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6. Making Sense of Failure: Stories of Businessmen and Wealth
- University of Wisconsin Press
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This chapter deals with stories that people in Mayanka tell about businessmen who were unable to transform their riches into enduring wealth. Such men also failed to attain full personhood. The stories are typically discussed in informal circles when a man either dies young or experiences misfortune in his prime. They are in fact interpreted life histories, since they probe the reasons for the man’s fate by reviewing his life trajectory. They are moral stories in that the reason for a man’s downfall is found in the moral quality of his person and acts. Here I will compare stories about past and presentday businessmen whose unhappy fates were believed to be caused by the illegitimate means of enrichment these men pursued. I heard many such stories , but here I will present a few cases as representatives of different story types. This is because the stories were seldom idiosyncratic, except in their details; instead they followed certain quite schematic patterns. Examining these stories and their narrative idioms enables us to see how ambitious men’s moral value is discussed and how understanding of the contemporary life is constructed. 165 6 Making Sense of Failure Stories of Businessmen and Wealth The stories reveal that regardless of the Chagga people’s long familiarity with trading, even in the case of men is business often considered a more morally suspicious way of advancement than, for instance, education. The changing forms of men’s labor and enrichment form a background for these views. In the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s educated and salaried men were the most influential people in the lineages after the elders (S. F. Moore 1986, 216, 250, 289 –90, 305). In the mid-1990s, however, a widespread understanding was that the influence of uneducated men who engaged in business had become greater than that of educated and older men. Nevertheless, the fact that morally suspect propensities were also ascribed to earlier businessmen complicates the stories’relationship to the present. Rather than simply looking at these as stories that reflect political and economic changes, I will here analyze the moral and symbolic aspects of the narratives. Interpreted life histories are ways to problematize the social status and local influence of newly rich men. The stories are political insofar as they try to control changes in the status hierarchies and the actions of ambitious men. However, they should not be reduced to mere politics. Recurring concepts in the stories such as “staying”and “vanishing,”as well as “bought spirits ” and “businessmen,” are also used idiomatically to discuss the broader consequences of the changing possibilities of wealth-making for social continuity . The imaginative and the fantastic in the stories have to be given full significance as ways of expressing feelings and concerns and of interpreting present-day events by creatively applying and expounding older concepts and metaphors. Success stories about men were hardly ever told, even though I occasionally tried to solicit them. Failures seemed to offer much more raw material for moral reflection on present-day men. On the event of a sudden and unexpected death, the stories that emerge are in tension with and counter to the official, formalistic, and nondramatic life histories that are publicly read at funerals. These official histories are respectful and respectable . They attempt to deflect any speculation about possible abnormalities in the deceased’s life—and at the same time to ensure the deceased a restful sleep in the family grave and a respectable position in the home lineage. But the informal life histories unsettle the official truths. Any sudden advancement or affluence invites suspicions and speculation, but it seems that death or a reversal in fortunes confirms that there really had been something hidden or unseen worthy of speculation. Such events become moments when appearances fail and hidden realities become interpreted and reinterpreted through gossip. The informal stories keep histories alive and in motion; with new events, the life histories once told and put aside become discussed and reinterpreted anew. Whereas the stories about men were often clear (even logical), chronologically sequenced, or progressive accounts that were often told to me 166 Men [44.220.41.140] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:09 GMT) without any prompting, such stories were not told about women. When I tried to get people to tell stories about the fates of women, those stories would be much more fragmented and less clear than...