Debates over land tenure have been instrumental to state-building in South Sudan since the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). Focusing on the local dynamics of post-conflict reconstruction in the town of Juba, this article argues that amidst the political and institutional change inaugurated by the transition from war to peace, debates over land provided a basis for the negotiation of the South Sudanese state. Actors at a variety of levels employed competing interpretations of rights to land as state-building strategies – as tools towards promoting particular visions of the state and of citizenship.

This study examines the consequences of the rapid and unprecedented expansion of insurances for the poor in South Africa. Over the last ten years, South African insurance companies established a myriad of policies in order to incorporate the previously excluded, mostly African, poor and lower middle classes. While poverty, violence and AIDS put state institutions and social relations under pressure, insurances enable people to manage risks in hitherto unthinkable ways. The article examines the development of this new regime of risk as a Janus head, after the Roman god of opening and closing. At the heart of access to insurance were the incongruencies that were caused by the ‘translation’ of risk into the seemingly neutral concept of costs and the inability of brokers and intermediary organizations to navigate these translations successfully. Access to insurance – here not defined as having an insurance policy but as making a successful claim when confronted with the insured risk – was fraught with the contradictions of complex high-tech bureaucracies and the poor's social networks.

The purpose of this study is to draw attention to the large volume of monetary transactions and profits within the traditional sector of a farming community in West Africa. More specifically it deals with the production, distribution and pricing of local brews, points to the effect of beer making on farming, and relates this trade to contemporary developments in other spheres of social and economic life.

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.

Le développement rapide des exportations de vêtements d'occasion de l'Occident vers les pays du Tiers-Monde et la hausse de la consommation de vêtements d'occasion dans les pays africains soulevent des questions pertinentes sur les effets de la mondialisation et les significations de l'Occident et du local que les consommateurs attribuent aux objets à différents points de leur parcours dans l'espace mondial. Cet article s'appuie sur des travaux de recherche approfondis sur la provenance des vêtements d'occasion en Occident ainsi que sur leur commerce en gros et au détail, leur distribution et leur consommation en Zambie. Analysant Fattitude de la population zambienne à l'égard des vêtements dont l'Occident ne veut plus, cet article suggère qu'une économie culturelle intervient dans les appropriations locales de cette marchandise particulière qui ouvre un espace au commerce local de vêtements. Les vêtements influent beaucoup sur l'imaginaire car le moi et la société s'expriment à travers le corps vêtu. En toile de fond, l'article dresse brièvement un profil des récentes tendances du commerce mondial des vêtements d'occasion qui placent les pays africains sub-sahariens en tête des régions importatrices au niveau mondial. Il s'ensuit une analyse des préoccupations de la population zambienne concernant les vêtements neufs et les vêtements d'occasion, tant sur le plan historique que sur le plan actuel. Cette analyse démontre que les significations qu'attribuent les consommateurs zambiens aux vêtements d'occasion ne sont ni uniformes ni statiques mais qu'elles varient selon la classe sociale et le sexe, et entre les zones urbaines et rurales. Surtout, elles dépendent de la politique culturelle du moment. A travers les vêtements, les Zambiens donnent un sens à la société postcoloniale, à leur place dans cette société et dans le monde en général.

A case study from western Kenya is used to explore the links between labour migration, rural economic decline and changes in key domestic relationships. Twentieth-century transformations in the regional political economy, together with processes of differentiation, have been closely bound up with changes, and continuities, in relationships within households, and in the ideologies which justify them. A central concept in the analysis is that of divisions of labour, which covers the division of tasks, divisions of spheres of responsibility and authority and contributions to the reproduction of the household. Changes in all these have shaped, and have been shaped, by the trajectory of economic decline in the region. Changing divisions of labour have been slow, piecemeal, non-uniform and non-linear. They have been the subject of intense conflicts within households which have centred on questions of access to and control over resources and in which, as well as power relations, ideas about rights and responsibilities have been crucially important.

Introduced into Lake Victoria in the 1950s, the Nile perch has gained fame for prompting rapid regional economic growth and for driving scores of endemic fish species into extinction. This study uses oral and archival data to trace the historical development of the Nile perch fishery on Lake Victoria. Particular emphasis is placed on local responses and adaptations to (1) the Nile perch itself; (2) the abrupt integration of the Lake Victoria fishery with the global economy; and (3) the ecological changes that the Nile perch has precipitated. I also attempt to situate Lake Victoria's history in the larger debate about environment and African livelihoods. Because so much of Lake Victoria's species diversity has been lost within one generation – biologist E. O. Wilson (1992) has called this process ‘the most catastrophic extinction episode of recent history’ – the lake is an ideal case study with which to examine ‘local’ perceptions of biodiversity. The data suggest that species diversity is important and highly resolved in the worldviews of Lake Victoria's fishermen; yet, although the will for conservation is present, poverty obstructs its realization. These findings are discussed in relation to other work on indigenous environmental knowledge and ecological ethics. I argue that ‘intrinsic’ valuation of species diversity and ecological processes may be more widespread in rural societies than has traditionally been assumed by natural and social scientists, and that the preponderance of social studies highlighting oppositions between Western science and ethno-science, and between conservation concerns and local livelihoods, may have blinded us to synergies between them. More effort is needed to understand fully the nuances in these complex local ecological worldviews, perhaps via ‘social histories of extinction’ that explore the local consequences of species loss.

