Certain aspects of van Gennep's (1908) analysis of the structure of ritual symbolism have in recent years been elaborated by E. R. Leach in a series of articles dealing with such topics as magic, the symbolism of time as well as initiation rites. This development has followed two related courses. Firstly, Leach has tended to emphasize the critical significance of rites of separation rather than van Gennep's overall schema involving rites of separation, rites of transition and rites of incorporation in effecting changes in the ritual status of persons (Leach 1970). Secondly, attention has been directed instead to the symbolic importance of the residues of such rites of separation (hair, foreskin, etc.) (Leach 1958) and, to a lesser extent, the agent effecting the separation (Leach 1961). The primary purpose of this article, however, is ethnographic rather than theoretical but in so far as the results of this empirical work tend to confirm the emerging analytical schema it is not without general interest and especially as the manner of this confirmation is not quite straightforward. It will be useful first of all to consider further and in general terms the issues indicated in these opening remarks.

This article examines the social and political background of escalating violence between ethnic groups in south‐western Ethiopia who until recently had customary and ritually sanctioned ways of resolving conflict. It highlights the impact of the emerging state hegemony in a local setting on ethnic groups not yet involved in the global political economy. The account also indicates the changing arenas of ‘ethnic’ self‐definition and economic opportunity for local groups in post‐1991 Ethiopia. As the report of a big reconciliation meeting held between the government and the groups involved (and discussed here) makes clear, in the efforts of state agents to mediate emerging conflicts in conditions of increasing resource scarcity and identity struggle, the use of customary mediation mechanisms and their cultural symbolism was rhetorically recognised. But at the same time efficient mediation was structurally impeded by the very nature of the exercise of authority by the agents of the state and by their incapacity to implement practical measures to establish local peace. This failure to reconstitute a new political arena of conflict resolution was matched by the inability of the (representatives of the) ethnic groups concerned to redefine their relationship in a constructive and culturally acceptable manner.

Across the world, the presence of domestic animals in protected areas (PAs) is considered an ‘incursion’ that threatens the economic and ecological viability of these areas. Dominant narratives about incursions inaccurately describe the relationships between people and PAs because they lack adequate contextualization. In this paper, I rely on a political-ecological framework to argue for an alternative narrative. Through a case study from a PA in southern Kenya, I demonstrate how incursions are instead modern co-productions that arise from the intersections between changing political geographies of resource control and variable animal geographies of resource utilization – thus clarifying a long-standing debate about the presence of domestic animals in PAs. I rely on direct empirical and supporting evidence from place-based studies to illustrate the spatial and temporal differences in resource access strategies of wildlife and livestock within and outside the PA. I contrast these against changing land tenure and resource management policies to highlight how livestock movements into PAs are patterned in ways that reflect the changing nature of PA management, the material conditions of the landscape, and the agency of animals. Through these investigations, this paper provides a more accurate and nuanced explanation for livestock movements into PAs.

The Mbeere live in the area east of Mount Kenya and south-west of the Tana River. Numbering just under 50,000 they are ethnographically much less well known than their related neighbours the Kikuyu, Embu, Meru, and Kamba. In this paper we first outline the social organization, then the system of land rights, continuing to describe the government's programme of land reform, concluding by assessing the probable consequences of changes in land tenure.

La circoncision féminine est pratiquée dans plus de vingt pays africains ainsi que dans un certain nombre de pays du Moyen Orient, et il a été estimé quʼau moins 100 million de femmes ont été circonsisées dans le monde. Il est frappant, cependant, que beaucoup plus de préoccupations aient été exprimées au sujet de la circoncision féminine quʼà propos de la santé reproductrice des femmes. Dans le milieu intellectuel, il est aussi intéressant de voir que les gynécologues, les épidémiologues et les antropologues ont eu tendance à se concentrer sur un nombre de questions assez limitées, et encore celles-ci ont été rarement examinées en profondeur.

Cet article examine le travail des chercheurs en Europe et en Amérique du Nord afin de montrer que des émotions intenses soulignent cet intérêt et ces préoccupations. Au milieu de l'intérêt grandissant porté à l'antropologie des émotions, il est suggéré quʼune plus grande attention devrait être prêtée à essayer de comprendre la source de ces émotions et la manière dont celles-ci influencent l'enquête de terrain et l'analyse des données. Jusquʼà ce que cela se produise, notre compréhension de la circoncision féminine restera seulement partielle comme les données continuent à être rassemblées et analysées de façon inadéquate.

