Fetishism, a word much in vogue in late nineteenth century anthropology, no longer appears in serious scholarly use, except among art historians, psychoanalysts, and Marxist economists. Tylor, the most influential voice in the definition of fetishism, regarded it as a development of animism; fetishism was ‘the doctrine of spirits embodied in, or attached to, or conveying influence through, certain material objects. Fetishism will be taken as including the worship of ‘stocks and stones’ and thence it passes by an imperceptible gradation into Idolatry’ (Tylor 1874:II:144). Tylor went on to speculate that primitive man originally imagined the soul of a deceased person to inhabit some relic such as a bone; this idea once established, it evolved into a propensity to associate any unusual object with a spirit. If the spirit, with its capacity for action, were embodied in an object specially made to represent its character, the ethnographer would recognise an Idol.

‘Acheter sa tombe’ exprime en un raccourci saisissant la situation des femmes, et, plus généralement celle des relations entre les sexes, au carrefour des processus dynamiques de continuité socio-culturelle parmi les populations Haya du nordouest de la Tanzanie. L'article suggère que la tombe, site important par la localisation qu'elle représente, perd sa signification par son ‘achat’ qui est ici signe de rupture, de bouleversement et de mobilité incontrôlée. Les hommes croient que les femmes ‘achetent leurs tombes’ (en contractant le Sida) lorsqu'elles pensent devenir riches à travers la prostitution. ‘Acheter une tombe’ en croyant s'enricher n'est pas un simple commentaire ironique sur les terribles conséquences qui s'ensuivent (la mort) pour ceux qui ne recherchent que leur propre profit. C'est aussi un constat sur la façon dont les transformations de l'économie et des conditions physiques des Hayas rendent impossible les formes mêmes de mort qui permettent aux vivants de réalises et perpétuer leur propre bien-être.

This article examines the ways in which the legacies and collective memories of Biafra, the secessionist state established at the time of Nigeria's civil war from 1967 to1970, shape contemporary Igbo practices and experiences of marriage, rural–urban ties and reproduction. The importance of appropriate and permanent marriage and the perceived necessity of dependable affinal relations for contemporary Igbos are analysed in relation to recollections of marriage during the war. The intense identification of migrant Igbos with place of origin and the importance of ‘home’ and ‘home people’ are situated in the context of the legacy of Biafra. The importance of kinship relationships for access to patron–client networks is linked to the Igbo perception of marginalization in the wake of Biafra. Igbo ideas about the significance of reproduction and the vital importance of ‘having people’ are reinforced through collective memories of Biafra. Igbo people's conceptions of Nigerian politics, their understandings of the social and economic importance of kinship and community in contemporary Nigeria, and even their reproductive decisions can be better explained by taking into account the legacies of Biafra.

The claim of psychology to a share in the study of culture and society is by no means firmly established. Indeed, a certain school of modern sociology and anthropology would cleanse the study of society from all psychological assumptions and interpretations and would deal with cultural and social phenomena as phenomena entirely in their own right. As this article is to describe an attempt to include psychology in anthropological field work a few words must be said first in justification of this attempt to examine, over and above the concrete realities of culture, the psychological factors ‘behind’ culture.

Western concern with ‘conserving’ or ‘managing’ the rain forests of Africa has led to the setting up of a number of conservation projects. In such projects the ‘participation’ of the ‘community’ in forest conservation has become the new orthodoxy. However, proposals about local people's participation presume that defining the future of the forest is a straight contest between the alternatives of conservation or forest clearing. Such proposals also presume that the existence of communities is non-problematic. In contrast, this article documents that there is already considerable local debate about forest use and conservation, much of it among those excluded from the formal arena of politics and policy-making. Concern with ‘the environment’ includes concern about the perpetuation of society, and represents a clear continuation of West African village cosmologies focused on the societalisation of space. At the same time, conservation aims of ‘keeping the forest as it is’ have few resonances, since forest people see society itself as an artful, but often problematic, construction in which the conversion of the forest plays a central part. In conclusion, the article suggests that the key to environmental management must be for external agencies to articulate with the interests and values of those who hold a legitimate stake in African forest resources.

