bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
From Kinship to Common Descent: Four-Generation Genealogies among the Gusii
Authors: Mayer Iona 
Published: April 2006

Opening ParagraphThis paper is concerned with the limits to which exact genealogical tracing is JL carried among the Gusii, a Bantu-speaking people of western Kenya.At the time of field-work (1946–9) the Gusii were a moderately prosperous peasant people subsisting by hoe culture and stock raising. They were isolated between non-Bantu peoples (Luo, Kipsigis, Masai) in mountain country near the Kavirondo Gulf of Lake Victoria. They had no central authorities, except those introduced by the British colonial administration, and no central cult; they were not stratified either by rank or by marked differences of wealth. A segmentary descent system, and a common code of law regarding marriage and compensation, held them together as a common society (see P. Mayer, 1949 and 1950).
Social Consequences of Dia among the Berti
Authors: Holý Ladislav 
Published: April 2006

Opening ParagraphThe Berti, numbering about 25,000, inhabit the part of the Northern Darfur district round their traditional centre, Melit, which lies about thirty-five miles north-east of El Fasher, the capital of the Sudanese province of Darfur. Their original language belonged to the Middle Sahara group and was closest to the Zaghawa language, but for several generations now they have been arabized. They form the sedentary population of the dry steppe of Northern Darfur and depend on agriculture with pennisetum as the staple, on animal husbandry and on collecting gum from the Acacia verek, which they sell at the local markets. Another, probably larger, part of the Berti now live in Eastern Darfur, where they migrated during the last century under pressure from the expansion of the neighbouring Meidob into their original territory in Northern Darfur.
The Mäsqal-Pole: Religious Conflict and Social Change in Gurageland
Authors: Shack William A. 
Published: April 2006

Opening ParagraphIn An Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand, Professor Gluckman argued that in situations of conflict, pre-existing groups do not divide neatly into opposing halves, but that groups realign themselves according to the values, motives, and interests governing them at a given time; and that groups who are opposed when facing one situation may find themselves aligned when the nature of the situation differs. Similar studies of social change in Africa and elsewhere have further advanced Gluckman's contention. In all these studies the analytical procedure adopted was to interpret the situational behaviour of the actors in terms of the influence of the wider social system of which they were a part. However, a great deal of the ethnographic data anthropologists gather in the course of field research are derived from chance observations of social phenomena occurring in relatively unstructured situations within which the individuals involved have a wide range of choice in determining the way they interact with others. This paper is based upon just these sorts of ‘imponderable’ facts of Gurage life which, when first recorded in the field, appeared less clearly a part of what Malinowski once called ‘the real substance of the social fabric’ of a changing tribal society than they do now in retrospect. I attempt here to interpret the spontaneous and contradictory behaviour of individual Gurage and groups in the setting of an Ethiopian Christian religious ceremony known as Mäsqal. This analysis of situational behaviour is made in terms of selected aspects of historical or ‘processive’ social change in Gurageland, a tribal district in south-west Ethiopia.
The Royal Stools of Ashanti
Authors: Kyerematen A. 
Published: April 2006

IntroductionIn the Bampanasi Stool House of the Oyoko royals of Ashanti, now at Breman on the outskirts of Kumasi, ten black stools are preserved, arranged as shown in Fig. 1. There is also a bell representing the famous Golden Stool of Ashanti, which is regarded as the black stool of its first king, Nana Osei Tutu. I am grateful to the Asantehene, Nana Sir Osei Agyeman Prempeh II for permitting photographs of these stools to be taken, and for the invaluable information he has provided about them. The black stools are of historical importance, in that they commemorate the reigns of several of the Ashanti kings. They are also of great social significance, enshrining the patriotic sentiments of the people and serving as a bond between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born. This bond is the very essence of Akan culture.
Ancestor Propitiation Ceremonies in Sukumaland, Tanganyika
Authors: Tanner R. E. S. 
Published: April 2006

