This article focuses on a number of highly successful female pop singers in Mali whose video music clips and music shows make up a major share of urban people's daily broadcast consumption. The article explores the reasons for the astonishing success of the singers by locating the consumption and interpretation of their songs in Malian popular and scholarly discourses on cultural authenticity and moral decline. Some Malian scholars emphasise that women's pop songs reflect the corruption and mixing of traditional oral genres characterised by historical knowledge, textual complexity and regional specificity. Their criticism is echoed by a number of older people in town and countryside. It is reminiscent of a tendency among urban consumers to express their fascination with and fears of life in town in the icon of the seductive, dangerous and immoral town woman. To many women of the urban middle classes, in contrast, the pop singers embody a desirable solution of women's daily dilemma: a Malian morality dressed up in the fashionable outfit of a ‘modern’ urban woman. Middle-class women respond enthusiastically to this art form because it praises them for upholding ‘traditional’ values in the face of adversity while absolving them of complicity in undermining such values.

The Nyakyusa were the subject of a classic series of ethnographies. This article suggests that these works took insufficient account of struggles over authority in the colonial period. Consequently they overstated the formalisation of chiefly power and understated the complex relationship between generational tensions and political authority in the pre-colonial period. Following discursive and practical changes in the use of alcohol, the article identifies a shift in the nature of power among the Nyakyusa over the twentieth century and develops the idea that drinking talk, and drinking practice, are central fields for the creation and recreation of the assumptions of power which underpin authority.

Nzema has been used historically as a multiple term to describe different but interrelated social, political and territorial realities. Failure to understand the historical context fully has led to persistent ambiguity in writings about the area, especially in anthropological studies. The tendency is to isolate ‘ethnic groups’ as precise categories in a broad context which in reality is covered by a pervasive network of continua. This article deals with the historical ‘mapping’ of ‘what it is to be Nzema’ and therefore puts forward a framework for analysing the question of identity in its actual formulation or, in other words, in relation to local ideological and political processes. Finally, it attempts to identify some of the registers which inform the question and some of the criteria for the use of each specific register by individuals and communities.

This article takes a historical approach to argue that communal lands in Zimbabwe are a construct inherited from colonial days (prior to 1980) which governments in post-colonial Zimbabwe have found convenient to maintain rather than dismantle. The construct is not only a convenient framework for the delivery of collective consumption goods but in turn it enables the government to subtly use communal lands as a framework for social control, especially in terms of urban management. The continued existence of communal land areas and land rights also sustains processes of social control at the household level. However, these are issues that will not receive attention in land debates as long as the larger problem of redistribution of large-scale commercial farms remains unresolved.

The Mkomazi Game Reserve is contested by people who wish to use its resources and by conservationists who have argued that the reserve should be set aside for wildlife. Underpinning the conservationist case is the argument that people are harmful to the reserve's environment. Former residents of the reserve, notably pastoralists, argue that human use of the reserve did not cause its degradation. The debate is characterised by a lack of data extraordinary in view of the assertions made. An earlier paper set out the contrasting views and defined the data that would be needed to test them. This paper assesses what data there are, and whether it is possible to evaluate the extent to which people caused environmental change at Mkomazi. Using physical data and comments about the environment made by observers it is argued that no firm conclusions can be drawn about small-scale change but that there are indications of large-scale resilience. As a result of this uncertainty the article goes on to consider the extent to which there can ever be clarity about environmental change at Mkomazi as a philosophical contention or as a researchable issue.

This study deals with the cultural construction of the forest by focusing on a group of farmers in Burkina Faso. It explores forest perceptions among Lyela farmers living in the vicinity of the Tiogo Forest Reserve through an analysis of cultural notions, specific historical circumstances and daily practices. Forest discourses articulate the process by which people's perceptions of forest resources are shaped both by religious and cultural notions of how to behave towards spirits, ancestors and human beings, on the one hand, and by sociopolitical and economic practices of how to make a living on the other. In search of nyo—that is, food, new farmland and a better living—people handle at least three layers of apparently contradictory conceptions of the forest. First, they follow the way of the ancestors according to which the Earth is sacred. Second, they cope with the legacy of colonial and post-colonial state administrations and particularly the Forestry Office. Third, they deal with market demands and the making of money by cotton cropping and woodcutting. The study concludes that these different layers of perception need to be understood as part of a present-day social struggle in which the Lyela farmers are engaged.