‘Traditional healers’ (sangomas) in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, are organized into ‘schools’ around a senior teacher (gobela). Healing is understood by its practioners to be a profession, not a religion or even a spiritual exercise. Healers actively assess the effectiveness of their healing methods, transmit their knowledge to each other, and evaluate each others’ performances in ways that stray far from the mere transmission of ‘tradition’. Clients are likely to pay sangomas as much as they would medical doctors for their services, which are not limited to the medical. Their practices can be divided into roughly six ‘disciplines’: divination, herbs, control of ancestral spirits, the cult of foreign ndzawe spirits, drumming and dancing, and training of new sangomas. The status of sangoma is achieved through an arduous process of teaching and learning through which the student or initiate is simultaneously ‘healed’ and educated to become a member of the profession that coheres around these knowledge practices.

This article examines the interplay of agency, culture and context in order to consider the social embeddedness of money and trade at the margins of South Africa's economy. Focusing on small-scale, survivalist informal enterprise operators, it draws on socio-cultural analysis to explore the social dynamics involved in generating and managing wealth. After describing the informal sector in South Africa, the article elucidates the relationship between money and economic informality. First, diverse objectives, typically irreducible to the maximization of profit, animate those in the informal sector and challenge meta-narratives of a ‘great transformation’ towards socially disembedded and depersonalized economic relationships. Second, regimes of economic governance, both state-led and informal, shape the terrain on which informal economic activity occurs in complex and constitutive ways. Third, local idioms and practices of trading, managing money and negotiating social claims similarly configure economic activities. Fourth, and finally, encroaching and often inexorable processes of formalization differentially influence those in the informal sector. The analysis draws on these findings to recapitulate both the ubiquity and centrality of the sociality at the heart of economy, and to examine the particular forms they take in South Africa's informal economy.

On a donné le nom de ‘parenté a plaisanterie’ à des institutions et manifestations diverses qui ne sont peut-être pas de même nature ou dont la nature commune, en tous cas, n'a pas été saisie. On s'est fié à l'apparence. Ou plutôt on à donné de l'importance à un facteur apparent, la plaisanterie injurieuse, qui se retrouve dans des occasions nombreuses et sans rapports les unes avec les autres. La parole, qu'elle soit injurieuse ou flatteuse, bénéfique ou maléfique, est certes avant tout porteuse de force vitale; elle a dans toutes ses applications la qualité constante d'être le verbe. Elle permet ainsi les emplois les plus différents qui, pour autant, ne sont pas obligatoirement classables dans la même série. En tous cas retenir l'aspect ‘plaisanterie’ de plusieurs phénomènes risque de lier les choses les plus hétéroclites. Une cloche sonne le glas et les mariages. II ne viendrait à l'idée de personne de prétendre que les funérailles et les noces se rencontrent dans une série dite ‘cérémonies à cloches‘.

Since 1960 several million Africans have been relocated in South Africa, mainly from the common (or ‘white’) area to the so-called ‘homelands’. This process of relocation is still under way, and precise enumeration of the numbers of people who have been and will be affected is impossible. Estimates vary according to the definition of ‘relocation’: it is apparent, for instance, that official sources define the process as narrowly as possible in order to minimize the numbers involved. There is abundant evidence, however, that relocation has taken place on a vast scale, and that the process has generally resulted in increased poverty and misery for its victims (Surplus People Project, 1983). Kane-Berman has recently argued that the South African Bantustans are, at present, not so much reservoirs of a reserve army of labour as dumping grounds ‘for people who have little chance of obtaining employment anywhere’ (1981: 29). From having been sub-subsistence dormitory areas for labour migrants, they are rapidly becoming places to which the structurally unemployed are being permanently consigned.

Cet article examine la proposition que les niveaux de l'agro-diversité déclinent en conséquence de l'augmentation de l'intensification des systèmes agricoles. La plupart de la littérature sur l'agriculture itinérante souligne le grand nombre d'espèces de plantes, à la fois sauvages et cultivées, que ces systèmes incorporent, tandis que les descriptions de l'agriculture mécanisée et intensive indique quʼun petit nombre d'espèces survivent.

Cet article fait un compte-rendu sur un système agro-économique qui est connu pour son intensité—celui des Kofyars au centre du Nigéria—mais qui cependant arrive à maintenir un haut niveau de diversité. Cet article explore plus généralement le rôle de la bio-diversité dans les systèmes agricoles des petites exploitations, et présente des arguments en faveur de ces systèmes, qui comme celui des Kofyars, favorise la bio-diversité comme faisant part de la ‘soutenabilité’ économique et environnementale, bien quʼils commencent à s'adapter à de nouvelles conditions agricoles.