Opening ParagraphThe Sukuma, like many other African peoples, believe that the living and the dead are a continuous line, in which death is not an end but only a transformation within the history of the family. The lack of children means physical and spiritual extinction, since the ancestor spirits depend for their survival on remembrance in the minds of their descendants. The unity of the living and the dead is expressed in their ceremonies when ancestors are referred to by kinship terms more appropriate to the living, whereas the word for ancestor spirit (isamva; pl. masamva) is rarely used in propitiation although quite common in everyday conversation.
Le Principe de la Réciprocité dans le Mariage Nyende
Authors: Huber Hugo 
Published: April 2006

IntroductionLes Nyende, population agricole au nord-ouest du Dahomey, appartiennent au groupe des langues voltaïques. Leur nombre est d'environ 12.000. Ils sont divisés en dix-neuf clans dont les traditions orales et les coutumes actuelles révèlent des origines assez diverses. Pour des raisons historiques, géographiques ou rituelles certains d'entre eux se sont alliés, de sorte qu'ils se regardent mutuellement comme frères, ce qui, dans l'une ou l'autre de ces alliances, va jusqu'à la reconnaissance de la loi de l'exogamie. Avant le regroupement imposé par le régime Maga (1960), la répartition territoriale correspondait en majeure partie à la division clanique. A côté du chef de terre (uteŋ-yenɔ ou ussɔ-hadɔ) dont l'autorité est pratiquement limitée aujourd'hui au domaine rituel, et du vieux du lignage (ukwiεmɔ), il y a, depuis le temps des Français, le chef de village (ukwatɔ) qui, sous l'autorité du chef d'arrondissement, s'occupe des taxes et d'autres affaires d'administration locale.
The Arabs and Swahili Culture
Authors: Harries Lyndon 
Published: April 2006

Opening ParagraphSwahili culture can be roughly defined as the culture of the Swahili-speaking peoples of the East African coast whose activities show features of Perso-Arabian origin, features that are foreign to the culture of other Bantu peoples of East Africa. It cannot be described simply as Bantu culture plus Perso-Arabian elements, for some Swahilis have excluded from their way of life anything that can be labelled as Bantu; they may have Bantu blood, but their whole way of life is Muslim-Arabic.
An Outline of the Cosmology and Cult Organization of the Oyo Yoruba
Authors: Morton-Williams Peter 
Published: April 2006

Opening ParagraphThe structure of the Yoruba cosmos is broadly evident in their creation myth and can be discerned as presupposed behind many other myths, praise songs of the gods, and other symbolic utterances. These formulations help us, too, to construct a more detailed model of this cosmos than is available in any single mythical form. A model worked out from these sources is preferable methodologically to one derived from interrogating informants to get at their personal ideas and formulations, because these myths and liturgical expressions are relatively permanent features of Yoruba culture and are the materials for informants' constructs. Furthermore, it is not on intellectual grounds that myths survive and one must therefore beware of jockeying informants into making untypical intellectual abstractions from them and then using these abstractions as one's main primary source material. However interesting in themselves their own attempts at a generalized statement of the cosmos may be, informants can better be used to clarify over-condensed or allusive passages in myths and to check one's own interpretations, and again, to supply evidence for the details of the analysis through, for instance, their assertions about the locations of the various gods, spirits, and the ancestors.
Two Studies of Ifa Divination
Authors: Morton-Williams Peter , Bascom William , McClelland E. M. 
Published: April 2006

Opening ParagraphTo the Yoruba, divination is of great concern, as the means by which they discover and hope to influence the changes in their relationships with the gods and ancestors and other spirits in their complex cosmos, and so to gain their aid in their pursuit of health and good fortune. They employ a number of divinatory techniques. The one that yields the fullest information is the system of geomancy known as Ifa, for which there are three procedures of varying complexity, the two most complex being used by professional diviners (babalawo). The Ifa oracle is animated by a deity named Orunmila, but also often called Ifa.
Two Marriage Forms in the Comoro Islands: An Investigation
Authors: Shepherd Gillian M. 
Published: April 2006