Certain features of Cewa witch beliefs make them well suited to sociological analysis. As this type of analysis has been somewhat neglected by students of witch beliefs, Part I of this paper will be devoted to a brief review of some of the literature (mainly on Bantu) and to an attempt to formulate a serviceable hypothesis. Part II will summarize information about the Cewa essential to an understanding of Part III, in which the hypothesis will be applied to Cewa material. Part III will appear in a subsequent number of Africa.

The democratisation process which began in the early 1990s in many sub-Saharan African countries has led to renewed interest in the role of voluntary associations in the shaping of the political and social realms. This article maintains that the most effective way to understand the role of associational politics and developments in Africa is not by postulating what they should do according to Western democratic theory, but through an historical analysis of how associations functioned before the introduction of multi-party competitive elections and putative democratic rules in recent years. In this way it will be possible to attain a richer and more complex under-standing of state–society relations under one-party and military regimes, and thus of how these links are likely to change in a more pluralistic environment. This article explores these issues in the Côte d'Ivoire.

It is greatly to the credit of the editors of Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa that they have made generally available ten systematic accounts of witch beliefs in East and Central African societies. All teachers of anthropology must surely be grateful to them on this account alone. Moreover the book is spiced with many insights into sociocultural problems connected with the main theme. A permissive editorial policy has stimulated a rich diversity of viewpoints and presentations. But one is left with the feeling that Monica Wilson's plea for the comparative analysis of these ‘standardized nightmares’—a plea which forms the book's motto—as one of the ‘keys to the understanding of society’ has not met here with a wholly satisfactory response.

For many social anthropologists the problem of divine kingship was solved in 1948 when Professor Evans-Pritchard, in a well-known Frazer Lecture, put a respectably structural interpretation on the facts of the Shilluk case. Divine kingship in Africa was rather an embarrassment because the central tenet of its doctrine—that the king must be killed when he fell sick or grew senile—was usually beyond empirical verification. There was also perhaps some reluctance to accept the explanatory theories of Sir J. G. Frazer when in so many other respects his authority had long since been overthrown. In a single essay Evans-Pritchard appeared to have effectively slain both the problem and its discoverer. Such problems and such intellectual kings, however, have a way of rising from the dead. In this paper I resuscitate in part Frazer's theory of divine kingship and try to show that it illuminates important aspects of the problem which are ignored by the structuralist interpretation. With reference to a single example of divine kingship, that of the Jukun of Northern Nigeria, I utilize two familiar conceptual distinctions—person/office and political/ritual. Complementary to these, and perhaps even more analytically fruitful, is the man-god dichotomy which was one of Frazer's main preoccupations.

The Copperbelt of Congo was once the bastion of industrial development and no individual embodied its modernity as fully as the salaried industrial miner. Today, with the near collapse of the state-run mining company, Gécamines, and the liberalization of the mining industry starting in 2002, the majority of miners are no longer trained and salaried industrial workers but rather children and youth eking out a precarious living as artisanal miners or creuseurs. In Congo, artisanal mining is paradoxical, for, although it indexes a future of unskilled, untrained, flexible work in rural and peri-urban enclaves, its organization of labour and rudimentary techniques of copper extraction allude to and borrow from the colonial and precolonial past. Creuseurs mobilize the past as a strategic response to the threat of dispossession of ‘their’ land by the state and foreign investors, and they do so by laying claim to an anterior ‘sovereign’ – the ancestors – whose existence predates colonialism. This paradoxical emplacement of artisanal mining, its entanglement in time, invites interrogation of some of the ways in which scholars have understood precarity not only as a politically induced condition resulting from neoliberalism but also as an outcome of the enduring nature of the colonizing structure in Africa.

