This article has been written as a contribution to the future orientation of a research programme on the agrarian crisis in Africa, which has been set up by the Joint Committee on African Studies (JCAS) of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. The aim of this article is to provide an agenda for research on the environment and access to resources in Africa and is one of four which both provide a review of some of the most important research issues and suggest ways in which they might be tackled.

The system of divination called Ifa is among the most elaborate of African systems of divination and occupies a unique position in what is often called ‘Yoruba traditional religion’. That it is inappropriate simply to regard it as part of Yoruba traditional religion indicates the nature of our problem. For its saliency in Yoruba religion, as that has been conceived by commentators both Yoruba and non-Yoruba since the early nineteenth century, has precisely been because of its capacity to ‘ride’ social change, to detach itself from much of what Muslims and Christians call paganism, and to impose itself on the respectful attention of the modern educated.

Lele religious life is organized by a number of cult groups. For a long time they seemed to me to be a collection of quite heterogeneous cults, uncoordinated except for a certain overlap in membership. In one of them, the Diviners' group, entry is by initiation only, though the candidate is supposed to give evidence of a dream summons. In another, the Twin Parents, there is no initiation. Parents of twins have no choice but to pay the fees and become Twin Diviners. In another, the Begetters, candidates must have begotten a child, pay fees and undergo initiation. Members of this group, who have begotten children of both sexes, are qualified for entrance into another group, which makes a cult of the pangolin (manis tricuspis) (see fig. 1). Lastly there are Diviners of God (Bangang banjambi) who are supposed to acquire their power not by initiation, but by direct communication with supernatural beings, the spirits. The primary objects of all these cults are fertility and good hunting.

Iron smelting was still widespread in Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century and was recorded in a number of areas by missionaries, administrators, travellers and the like. A wide variety of technical procedures and associated magic was observed in the process. The quality of these early accounts varies depending on the technical expertise of the observers and their interest in (or bias against) the ritual aspects. Reviews of the early literature, both technical and ritual, have been provided by Cline (1937) and others and no attempt in this direction will be made here. It will suffice to say that magic associated with smelting appears to be universal in sub-Saharan Africa, as are certain themes. These include the following:

1. For iron smelting to be successful, the smelters must be technically expert and a variety of supernatural forces must be propitiated. This propitiation takes the form of ceremonies and ritual and involves the application of special materials or medicines. The combination of ritual and medicines is referred to here as magic.

2. The iron smelters, especially the leaders, command the knowledge to carry out both the technical and magical components of smelting. This makes them more than ordinary craftsmen and gives them special status, usually high; alternatively they may be outcasts.

3. Sexual symbolism and taboos accompany smelting, often expressed through the exclusion of women from smelting in progress, compulsory celibacy for the smelters, or female anthropomorphic details added to smelting furnaces.

Les pratiques des connaissances locales sont de plus en plus considérées et respectées au sein même des sciences conventionnelles et du monde du développement international. Ces procédés sont en général le fruit de l'observation empirique et de l'expérience des gens du pays à travers les siècles, et sont notamment très censés du point de vue écologique. Le savoir qu'ils transmettent, ainsi que l'association des matériaux et des techniques peuvent être d'une énorme valeur pour élever des initiatives qui seraient sumsamment rentables, réalisables aux niveaux socioculturel et politique, sans conséquence sur l'environnement, et done défendables, afin d'améliorer les moyens d'existence et le bien-être de l'homme. L'article en question offre une idée générale sur un secteur pionier des recherches et développements locaux pour le continent africain: la médecine ethnovétérinaire. Il décrit les caracteristiques des guérisseurs indigènes, des sciences ethno-étiologique, ethnopharmacologique et toxicologique, des connaissances en matière de vaccins et de chirurgie, et de quelques pratiques agricoles en lien avec la santé. Ces faits sont alors analysés d'un point de vue à la fois socio-scientifique et bio-technologique, afin d'évaluer dans quelles limites et comment il serait possible d'appliquer les compétences vétérinaires africaines au sein d'un développement agricole vraiment approprié. En conclusion, les auteurs donnent des orientations à la fois pour le présent et le futur, afin d'étudier et d'utiliser au mieux ce recueil de connaissances, précieuses mais compromises.

