Age has represented in various ways a significant principle of social organization for the Mbeere of Kenya, one of the peoples of the North-eastern Bantu cluster, just as it has among numerous other peoples of East Africa. Traditionally a formal age organization comprised two groups: age-sets universally recruited from circumcised youth, and generation classes with constituent generation-sets. Informants' explanations of the age organization together with census and genealogical data clearly suggest that the recruitment principles and social processes within age-sets were independent of the recruitment principles and social processes characterizing generation classes and their generation-sets. The distinction between these two subsystems of the age organization is therefore more than an heuristic device.

Royal symbols vary from one monarchical culture to another. In Europe, particularly in England, Netherlands and pre-1789 France, royalty was marked by the sovereign's exclusive use of the crown and the sceptre. In Africa, the continent with perhaps the most ancient monarchical traditions, the variation of symbols is especially remarkable. The pharaohs of Egypt, whose model is held by some scholars to have inspired kingly institutions elsewhere in Africa, Europe and Asia, were distinguished by their metal crowns and special sandals. In Ashanti the hene, while he might wear a distinguishing cap, looked more to his ‘stool’, often adorned with beads or (as in the case of the Ashantehene himself) gold, as the most important royal emblem, the seat on which had sat all his predecessors in office. In ancient Dahomey, on the other hand, the king wore no special head dress; and although the throne was an important royal emblem, there was nothing to compare with the rigidly impersonal and ritualistic concept of the throne as found in Ashanti, since every reign usually had its own particular throne dedicated to it. In Fon monarchy, where royal authority was more ideologically conceived, as seen in the perforated pot symbolism, the royal personage was, remarkably, of very ordinary appearance, apart from his large retinue, his aristocratically longish pipe, and a hand-axe across his shoulder.

The collection of republished essays entitled Right and Left: Essays in Dual Symbolic Classification, edited and with a substantial introduction by Rodney Needham (the University of Chicago Press, 1973), has been long awaited. All of the essays are of great interest, and all are concerned with the binary mode of symbolic classification, something which appears to be found, in greater or lesser degree, in all human cultures. The work will no doubt be widely reviewed in the appropriate journals. What follows is not an attempt at an over-all review. It is rather a response to, and a critical examination of, some of the arguments Needham advances in his introduction to the book. As such, I hope that it may contribute, however modestly, to our understanding of some of the problems involved in the application of the ‘binary’ mode of structural analysis to ethnographic data. The context is the symbolism of the Banyoro of western Uganda.

On n'est pas toujours certain, en anthropologie, lorsqu'on étudie un secteur de la vie ou de l'activité sociale, d'avoir défini pour autant un objet de recherche. Le phénomène isolé, privilégié, peut n'être qu'un aspect fluctuant ou même éphémère d'une réalité plus vaste. Seule la compréhension de cette réalité permettrait de situer à sa juste place le phénomène privilégié; le trajet inverse est impossible. Cette remarque me paraît rejoindre celles que formule E. Leach dans Rethinking Anthropology lorsqu'il invite ses collègues à ne pas ‘collectionner les papillons’, à ne pas multiplier les typologies—et par exemple (mais ceci est une autre histoire) à ne pas distinguer entre différents types de filiation aux dépens de la seule distinction pertinente, selon lui, qui oppose la filiation a l'alliance.

In 1970 and 1971 I spent fifteen months studying the ritual gatherings of a syncretistic healing movement popular among the coastal Fante of Ghana. The group is known as the ‘Nakabah people’ (the name of one of the founders) or more generally as The Twelve Apostles Church. On Fridays the Twelve Apostles gather for a healing ritual known to them as edwuma, the work, or sunsum edwuma, the working with spirits. On Sundays a prayer service called kyεpor, a pidgin term for ‘chapel’, is conducted. Both the edwuma and the kyεpor are performed in small communal healing centres of the movement designated as ‘gardens’. Most of these gardens are located in coastal fishing towns or inland agricultural villages up and down the coastline of Ghana's central region.

This paper is an attempt to establish certain contested facts about Nyoro symbolism. The need to do so results, in brief, from the following circumstances. Eight years ago I published an analysis of the significance of right and left in Nyoro symbolic classification (Needham 1967). John Beattie, who had done field research among the Nyoro, then brought out an article in which he contended that I had seriously misrepresented the nature of Nyoro representations of their own culture and history, ‘even in so far as these can be understood from readily available published sources’. His main concern in his critique, consequently, was ‘to set the Nyoro ethnographic record straight’ (Beattie 1968: 413).

