 Julius Nyerere has written extensively about the disadvantages of capitalism in an African context in a number of political documents, of which The Arusha Declaration and TANU's Policy on Socialism and Self-Reliance (Dar es Salaam, 1967) is the best known.Google Scholar

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