This article brings two analytic perspectives to bear on temporal aspects of relations to children's children. The first, which we call processual time, is the long-term, ‘experience-distant’, view of household developmental cycles over a historical period. Beginning with this approach, we describe the arrangements of family and marriage that provide the framework for people's relations to the children of their sons and of their daughters in Bunyole County, eastern Uganda. Household survey material collected over thirty years in one village shows an increase in the number of grandchildren being cared for, as expected in an era when parents are dying of AIDS. However, it also qualifies the hegemonic historical narrative of AIDS by showing that other factors have been and still are at work in influencing the patterns of caring for grandchildren. The second analytical perspective is that of the intersubjective time of shared biographies and common experience. The emphasis here is on the ‘experience-near’ qualities and practice of relatedness as they are lived and talked about in the lifeworlds of social actors. They are evident in the dyadic relations between grandparents and grandchildren and also in the ways that these relations are embedded in other connections to children and in-laws. When grandparents take on the care of a daughter's children, they are mindful of the past, present and future of her relation to her husband and his family. The concept of ‘intersubjective time’ points to the intertwining of the lives of three generations and provides a rich complement to the more abstract concern with developmental cycles and historical processes.

Using ethnographic material alongside newspaper and NGO reports, this article explores popular responses to ZANU PF's devastating Operation Murambatsvina, commonly dubbed Zimbabwe's tsunami, which targeted informal markets and ‘illegal’ housing across Zimbabwe between May and August of 2005, making an estimated 700,000 people homeless and indirectly affecting a quarter of Zimbabwe's population. The article argues that central to experiences of these dramatic events ‘on the ground’ (particularly in Harare's high- and low-density suburbs of Chitungwiza and Hatfield, where most of the ethnographic material was collected) was a profound tension between the resonances evoked by official appeals to a reassertion of ‘order’ and formal planning procedures, and the spectacle of ZANU PF's public demonstration of its ability to deploy state ‘force’ ruthlessly, and indeed ‘arbitrarily’; that is, as, when and how it chose. Although the brutal execution of the programme was widely condemned by observers and victims alike, less reported has been the way in which official justifications for the operation were sometimes recognizable and salient to people living in urban areas across Zimbabwe, resonating with memories of past clearances, or with longstanding and divergent aspirations for respectability, urban ‘order’, and a functioning, bureaucratic state. It is argued that in the ambiguity and uncertainty generated by this tension the political advantages of the operation for the ruling party become most apparent. Relating the plethora of rumours circulating at the time (about the ‘hidden agendas’ behind the operation) to Mbembe's work on post-colonial conviviality, the article argues that like Mbembe's satirical cartoons these rumours did not so much undermine or subvert the authority of ZANU PF as reinforce its omnipotent presence. However, unlike the pessimism of Mbembe's vision of all encompassing power, it is argued that if the rumours that circulated about Operation Murambatsvina are an example of the constant re-making of ‘stateness’ on the margins, then the uncertain ambiguity of such rumours can not only reinforce the omnipotent presence of the ‘state power’, but also illustrate the omnipresence of its fundamental insecurity.

Professor Griaule's article on ‘L'Alliance cathartique’ in Africa of October 1948 raises a methodological point of considerable importance. If we wish to understand a custom or institution that we find in a particular society there are two ways of dealing with it. One is to examine the part it plays in the system or complex of customs and institutions in which it is found and the meaning that it has within this complex for the people themselves. Professor Griaule deals in this way with the custom by which the Bozo and the Dogon exchange insults with each other. He considers it as an element in a complex of customs, institutions, myths, and ideas to which the Dogon themselves refer by the term mangou. He shows us also what meaning the natives themselves attribute to this exchange of insults (p. 253). As a piece of analysis the article is admirable, and is a most important contribution to our growing knowledge of West African society.

