The colonial process introduced Tshidi not merely to wage work, but also to other features of commodity production-most notably, money, the supreme standard of value, and the clock, the measure of human labor time. In South Africa, as elsewhere, the experience of "time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism" (Thompson 1967) went together. But the forms of European capitalism were not implanted into a vacuum. The way in which Tshidi set about making sense of the whole process was mediated, as it always is, by an existing set of cultural categories. Indeed, the experience of wage labor was of needs to be filtered through indigenous notions of human activity and the nature of work, just as money had to be understood in relation to local concepts of value, embodied, especially, in cattle (Comaroff and Comaroff n.d.[a] ). This, however, was not a confrontation between a primordial folk tradition and the modern world. Quite the contrary, Tswana "tradition" (setswana) was to be fashioned during the course