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.

Among most groups of people in Nigeria, land is a basic and high value resource. This is not due simply to the people's dependence on agriculture to gain a livelihood. It owes more to the fact that the pattern of traditional rural life has continued to raise the demand for the available land.

The agricultural land is used as a fund-type resource which is exploited and abandoned, rather than as a flow-type resource whose productivity is maintained indefinitely. Every new farming season numerous old farm sites not considered, because of their low estimated nutrient status, to be adequate for exploitation are left idle. What then becomes available for use is, in most cases, not enough to meet the demand. This built-in idle capacity in the land utilisation system is a key factor conferring high scarcity value on agricultural land.

One effect of specialization in the field of African Studies has been to prevent or hinder the study of subjects which, by their very nature, demand interdisciplinary interests and competences. Emerging popular culture is such a field. Division of labor among various social sciences and between the social sciences and the humanities—late-comers to Anglo-American concerns with Africa—have long worked like a conjuring trick: making vast and vigorous expressions of African experience de facto invisible, especially to expatriate researchers. African scholars have been slow to denounce this state of affairs, perhaps out of an elitist need to set themselves apart from the loud and colorful bursts of creativity in music, oral lore, and the visual arts emerging from the masses.

Fourteen years have passed since J. A. Barnes published his short article on ‘African models in the New Guinea Highlands’ (1962). In it Barnes raised the question of whether the concepts used to analyse systems of descent in African societies were applicable to descent systems in New Guinea that appeared at first glance to be similar. This article signalled the beginning of a debate over the nature of descent and kinship in New Guinea and the advisability of using concepts and results derived from field research in another continent and in a different context. The very status of social anthropology as a comparative and generalizing science is called into question by the debate initiated by Barnes, for if African research has no relevance for New Guinea research, then neither cross-cultural typologies nor generalizations about social behavior are possible. Hence, the New Guinea literature has more than just an area specialist's significance.

The nature of ethnic interaction has been at the heart of a longstanding debate on the characteristics of Rwanda's precolonial political system. Until recently, the historical referents for such discussion, and in particular the origins of the Rwandan state and its social institutions have been seen as far too remote to base conclusions on empirical data. Consequently the debate has tended to be formulated in terms of logical constructs, rather than in terms of empirical reconstruction of the historical processes involved.

The debate on the ‘Bantu expansion’ has been notable for the relative absence of contributions by social and cultural anthropologists. Murdock's rather extravagant contribution (1959) has assumed a quite inordinate significance, as the only direct attempt to discuss the sociology of large linguistically defined areas. This anthropological silence is particularly noteworthy in view of the close collaboration between anthropologists, linguists and archaeologists in the Americas. It is fair to say that nothing in the Africanist literature approaches the sophistication of, say, Dyen and Aberle's Lexical reconstruction: the case of the proto-Athapaskan kinship system (1974). Studies like that are the outgrowths of a living tradition stemming from Boas and Kroeber and Sapir. There is nothing comparable in Africa—H. Baumann, the only candidate, lacked sociological interests and did not systematically relate his findings and hypotheses to those of the linguists. Yet it is surely obvious that an anthropological contribution is needed here, if only in a critical role. The present paper outlines a few of the ways in which social and cultural anthropologists might contribute; and begins with a critique of traditional ‘culture area’ approaches, since these are generally thought of as the kind of thing that anthropologists can do, however poorly.

In January to March 1975 I visited certain Fante food-growing villages near Cape Coast, in southern Ghana, with the intention of investigating the organisation of food-farming, with special reference to the position of women farmers. In the event, as I shall relate, much of my time was spent studying the outward migration which involved nearly all young men and women. In this short article I shall deal with the main sociological factors which account for what I can only assume to be the extreme inefficiency of most food-farmers in these villages in terms of crop yields per cultivator.

In the past there was a tendency to seek economic cooperation among one's local matrilateral and bilateral kindred. Like the Lozi situation described by Gluckman (1941), the economic activities of Luapulans are so varied that a wide deployment of manpower is required. In any one situation there are always some local kinsmen from whom one may choose helpers, and widely dispersed clansmen amongst whom one can travel and live in order to harvest or collect different resources to offset seasonal shortages at home. Permanent residence in one locality is based upon the mobility of kin who can be sent to garner varied resources in different areas. For example, young men may be sent to live in fish camps on islands in the swamps or river during the months of May, June, and July, or November through March. Commercial fishing of the prized pale (Tilapia macrochir) takes place from August through November and, at this time, young men devote their energy to fishing in the main river. Older men, on the other hand, even today usually fish in nearby waters for immediate consumption only (see Figure 3).

The prominence of the eland in San thought is suggested by the frequency with which this antelope was depicted in rock paintings and also by the myths and rituals in which it features. In this paper we describe and compare certain eland beliefs and hunting rituals drawn from two San groups, the !Kung of Botswana and the now extinct \Xam of the Cape Province. The relevance of material obtained from the northern !Kung to the explication of the limited southern \Xam ethnographic record and rock paintings has been regarded as questionable in view of the ecological and linguistic differences between the two societies. Using the results of recent field work among the !Kung, we attempt to show that, in spite of the linguistic and ecological differences, there is evidence for a conceptual framework common to both groups.