A recent paper by Igor Kopytoff (Kopytoff, 1971) argues that Africanists have been led by their Western conceptual ethnocentrism into creating a false dichotomy between ‘elders’ and ‘ancestors’ in their descriptions and analyses of African societies. He asserts that this has obscured the fact that ‘elders’ and ‘ancestors’ are conceptually as well as terminologically united in many African cultural and social traditions. There are flaws in his assertion, perhaps the most serious of which has been ably countered by James Brain in a recent article (Brain, 1973) where he demonstrates that many, if not most, African societies make explicit and clear-cut distinctions both linguistically and conceptually between ‘elders’ (both living and dead) and ‘ancestral spirits’. Nevertheless Kopytof's article effectively argues that Western scholars have had a tendency to overlook indigenous conceptual continuities between living and dead elders, and this prompted me to re-examine my data on the Tiriki of Kenya and the Irigwe of Nigeria which deal with the traditional relations of the living and the dead (including the not yet born). I found that these relationships, though strikingly different in the two societies, are nevertheless in each case patterned in ways that are congruent with relationships between both adjacent and alternate generations.

An interesting problem emerging from recent studies in complex societies is that of the relationship between ethnic identity and the interaction between various ethnic groups in a pluralistic society. In much of the sociological and anthropological literature, writers have treated ethnic groups as isolates and ‘givens’. Such categorization dismisses the potential investigation of factors responsible for permanence and change in ethnic groups. This paper will focus on a specific example of ethnic identity change, that of the Gungawa of Yauri Emirate, North-Western State, Nigeria, who have long had a pattern of ‘becoming’ Hausa. The paper will suggest some ways in which the possibility and mechanism for ethnic identity change functions to structure interethnic relationships and ease tensions resulting from such contact.

This article is concerned with the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren in changing Tswana society. It argues that, in order to understand this relationship and how this has been changing, we have to look at different sets of relationships separately. The relationships between grandfathers/grandmothers and grandsons/granddaughters have quite different qualities depending upon whether their sons/daughters are married or unmarried. Moreover, these qualities are influenced in different ways by changes taking place in society. The data are analysed using Charles Taylor's concept of moral space and discussed in terms of ideals of respect, meaning and dignity.

The purpose of this study is to present a comparative analysis of men's age-group (or age-set) systems in Africa, and to determine: (a) some of the main structural differences between the various age-set systems; and (b) the conditions (or the types of societies) in which the different systems arise and the functions they fulfil. For reasons of space the material is presented summarily, no full description, nor a complete inventory of age sets, being included.

This paper forms part of a short general account of the Luo based on a rapid survey made in 1936. The survey was financed by the Leverhulme Grants Committee. An earlier part, describing the political structure of the Luo, has recently appeared in another journal.

Apart from information provided by Father Hartmann and a fuller account by Mr. K. C. Shaw, early accounts of Luo marriage are slight, and in some cases misleading. Mr. Shaw's account covers a good part of the ground covered by the present paper, but it is useful to have two independent accounts, especially as both were written from information obtained through interpreters. When I went to Kenya I did not expect to visit the Luo and I had not therefore read Mr. Shaw's article. Mr. Shaw and I disagree in a number of particulars in the overlapping parts of our papers. It does not follow from this that either of us is wrong in our statements because, as Mr. Shaw points out, there is some variation in local custom in the different tribes of Luoland. My own information on this particular subject was mostly obtained from the Alego tribe of Central Kavirondo. In the main I have followed the account given me by Pastor Ezekiel of that tribe. In doing so I have omitted much detail.

Using ethnographic and historical approaches, this article examines unplanned, peri-urban settlements on Dar es Salaam's northern and western fringe, where urban farming is central to many residents’ household economy. Contrasting with conventional models of African urban migration, these new districts were established by a vanguard of educated urban professionals, utilizing farming as an economic diversification strategy. Despite disjunctures arising through decolonization and implementation of state socialism in the 1960s and 1970s, this peri-urban vanguard not only engaged in agricultural activities reminiscent of regions on the borderlands of Tanzania, but also contributed to the reproduction of configurations of socio-economic inequality characteristic of other kinds of urban communities. With critical infrastructural improvements and a pool of urban labourers supporting their endeavours, these districts attracted additional, economically influential urban in-migrants following capitalist reforms following the implementation of the Zanzibar Declaration in 1991.

This paper examines the intertwined issues of memory and forgetting, focusing particularly on the question of precisely how, and by what social mechanisms, forgetting is accomplished. I discuss how collective and individual forms of forgetting are central to Bourdieu's notion of the habitus, commenting that the habitus is a living paradox, foreclosing (unimagined perhaps because unimaginable) possibilities and opening others only when moments of improvised reflection intervene. Moreover, the systems of the habitus enact a forgetting of the strange, the marginal, the in-between, and even the singular and the autobiographical. I explore these issues through the juxtaposition of formalized, collective Samburu (Kenyan pastoralists) memory forms and the illicit sexual practices that underworld them.

This article arose out of an attempt to quantify the risk of transmitting blood-borne diseases, in particular Hepatitis B and HIV, through the practice of making incisions (umgcabo) and punctures (ukutshobha) in the skin for the purpose of introducing medication (muthi) into the human body. The intention was to examine means of containing the risk. It soon became apparent that the practice of these therapies was inextricably bound up with legal and economic issues arising out of the impact of colonialism on Zulu medicine. Any endeavour to contain them would first have to address these fundamental issues. The article takes a step in that direction by (1) examining in detail some of the practices of diviners and herbalists in their historical context and (2) showing how colonial and post-colonial legislation has affected traditional healers and their clients in rural KwaZulu/Natal.