In this article, mimesis and mimicry are used as analytical concepts to explore dynamics of state and identity formation in Somaliland and Puntland since the early 1990s. Mimesis captures endeavours to imitate well-established models of social and political organization. Mimicry involves the deceptive imitation of such models in order to reach a certain aim. In the particular setting of northern Somalia, miming and mimicking in state and identity formation are also related to conflict escalation. The article first presents relevant political and legal positions on state collapse and secession. This helps to grasp the theoretical and policy implications of the empirical material. Then, the establishment of Somaliland and Puntland through mimesis and mimicry is sketched. The outline of the repeated military confrontations between both sides, particularly the last round of fighting in and around the town of Laascaanood in late 2007, indicates the relation of state and identity formation to military conflict. These localized dynamics are embedded into the continuing conflict in southern Somalia that involves a number of internal and external actors. The article concludes that miming and mimicking underlie many of Somaliland's and Puntland's internal developments and their conflictive relationship. Moreover, since the conflict in northern Somalia concerns state formation, it might have far-reaching consequences for the future of Somalia as a whole. This finally leads to the suggestion that the international norms regarding state collapse and secession have to be re-evaluated in the light of the empirical realities at hand.

Everywhere in West Africa contact with Western economy has brought changes in the technology of the indigenous people; today, side by side with the old man chipping away at a block of wood, making an image or a mask, and the weaver with his horizontal loom producing yard upon yard of narrow cloth strips to be sewn together into huge, flowing robes, sit the tailor making khaki shorts on his treadle sewing-machine and the carpenter nailing together planks for doors and window frames. In the traditional craft industries a father hands on his knowledge and skill to his sons; thus some crafts become the preserve of certain lineages. The sudden impact of the new technology did not give the craftsmen an opportunity to adapt their work to the new machines and tools; new men were recruited who had never been craftsmen and thus today the numerous tailors, carpenters, builders, and their like are not related to their fellow workers by blood ties; but, independent as these workers may appear, they are usually united to their fellow craftsmen by bonds of economic agreement whereby their work is strictly regulated. This study will attempt to describe the organization of the traditional crafts in some Yoruba towns and to show how the new crafts have formed guild organizations which preserve many of the functions of the older craft organization, but have a structure based not upon the lineage but upon the territorial divisions of society.

This paper starts with a critique of two recent essays on African religion—Professor Max Gluckman's essay ‘Les Rites de Passage’, and Dr. V. W. Turner's Chihamba: the White Spirit. Though the first is a generalized interpretation of African rituals, and the second a close study of one rite in a particular culture, the two make an interesting comparison. First of all, they are inspired by strongly contrasted theoretical premisses. Secondly, one represents a well-established approach to the study of ritual, while the other includes a powerful objection to this approach. Thirdly, the two essays exhibit a polarity of attitude which I suspect has a wider currency both in Social Anthropology and in Comparative Religion. In what follows, I shall argue that the polarization of thought suggested by these two essays is basically unhelpful to the study of African religions; and I shall go on and suggest an approach which seems to me a fruitful middle way into the subject.

Considerable attempts to create a single economy of credit, in part through regularizing microlenders (especially the much-demonized loansharks or mashonisas), have been made by the South African government, notably through the National Credit Act. This article explores how borrowing and indebtedness are seen from the point of view of consumers and of those who aim to protect them. It suggests that we should speak of moneylending rather than moneylenders; that lending is often done by groups rather than by individuals (in a variant of the well-known stokvel); and that it may represent a response to so-called ‘formalization’ (Guyer 2004) of financial arrangements by those who have considerable experience of this, rather than being a bulwark against it. Based on research in Gauteng and Mpumalanga, the article critically explores prevalent stereotypes of the ‘overindebted consumer’ and the ‘black diamond’, seeking evidence both in support and in refutation of them. It discusses those factors which are conducive to and those which obstruct the achieving of the status of upwardly mobile – and simultaneously overindebted – person; demonstrates that aspiration and upward mobility, and the problems of credit or debt that accompany these, have much longer histories; and that these matters can give us insights into the contradictory character of the South African state. Its ‘neo-liberal’ dimension allows and encourages free engagement with the market and advocates the freedom to spend, even to become excessively acquisitive of material wealth. But it simultaneously attempts to regulate this in the interests of those unable to participate in this dream of conspicuous consumption. Informalization intensifies as all manner of means are devised to tap into state resources. Neo-liberal means are used to ensure the wide spread of redistribution.

