Entrepreneurship is commonly understood as the identification, evaluation, and execution of a market‐based opportunity to produce profits. But anthropological scholarship shows that capitalism, and market relations more broadly, cannot function without acts of distribution. Focusing on two different groups of entrepreneurs across the racialized socioeconomic divides of Cape Town, South Africa – White South African entrepreneurs in the city's central business district and Black South African entrepreneurs in the city's largest township of Khayelitsha – this article compares the distributive resources that entrepreneurs use to launch and maintain their businesses. I show that the productive capacity of all entrepreneurs depends upon the distributive resources that are available to them, gained primarily from access to intergenerational wealth or from lateral modes of reciprocity and social support. But more importantly, I demonstrate how these distributive resources and activities reproduce the structural economic inequalities of racial capitalism, which are rooted in South Africa's colonial and apartheid history. I conclude by discussing the implications that this has for the ways that anthropologists discuss the potential of distributive strategies among marginalized populations, as well as the way that scholars and policy‐makers understand the economic potential of entrepreneurial practice.

中文翻译：

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通过分配来重新思考企业家精神：南非企业家之间的分配关系和种族不平等的再现

企业家精神通常被理解为基于市场的生产机会的识别，评估和执行。利润。但是人类学研究表明，资本主义和更广泛的市场关系如果没有分配行为就无法运作。本文着眼于南非开普敦种族化的社会经济鸿沟的两个不同的企业家群体–该城市中央商务区的白人南非企业家和该城市最大的哈伊利特沙镇的黑人南非企业家–本文比较了企业家们的分配资源用于启动和维持其业务。我表明，所有企业家的生产能力都取决于他们可利用的分配资源，这些资源主要来自获得代际财富或互惠和社会支持的横向模式。但更重要的是 我展示了这些分配资源和活动如何重现种族资本主义的结构性经济不平等现象，这种不平等现象根源于南非的殖民和种族隔离历史。最后，我讨论了这对人类学家讨论边缘化人群中分配策略的潜力以及学者和政策制定者理解创业实践的经济潜力的方式的影响。