The purpose of this paper is to present evidence of the changes which occur in the behavior of truck and lorry drivers when they are operating their vehicles as opposed to their behavior at other times. Specifically, it is hypothesized that drivers of trucks and lorries in certain West African societies behave in a very time and profit oriented, efficiency conscious manner when they are actually driving, but that this mode of behavior is not carried over into other spheres of their daily interaction. The impression, to use Ferdinand Tonnies' terms (1887), is one of an island of gesellschaft behavior (driving the vehicle) surrounded by an ocean of gemeinschaft behavior (the remainder of daily life).

Whether public policies concerning family planning involve legislative or educational programs, their impact depends upon an analysis of patterns of family formation. But to merely identify the direction and the magnitude of overall aggregate trends in this regard is insufficient. While programs of family planning aim at satisfying the requirements of a national and hence uniform policy, their success depends upon a problematic lack of variability in the relevant behaviours across the various social and ethnic groups located within a particular nation. Accordingly the thrust of the present paper is not only to identify the determinants of child-bearing activities, but also to assess the variability of these determinants along ethnic lines.

Many strategies of rural development in Africa propose greater reliance on local institutions (Girard 1963; Seibel and Massing 1974; The World Bank 1975: 33–40; Tall 1976). Sometimes these proposals are primarily political rhetoric (Migot-Adholle 1970; Cliffe 1970); but they may, on the contrary, genuinely take account of rural social organization and history (Hamer 1967; Magid 1972; 1976: 154-69). Despite their merits, such proposals often fail to consider sufficiently the changing social and economic bases of rural institutions. One factor which deserves more emphasis is the dependence of rural dwellers on wider economic forces. As producers of cash crops, purchasers of imported goods, and suppliers of wage labour, rural Africans are integrated into the national and ultimately international economy. Integration and dependence are facilitated and encouraged by numerous government policies. Peasants are increasingly drawn to the cities by the symbiotic, subordinate relation of rural villages to the urban capitalist export sector, whose interests require a supply of cheap labour (Amin 1974a; 1974b; Meillassoux 1975; Seidman 1974) and predominate in the making of policy. The consequent dislocation and disintegration of rural communities limit severely the possibilities of delegating new tasks to existing rural institutions or of using them to decentralize authority, foster mass participation, or promote self-reliance.

Among the Akan-speaking peoples of Ghana the fundamental notion about the nature and composition of man—a notion which has a significant bearing on their view of the relation between man and his social, natural and spiritual worlds combined—is that each person at his or her conception receives specific physical and spiritual elements from the genitor, genetrix and Nyame, the Supreme Being. These gifts are conceptualised as bogya (or mogya in the Asante dialect), sunsum and kra, equivalent English translations in literary and popular usage being ‘blood’, ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’ respectively.

There are almost three thousand Ibo in London, with men outnumbering women in the ratio of three to two. They tend to be between twenty-five and forty years old and to have been in Britain for between five and ten years. The majority came to obtain qualifications which would bring status on their return to Nigeria, but the Nigeria–Biafra war interrupted the process and as a result they are still here. If the defining characteristic of the immigrant is the tendency to remain in the new country, regardless of the intention to return, the Ibo are not immigrants but a migrant community in which departure is the norm although individual migrants make considerable investments in the new environment and some may never realise their ambition to return. In terms of the degree of their economic incorporation, cultural distinctiveness, ideological commitment to a ‘traditional’ way of life and belief in their own superiority in relation to outsiders, the Ibo have much in common with East African Asians; the difference lies in their declared intention to leave Britain and the success of many in achieving this ambition.

Anthropological analyses of cultural symbolism have often benefitted fron the commentary of gifted informants who have provided ethnographers with detailed symbolic exegeses of the rites and ceremonies of their societies. Ethnographers have usually signalled with enthusiasm such received help and offered profound thanks to their philosophically reflective friends, but at the same time few, if any, ethnographers have indicated a willingness to restrict their data to those offered by such exegetes. In part this reticence is perhaps due to the fact that reliance upon the knowledge or philosophical reflexions of ritual or religious virtuosi raises the question of a possible disparity between the explicit ‘theological’ or cosmological knowledge controlled by certain experts and the implicit working knowledge of practical religion as understood by the majority of its practitioners (cf. Leach 1968). Thus there arises the problem of the subject matter of investigation: should anthropological analyses of symbolism be directed toward explicit specialized knowledge or implicit common knowledge? Furthermore, is articulated knowledge part of the solution of symbolic analysis or is it more properly part of the data (Sperber 1975:x, passim)?

In the protection of their kaya home deep in the forest of the Mombasa hinterland, the Giriama of Kenya developed a non-centralized government based on a council of elders (kambi), and derived from age-sets. They were supported by a special secret society within the kambi whose oath and select membership were used to maintain order and determine guilt in difficult situations. In the period from approximately 1700 until sometime in the nineteenth century, the Giriama developed this form of government by drawing upon their previous experience of life in Singwaya and subsequent southward migration, upon their identification or assimilation of members into six original clans, and upon their unique environment of the kaya neighborhood to become successful cultivators, keeping cattle when circumstances allowed and emerging as the prominent traders of the Mombasa hinterland.

The stability of marriage is one of the most striking features of a rural Luo community, yet discussions of marital problems are endemic. Women frequently voice complaints about their husbands' behavior or make more general comments on the difficulty of marriage for women. By contrast, men voice few complaints about their own marriages, although they are well aware of women's attitudes. I was frequently cautioned by male friends not to pay too much attention to anything a woman might tell me since ‘women liked to complain.’