So far only two scholars have done significant work on the institution of àkó, a burial ceremony in Owo. Àkó, particularly the effigy used in it, is of unquestionable importance in the stylistic interpretation of some bron2e and terracotta sculptures from Ile-Ifẹ. In fact, it is essentially for this reason that Justine Cordwell and Frank Willett have studied the àkó ceremony and effigy in Owo.

In this paper I discuss the mythological and ritual sequences honouring dead elders amongst two descent segments of the Sadama of Southwest Ethiopia. Myth and ritual will be described and an explanation offered regarding the persistence of both under changing conditions.

The participants in these rites are the men of the Holo-Garbičo clans, two of the most esteemed descent groups of the Cushitic speaking Sadama. The Sadama, located approximately 170 miles south of Addis Ababa, are estimated by a 1969 sample survey to number over 600,000 persons (Central Statistical Office 1972: 11). The institutions and culture of the Sadama have been described elsewhere. They have a mixed economy based on the cultivation of such staples as ensete-edulus and maize, cattle herding, and recently the production of coffee as a cash crop. There are a number of clans which are subdivided into patrilineages cross-cut by several generational classes (Hamer 1970).

In the north of Mafia Island, the rites surrounding the circumcision of boys and the first menstruation of girls are no longer, if indeed they ever were, universally performed. This article attempts to explain this situation, and in so doing, draws on some of Turner's work on symbolism. In particular, his distinction between different levels of meaning expressed by symbols—the exegetical, the operational and the positional (1962)—is followed in a discussion of the political implications of performance or rejection of the rites.

The purpose of this paper is to examine in detail a mode of economic integration, redistribution, and its relationship to political power. The redistributive institution studied here involves assumption of the title halak'a by a male citizen. ‘We catch the halak'a!' say the Dorze (halak'a aikos), implying by their choice of verb that candidates show some reluctance to disburse their economic resources upon feasts and fees. During the ceremonies which create a titled incumbent from an initiate, large amounts of goods, services, and money are collected by the halak'a and used in lavish feasting. Pooling of resources and their subsequent reallocation mark as redistributive this prominent institution of Dorze public life.

African Zionist ritual is for the patient. The ambiguity is intended. Not only is Zionist ritual a healing rite but it makes demands on the patience of the participant. In the South African township of Kwa Mashu where African Zionists meet in small groups of from six to thirty people called Ibandla, i.e. a band, the meeting which takes place in one small room normally lasts for four or five of the hottest hours of the day. This is usually a Sunday. An occasional variant is to begin the meeting the previous midnight and continue into daylight. In either case, the most palpable feature of the meeting is its lack of urgency. It seems to meander indulgently from one unmanaged moment to the next and its atmosphere of unplanned relaxation leaves one with no expectation that it will ever end. The whole tenor of the meeting is therefore alien to the imposition of an organizational framework based on the division of activities into strict time intervals. Nevertheless time does intrude. In the course of the meeting the minister will more than once consult a watch ostentatiously placed before him on the table or he will interrupt activities publicly to enquire the time. Despite the general trend, therefore, some attempt is being made to measure and control the use of time. This is one way of stating the basic paradox of a Zionist meeting; despite an absence of overall control there are visible signs that control is somehow being exercised.

In the 19th century, there were Chagga chiefdoms which initiated their young men into adulthood by putting them through an elaborate series of rituals and ordeals. The first was circumcision. No sooner had the young men fully recovered from their circumcision wounds than they had another trial to undergo. They were sent to the forest for a period of seclusion and instruction. Children and young women were told that during this time in the Kilimanjaro forests the newly circumcized youths were subjected to another operation, this one to plug and stitch closed their anuses (Gutmann, Recht: 321–338; HRAF trans.: 289–304).

There is a type of labour agreement encountered in agrarian societies, which almost inevitably gets labelled ‘traditional’. This is the arrangement, occurring in a variety of styles which I discuss elsewhere (Charsley 1974a), whereby members of a rural community co-operate to perform collectively tasks which belong to them individually. The use of such a label has often, as will be seen, some justification in that these arrangements typically form parts of institutional complexes embedded in the diffuse and multiplex social relationships of small-scale communities. They usually imply a lack of specialization both of task and of skill.

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.