Opening ParagraphComorian marriage must strike anyone with even the most passing knowledge of the Islands as surprising. All men strive for the lavish, expensive and lengthy marriage form known asndola nkuu(great marriage) orharusi ya ada(customary marriage) even though a perfectly respectable simple form,mna daho(little house), is all that moslem customary law requires.Mna dahomarriages cost almost nothing:adamarriages may cost as much as £5000. Why invest such a large sum in this way? What, in plain anthropological language, are the functions ofadamarriage?
The Interpretation of Symbolism in Wan Female Initiation
Authors: Ravenhill Philip L. 
Published: April 2006

The ProblemAnthropological analyses of cultural symbolism have often benefitted fron the commentary of gifted informants who have provided ethnographers with detailed symbolic exegeses of the rites and ceremonies of their societies. Ethnographers have usually signalled with enthusiasm such received help and offered profound thanks to their philosophically reflective friends, but at the same time few, if any, ethnographers have indicated a willingness to restrict their data to those offered by such exegetes. In part this reticence is perhaps due to the fact that reliance upon the knowledge or philosophical reflexions of ritual or religious virtuosi raises the question of a possible disparity between the explicit ‘theological’ or cosmological knowledge controlled by certain experts and the implicit working knowledge of practical religion as understood by the majority of its practitioners (cf. Leach 1968). Thus there arises the problem of the subject matter of investigation: should anthropological analyses of symbolism be directed toward explicit specialized knowledge or implicit common knowledge? Furthermore, is articulated knowledge part of the solution of symbolic analysis or is it more properly part of the data (Sperber 1975:x, passim)?
Savoir voir et savoir vivre: les croyances à la sorcellerie en Côte d'Ivoire
Authors: Augé Marc 
Published: April 2006

Opening ParagraphOn n'est pas toujours certain, en anthropologie, lorsqu'on étudie un secteur de la vie ou de l'activité sociale, d'avoir défini pour autant un objet de recherche. Le phénomène isolé, privilégié, peut n'être qu'un aspect fluctuant ou même éphémère d'une réalité plus vaste. Seule la compréhension de cette réalité permettrait de situer à sa juste place le phénomène privilégié; le trajet inverse est impossible. Cette remarque me paraît rejoindre celles que formule E. Leach dans Rethinking Anthropology lorsqu'il invite ses collègues à ne pas ‘collectionner les papillons’, à ne pas multiplier les typologies—et par exemple (mais ceci est une autre histoire) à ne pas distinguer entre différents types de filiation aux dépens de la seule distinction pertinente, selon lui, qui oppose la filiation a l'alliance.
The staff of life: Food and female fertility in a West African society
Authors: Weil Peter M. 
Published: April 2006

Opening ParagraphThis paper is an examination of the dynamics of the kanyalangkafo, a cross-cultural fertility association. It first examines the changing economic and social environment of the Mandinka to clarify the factors relevant to the spread and acceptance of the fertility association.The second part of the paper describes the history and organization of the association.In the last part of the paper, the activities of the association and the ritually inverted sexual behaviour of its members are analyzed. Social integration is shown to be brought about in the presence of and partly because of the association and its activities. The integrative results include the manner in which the association organizes women and the social environment within which associational behaviour occurs. Models stemming from analyses of ritually inverted sexual behaviour are found to be generally supported by data from the Mandinka case.
Atuot ethnicity: an aspect of Nilotic ethnology
Authors: Burton John W. 
Published: April 2006

