Colin M. Turnbull's publications form virtually the only source available on Ik clture and society. His book The Mountain People has found wide distribution, far beyond anthropological circles. The problems it raises have been discussed in a number of reviews (see especially Beidelman, 1973; Spencer, 1973; Barth, 1974; Winter et al., 1975). Through the present article, I wish to show that there is an urgent need for a more comprehensive and less biased study of Ik culture md society.

The linguistic and religious affiliation of the peoples of the arid lowlands of northern Kenya and adjacent areas of the Horn is very heterogeneous. Although most of the populations east of Lake Turkana speak languages which belong to the Lowland branch of the Eastern Cushitic sub-family, within this branch Oromo speech (Boran, Gabbra, Sakuye, Orma) is not mutually intelligible with Somaloid languages like Rendille and Somali. Even within the Somaloid group, successful communication between monolingual Rendille and Somali is normally difficult, but a high degree of bilingualism is found.

The research upon which this article is based was carried out over a period of four months in the Northern and Luapula Provinces of Zambia. Before that, I spent two years working in the area as an agricultural officer. One of the villages described in the article is situated on the western shore of Lake Bangweulu, the other 20 km south of Kasama, the major city of Northern Province, the homeland of the Bemba (Fig. 1). The area is almost exclusively devoted to chitemene shifting cultivation, an agricultural system where crops are grown in the ash from burning the collected, stacked branches that have been lopped and chopped from an pressure, vegetation is now chopped before it is fully regenerated, and the system seems to be starting to break down. A major task during my field stay was to describe the ecological (Stromgaard, 1984a) and economic (Stromgaard, 1984b) aspects of this change, but it soon became apparent that subsistence activity and social structure deeply influenced the village's economic activities.

In the colonial period Zambia, then Northern Rhodesia, was a field for brilliant social research. The social scientists who worked at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (hereafter abbreviated to RLI) in Lusaka produced studies which can be found in libraries throughout the world. Yet the relevance of this literature for understanding present-day Zambia may not be immediately obvious. Our knowledge of society turns into historical knowledge, especially when great social changes such as decolonization take place. Social scientists inevitably capture one particular historical moment. The work of those connected with the RLI can therefore be treated as part of history; Kuper (1973) has characterised its role in the development of British anthropological thought as a part of the history of ideas, and Brown (1973, 1979) has written evocative accounts of the involvement of its members in the country as an example of the white man's presence in Africa.

In the first part of this article I set myself two objectives, each of which took its cue from a generalization made about the political and social organization of the Tiv by their principal ethnographers, Laura and Paul Bohannan. I proposed to challenge the related views (1) that the political organization of the Tiv could adequately be described as a segmentary lineage organization and (2) that their organization was atypical of the area of middle-belt West Africa in which the Tiv live. Confining my attention to Tiv ethnogaphy, I argued in Part I that a persuasive case could be made for a more complex account of Tiv political processes which recognized the salience not only of descent but also of marriage, kinship and local competition for the achievement of personal prestige through manipulation of marriage strategies, mastery of the major akombo or cults and claims to the possession of legitimate tsav or supernatural power. Tiv society still retains remarkable features on this view of its political processes, but they are not those of complete atypicality. Instead, it becomes apparent that, while sharing many of its core institutions with neighbouring societies, Tiv culture combines them in a unique manner. The uniqueness of the combination becomes visible through the effects of Tiv social organization, the more important of which I would itemise as:

1. The persistence of Tiv culture and identity in a region of generally fragmented populations.

2. The capacity for expansion of Tiv society.

3. The capacity of Tiv society to absorb so many circumstances conducive to the development of hierarchy yet to remain, by and large, acephelous.