In the last three decades, the politics of indigeneity have led to discrimination against and marginalization of non-indigenes as well as numerous violent conflicts between indigenes and non-indigenes in Nigeria. This discrimination, which is based on a localized place of belonging, has today become bureaucratized: local governments produce ‘certificates of indigene’ to identify the origin of their holders. This article looks at the bureaucratic machinery of issuing certificates of origin in two local governments of Oyo State (in the south-west) and the everyday encounters between users and bureaucrats that cannot be reduced to practices of corruption. It looks at the complicated and ambivalent process of identifying a ‘true indigene’; this process is supposed to strengthen local citizenship but it also contributes to the daily functioning of the state and is largely accepted by the majority as part of the state's ‘insidious gentleness’. The article also seeks to understand why official discrimination against non-indigenes is poorly contested locally by assessing the role of these documents in accessing public employment, university places and basic services, and examining whether areas inhabited by non-indigenes are perceived as being neglected or abandoned by the state. Currently, discrimination policies are implemented unequally and in many instances client–patron relationships help sidestep these policies.

Leach in his study of the Kachin interpreted disputes over claims to administer ritual or to recite myths as a means whereby politically opposed factions sought to assert their independence or their dominance (Leach, 1954, p. 278). He also showed that in this competition the Kachin made use of ritual and other cultural elements which they had adopted from the Shans and were using for political ends.

In his Economic History of West Africa (1973) Hopkins points out that relatively little attention has been paid to the history of food production by contrast with export crops, even though it has been clear since early research on African food systems (e.g., Johnston 1958) that patterns of production have been changing. The determinants of shifts in land use and crop rotations are complex but two major factors have been suggested: population pressure on land resources, and the relative prices of different crops. The population pressure argument tends to assume that subsistence is maintained, so that any change in the relationship of population to food land requires shifts in farming practice to allow the maintenance of the same level of living (Boserup 1965). The price argument tends to assume that the agriculture system is penetrated by the market principle, so that farmers' decisions to maintain subsistence production patterns depend on projections about the prices of the cash crops available for sale and the food items needed to purchase (Chibnik 1978). From work on African farming systems comes a modification which suggests that the management of both these constraints depends to some extent on the broader social and economic context in which decisions are made. In particular it has been suggested that the position of women farmers in both indigenous social organisation and national economies is different from men's; they work under different constraints in their farming and have different opportunities for alternative employment (Boserup 1970; Meillassoux 1975). If the sexual division of labour is an important aspect of farming, men's and women's differential access to resources might be expected to have an independent effect on cropping patterns.

In 1961 Marvin Miracle attempted to demonstrate that reports of ‘seasonal hunger’ in tropical Africa were to be discounted and that in fact regular ‘hunger periods’ did not occur. He based his argument on a definition of seasonal hunger which took into account only the calories people consumed. By his definition, ‘seasonal hunger’ can exist only if people consume fewer calories than they need in certain months of each year even though their total calorie intake over the year is adequate (Miracle, 1961: 277–88). He denied that there was sufficient evidence of any such shortfall to justify the F.A.O. statement (1958) that ‘pre-harvest food shortage is still a problem in many of the drier parts (of tropical Africa)’.

The aim of this study was to examine people's beliefs about the causes of marital instability in a rural population cohort in south-west Uganda. Results from a baseline survey of HFV-1 infection in the cohort of over 4,000 adults (over 12 years old) showed a twofold increase in risk of infection in divorced or separated persons when compared with those who are married. A purposive sample of 134 respondents (seventy-two males, sixty-two females) selected to represent different ages, religions and marital status were asked in semi-structured interviews to comment on the reasons for continuing marital instability in their community. The most common reasons suggested for marital instability were sexual dissatisfaction, infertility, alcoholism and mobility. Interviewees stated that men and women would be more likely to stay with someone who satisfied them sexually. It was reported that infertility, particularly of the woman, would lead a couple to separate. Alcoholism was said to lead to neglect of family responsibilities and decreased sexual inhibitions, while occupational mobility was a common cause of infidelity. HIV infection was not mentioned as a direct cause of separation, but a small independent study revealed that seven out often couples separated on learning of a positive HIV test result of one or both partners. Marital instability is not uncommon in this population; there is evidence that HFV infection is making the situation worse.

Les églises sionistes, en particulier celles qui mettent l'accent sur la guérison se montrent d'une disposition envers la politique d'état sud africaine d'un consentement frappant. Cet article examine à la fois l'évidence et les explications présentées par les sciences humaines et par les théologiens. Mais avant tout, cet article se concentre sur l‘organisation du service de la santé en tant qu‘appareil de contrôole social, une considération qui a tendu à être négligée dans ce contexte.

In the essay which follows an attempt will be made to answer and elaborate on some of the points raised by Kopytoff in his article ‘Ancestors as Elders in Africa’ (Africa, xli, 2 April 1971, pp. 129–42), an article which will, no doubt, stimulate much argument and discussion. To do this I shall utilize both published sources and material collected in Uluguru in Eastern Tanzania.