The Manya-Krobo are one of the eight groups comprising the Adangme-speaking peoples who inhabit the Shai Plain between the River Volta and the Accra Plain. Until about 1890 the Krobo head-quarters were on the Krobo Hill, a rocky fastness which rises abruptly like a craggy island out of the perfectly flat plain. They have now abandoned this hill and made their head-quarters in the town of Odumase near the foot.

I examine the struggle surrounding the relocations of Bushmen from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in Botswana. Despite a recent court decision allowing the Bushmen to return, the ‘war of words’ continues and the Bushmen's circumstances remain inconclusive. I analyse and compare the actions of transnational and local NGOs and the Botswana state in addressing the ‘Bushman Question’ and consider the impacts of the various strategies and images deployed. The clash between essentialized views of pristine hunter-gatherers and images of Bushmen as modern citizens in the making has contributed to the problematic outcome thus far.

This article deals with issues of territoriality, public space, the microphysics of power and street gang life in the current urban context of Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In this city, a growing number of street children invade the public places. They team up in gangs and scour the streets in search of a location to settle (for a while). Along with their appropriation of public space, these gangs encounter several actors such as the city authorities, shop owners, tenants or rival street gangs. Before any settlement, deals have to be closed since every inch of the city is negotiable. All participants get involved in these negotiations, for no one is considered marginal, certainly not the street youth who are inextricably bound up with Congolese society. This contribution considers this dynamic field of negotiations through a focus on space and analyses it from a Foucauldian angle. It explores how gang members develop particular ways to control their territories and exercise power in them. Additionally, it examines how street youths manage to construct a home in the streets and make sense of their urban environment in the process.

The emergence of the charismatic movements in Nigeria in the 1970s is a remarkable religious phenomenon. Their rapid growth and success could be attributed to many factors, but the central factor which clearly emerges is that the movements have been presented in a manner acceptable and relevant to Nigerians, and they have been adapted to the situation in Nigeria. The continuous growth of the movements into the 1980s suggests that they are acting as responses to certain areas of need in Christian commitment in Nigeria. The concept of contextualisation is therefore the major key to an understanding of their rapid growth. Were it not for their contextualisation, the movements might have crystallised without any growth or might even have condemned themselves to decline and dissolution.

Focusing on the tri-juncture of Ghana, Togo and Burkina Faso, this article examines the role of cross-border traders in the construction and redefinition of international boundaries. Through the study of the social and spatial patterning of trade surrounding three commodities–imported cloth, beans and shea butter (karite)—it explores the multiple ways the border is endowed with or deprived of significance. When the border is viewed as a socio-geographic region the importance of popular practice to the on-going constitution of state power and presence becomes evident.

Reports of the occurrence of ‘woman marriage’ in parts of Africa as far distant from one another as northern and southern Nigeria, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and the Union of South Africa indicate the possibility that there may be other instances of this institution that have gone unrecorded. The purpose of this paper is therefore to call attention to this striking phase of social organization by describing the form which ‘woman marriage’ takes in Dahomey, presenting data collected in the field in 1931. In doing this, attention will be paid to such aspects of the social setting in which this kind of marriage is lodged as may be needed to allow it best to be understood, while some of the attitudes which arise from it will also be indicated.

The second, or informal, economy developed later in Lubumbashi (DRC) than it had in Kinshasa. The Katanga metropolis, long protected from the process of informalization thanks to its large industrial complexes, suffered seriously from the crisis of the 1990s which led to the collapse of the mining industry and, more generally, of the whole salaried sector. After a brief history of the city and of the state of play of the informal economy, this article attempts a detailed analysis of this economy's lexicon. Expressions newly created from Swahili, French and other languages provide an excellent point of entry into the concrete practices of this sector, as well as the representations and morality on which such practices are based. Strongly associated with expressions of energy, cunning and conspiracy, the vocabulary emerging from the second economy bears witness to the appreciation of the ‘anti-hero’ and demonstrates the inception of a new moral economy in which the state and the powerful have become targets of legitimate predation based on the principle of redistribution.

A significant aspect of the newly developed towns of Central and Southern Africa is the degree to which social relationships in certain situations are being organized in terms of social strata. It is not always easy, however, to secure data on the nature of the system of stratification—there are, in fact, very few substantial studies available. One method of approach, which promises to be fruitful, is through the study of the ranking of occupations by their social prestige. This method has the advantage that the techniques are fairly simple. They can be applied at successive times, thus yielding some measure of change, and they can be applied at different places, thus yielding comparative material.