The aim of this article is to show how a ‘traditional’ society may produce a household system in which the structural tensions are no less intense than in the Western world. Muslim Hausa society (in northern Nigeria) has one of the highest rates of divorce (and remarriage) in the world. An explanation is sought here in terms of the economic and organisational requirements of a subsistence farming system that is always potentially short of labour. Divorce is a solution to otherwise unacceptable pressures, particularly on young women, in a society that requires them to be subordinate and marginal within the extended family. The data presented here were collected between 1979 and 1989 in the Niger valley of Sokoto State in northern Nigeria.

The history of the town of Mokolo, in the heart of the land of the Mafa (in northern Cameroon), exhibits a specific pattern of urbanisation that seems characteristic of Islamic frontier zones generally in Africa. The town was founded as a settlement for converted slaves towards the end of the nineteenth century by Fulbe chiefs who regularly raided the area. Since that time urbanisation has largely gone hand in hand with Islamisation. It has involved, therefore, a marked change of identity for Mafa converts in the town, with drastic consequences for their relationship with their areas of origin in the mountains. The article emphasises, moreover, that the implications of Islamisation/urbanisation differ along gender lines. Although for both men and women the Muslim community in town provided specific forms of social security, the motives for migration, and the ways men and women were included in the urban community, differed sharply. In the 1980s, owing to political changes at the national level, the pressure to convert to Islam decreased throughout northern Cameroon. Since then the number of migrants to town who do not convert has increased rapidly. Mokolo used to be a Muslim town. In the 1990s, however, it has become more and more a Mafa town, and thus symbolises the revival of Mafa ethnicity as a truly region-wide force.

The research upon which this paper is based was carried out over a period of about 18 months in the Luapula Province of Zambia. I first spent a month in Ntoto fishing camp, which is located about 15 km north of Kashikishi village on the slopes of Lake Mweru. For a year after that I conducted research in Kashikishi, a large village (about 1,500 population) adjacent to the southeastern shore of Lake Mweru. I then spentfour months in Lukwesa, which is situated about 130 km south of Kashikishi on the Luapula River, which flows into the lake. Finally, I spent an additional month in other smaller villages along the river. By these changes of locale I attempted to cover the area researched by Cunnison in 1949 (published in 1959), and to record some of the variability in kinship, economic, and religious activities within the river and lake region.

This paper presents the general features of dualistic symbolic classification among the Kaguru, a Bantu people of east-central Tanganyika, East Africa.

It has been written as a result of my reading Needham's stimulating article, ‘The Left Hand of the Mugwe’, which recently appeared in Africa. Using Bernardi's ethnographic data on the Meru, Needham isolates a dualistic symbolic classification of those people. The result is a very striking illustration of the order and understanding gained by the social anthropologist once this important feature of Meru ideology is shown. Needham then goes on to indicate some of the relations which such a symbolic classification may have to certain structural divisions of a society.

The society to which this paper refers is a Nilo-Hamitic tribe of north-western Kenya among whose people, the Pokot, I carried out field-work for a period of approximately 6 months in 1947. For the opportunity to do so I am indebted to the Government of Kenya.

The population of West Suk does not exceed 25,000 but is dispersed over an area of 1,810 square miles. The eastern and western sections of this tribe are composed of semi-nomadic pastoralists, the pi-pa-tich (cattle people) who live in arid and often semi-desert plains. Between the plains rise the Suk Hills, inhabited by the pi-pa-pagh (people of the grain) who, in certain areas, practise intensive irrigation agriculture and in others follow the usual ecological pattern of the mixed-economy Kipsigis and Nandi. The hill people have close cultural affinities with the Nandi group, while the pastoralists have been strongly influenced by their Karamojong and Turkana neighbours.

In a country which in the last 200 years has undergone continuous and often momentous political, economic and social changes, few things are capable of conveying as strong an impression of stability and changelessness as wood fuel (charcoal and firewood) consumption and production; and nowhere is this more striking than on the Freetown or Western Area (formerly Colony) peninsula. In this region, which has always accounted for the major share of national electricity, kerosene and cooking gas (LPG) consumption, not only is current percentage household firewood consumption only fractionally lower than in the nineteenth century but a much higher proportion of households consume charcoal now than at any time in the last two centuries (Cline-Cole, 1984a). Today firewood and charcoal combined supply a minimum of 80 per cent of total peninsula energy demand for both domestic and non-household uses (Davidson, 1985). Freetown's firewood consumption also represents some 10 per cent of the national total (Atlanta, 1979).

This paper has three related themes. First, the hunting peoples of the northern East African coast are defined; second, a period of origin of each group is proposed; and, third, the processes which resulted in their creation and persistence to the present are hypothesised and discussed.