Opening ParagraphEvans-Pritchard's assessment of what contemporary social anthropologists might call ‘contextual ethnicity’ has offered many with no first-hand research experience in this region of Africa a prerogative in which some apparently revel: to opine on the bizarre and the obvious. Examples of the former persuasion are typified by articles which, with a passion for ‘theoretical purity’, openly declare an indifference to ethnographic fact (Newcomer 1972). Others attempt to account for the present distribution of pastoral Nilotes in the Southern Sudan as though ‘tribal’ groups and their tract of migration possessed the physical properties of pool balls pelleted across the swampland of the Upper Nile Basin (e.g. Southall 1976). Some must surely have had moment to wonder if the Nuer really exist at all. Of course they do, as even the uninterested tourist could note by observing the ethnic composition of labour groups in Khartoum, but only because so do the Dinka, who live north, south and west of Nuerland.
The origins of the Borana gada system
Authors: Hallpike C. R. 
Published: April 2006

Opening ParagraphGADA, or generation-grading, systems are found only in a few Cushitic-speaking societies of Ethiopia. Unlike a true age-grading system a gada system is distinguished by the rule that all sons follow their fathers in the sequence of grades at a single fixed interval, irrespective of their actual age. In order to maintain the constancy of this interval, the length of time which a man spends in each grade is fixed at a specific number of years, as is the number of grades separating him from his father. It is evident, therefore, that in such systems the various grades will include at the more senior levels young boys and adolescents together with mature men, a confusion that will not arise in true age-grading systems.
The diffusion of age-group organization in East Africa: a reconsideration
Authors: de Wolf J. J. 
Published: April 2006

Opening ParagraphIn 1962 LeVine and Sangree attempted to answer the question of why some Bantu-speaking peoples in Kenya and Tanzania had adopted the age-group organization and associated rituals of their non-Bantu neighbours, while other Bantu peoples in the same region had not. They examined the Tiriki, who adopted the age-set system of the Kalenjin-speaking Terik, and the Gusii, who are also Bantu and who were also in close contact with the Kalenjin-speaking Kipsigis, but who did not borrow their age-group organization . The authors suppose that the age-group organization of the Kalenjin and Maasai had military functions and that their Bantu neighbours whom they attacked and defeated may have decided to copy this institution, because they would have attributed Kalenjin and Maasai success in warfare to it (LeVine and Sangree 1962:97-8).
Class and kinship in Sudanese urban communities
Authors: Lobban Richard A. 
Published: April 2006

Opening ParagraphThis article represents some of the results of three field research studies of urbanization in the Sudan. The research has focussed on two urban communities in the Khartoum area, those known as Tuti Island1 and Burn al Manas. The first study was conducted as doctoral research in 1970–72; a brief re-study took place in 1975, and most recently research was conducted in 1979–80. This ten-year period was a time during which major economic and demographic change occurred in the urban Sudan. A recent study in the capital city area of the Sudan by urban planners has concluded that ‘any sociologist or social anthropologist who approaches the problems of urbanization in Africa today has the privilege of witnessing a social transformation on a grand scale’ (MEFIT, 1974: I). I have already reported on some aspects of change in class structure, marriage, kinship and the family (Lobban, 1971, 1975, 1979), but these earlier articles have relied chiefly on earlier fieldwork. Among studies of culture change in general, and urbanization in particular, it is unfortunately uncommon to have data from replicated, longitudinal studies. In this respect this article may make an especially useful contribution.
Oedipus Rex and Regina: The Queen Mother in Africa
Authors: Cohen Ronald 
Published: April 2006

Opening ParagraphThe importance of female title holders, especially that of the Queen Mother, is widespread throughout the state systems of Africa. Royal monarchical power and authority is often linked to a senior woman of the royal line, sometimes a real mother, sometimes not, who is the female counterpart to the male royal person. One writer has suggested that in Africa the monarchy itself involves not simply a King but rather a royal couple—the King and his mother—so that centralized authority is in fact inherent in a mother-son ‘royal duo’ (de Heusch, 1962: 145). The Queen Mother in such a view is not simply ‘important’ but an essential ingredient in the nature of royal power and authority, and therefore of centralized government as this has developed historically on the continent.
The Social Structure of the Nyakyusa: a Re-evaluation
Authors: Mckenny Michael G. 
Published: April 2006

Opening ParagraphThe Nyakyusa of south-western Tanzania have received very substantial ethnographic coverage. Nonetheless there remain certain gaps in our knowledge of this society. The field-work by Dr. Godfrey Wilson and Professor Monica Wilson was done largely in the mid 1930s before structural-functional analysis had achieved its present refinement and was evidently influenced by Malinowski who was not himself known for a concern in sociological analysis per se. In these studies of the Nyakyusa, values, beliefs, and ritual were a main object of attention; they present Nyakyusa society as though it were a direct result of the Nyakyusa value system, although the actual workings of the society have been left rather obscure. It is presented as coherent, values and social organization reinforcing each other at every point. But internal evidence contradicts this picture, and on a priori grounds it may also be seen that there were several structural pressures towards incoherence, or rather, conflict between the actual development of social organization through time and those presumably timeless values reputed to maintain it.
Aspects of the Ashanti Northern Trade in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Arhin Kwame 
Published: April 2006

Opening ParagraphI Mean by the Ashanti northern trade Ashanti market exchanges with Hausa, Mande, and Mossi caravan traders at the town of Bonduku (eastern Ivory Coast), Salaga (northern Ghana) before 1874, and at Kintampo (Brong-Ahafo Region of Ghana) 1874-92. The main facts relating to this trade are well known to students of Ashanti. This paper attempts (i) to establish the basis of the Ashanti trading relationship with the northern peoples; (ii) to make distinctions between types of Ashanti traders, the scale and results of their operations, and to describe the production and distribution of kola from Ashanti; and (iii) finally to draw attention to those features of the nineteenth-century trade which contribute towards the understanding of what Tordoff(1965: 187) has called ‘the emergence and phenomenal growth of the cocoa industry’ in the early years of this century.
Poverty, Work and the Financing of Single Women in Kampala
Authors: Mandeville Elizabeth 
Published: April 2006

Opening ParagraphThis paper examines the financial position of all-female households in a poor area of Kampala, Uganda. The intention is to indicate the relative standards of living of households of various composition and to decide whether the practice of soliciting money from lovers is better viewed as a preferred alternative to employment or as an essential supplementing of inadequate incomes. If lovers are necessary to the maintenance of single women and their children in African cities, analyses of extra-marital sexual behaviour which rely only on arguments about marriage rules and roles and personal values are rendered inadequate. Securing a paying lover may be indispensable to a woman who wishes to live and bring up children in town, and the practice may tell us more about her wish to educate her children, or her dislike of rural life, than it does about her sexual and marital preferences. Love affairs, in short, may be more appropriately considered under the heading of domestic finance than as an adjunct to a discussion of marriage. The data which I present here do not reduce a lover's importance to a woman to that of a charitable institution or welfare state: women who are prosperous have love affairs, and sexual pleasure is celebrated. They do indicate, however, the difficulties faced by a woman anxious to remain in town if she is not prepared to take lovers and to select them at least in part according to financial considerations. I hope, too, that the method which I use for working out standards of living available to households may prove useful as a means of establishing comparability between living standards in different cities.
Results and Implications of the Preliminary Enquiry
Authors: Southall Aidan 
Published: April 2006

Opening paragraphIn choosing small urban centers for study and arguing that they were strategic for development, we did not suggest that small urban centers were at present generally playing a positive role in rural development, nor that it would necessarily be easy to get them to do so without major changes or even radical transformations of society. The argument was, that if effective rural development were achieved, small urban centers would certainly have to play a crucial part in it. They may therefore act as sensitive barometers of the adequacy or inadequacy of rural development efforts. Combing the literature on small urban centers in Africa, and in Asia and Latin America as well, has certainly convinced this writer that the instances in which small urban centers are playing anything like an adequate positive role are distinctly rare, and most situations convey the very strong impression that quite fundamental transformations of society—of political and economic structures—will be necessary if they are to have any serious chance of doing so. To study small urban centers without paying attention to the macroeconomic and political context in which they are set may therefore be futile.