Two related problems are raised: (1) why the persistence, and increase in scale, of funeral rites (with consequently much greater expenditure) both colonially and post-colonially; (2) what is the effect of this greater funeral expenditure on the economy of today's Asante? It is suggested that present-day funeral rites have only superficial religious significance; it is their economic and social importance that explains the vigour with which they are still performed. Far from being economically wasteful, they fuel economic activities that are on balance beneficial. It is the combination of economic and social utility that sustains, even enhances, the scale of the performance of the rites.

As we approach the post-colonial half century, transnationalism has become a major reality in Africa and the wider world with the proliferation of immigrants, refugees and displaced persons. But transnationalism is not a new development, and diaspora and globalization – both historical processes – have long served as contexts for the remaking of identity, citizenship and polity. Today, concepts such as ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘flexible citizenship’ are in vogue in a globalized world, as transnationalism challenges statist concepts of political citizenship. In this article, using the case of Ghana, I revisit the historic presence of a Lebanese diaspora in west Africa from the 1860s, and the intellectual and political obstacles that have worked against their full incorporation as active political citizens. I seek to understand why the prospect of non-black citizenship was considered problematic in black Africa during the era of decolonization, interrogating the institutional legacies of colonial rule and pan-Africanist thought. The intellectual rigidity of pan-Africanism on race is contrasted with current notions of the constructedness of identity. I probe the ways in which the Lebanese in Ghana constructed their identities, and how these facilitated or obstructed assimilation. As African governments seek to tap into the resources of the new African communities in Europe and North America, the article suggests the timeliness of exploring alternative criteria to indigeneity when defining citizenship in black Africa.

In Eastern Uganda, a married woman should be buried at her husband's home, raising questions such as: which husband? were they really married? These questions become urgent when a woman dies at the home of her parents or brothers, a situation that has become increasingly common as women ill with AIDS seek care from their families of orientation. In Bunyole, the ways in which a woman ‘belongs’ to two different homes are brought out as discussions proceed about where she should be buried. This article uses accounts of cases where there was uncertainty about the burial site to show how people justify the choice of a ‘final home’. ‘Arguments of cultural rules’ are used to underwrite demands about bridewealth, while ‘arguments of affection’ are put forward in sympathy for women who needed care or were loved by children. The location of the grave provides a vantage point for looking at how home and marriage take on significance for women in distress. The explanations provide a window on the ways families reason about rights, obligation, virtue and compassion. They show the enduring importance of a woman's natal family; in the era of AIDS, mortally ill women are usually cared for by parents and siblings even though their corpses may be carried to a husband's home for burial.

In January 2008 the Ghanaian Central Bank announced that it had introduced a new centralized mechanism for the settlement of transactions between the Ghanaian banks. This interbank switch, as it was called, was purchased from, and managed by, the South African company Net 1 UEPS, and it had a unique central organizing principle. The switch was indexed biometrically, using a key derived from the ten fingerprints of account holders. This new interbank switch and a smartcard encoded in the same way has equipped Ghana with the world's first biometric money supply. This article is an effort to explain the development and significance of this biometric money, which Ghanaians call the e-Zwich. It traces the way in which biometric registration in Ghana (as in other African countries) has leaked from the mundane, difficult, and mostly unrewarding, task of civil registration into the more properly remunerated domain of monetary transactions. Viewed in the light of the rich historical anthropology of money in West Africa, what is at stake in Ghana may be much more significant than any of the current participants fully realize. Perhaps the most interesting finding of this study is that the e-Zwich system might actually succeed.

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.

The structural conditions associated with increased inequality amidst rapid change brought about by growing financialization and efforts to get the ‘unbanked’ sections of society into the formal financial system have created the conditions under which illegal pyramid and ponzi schemes, fake investment schemes, and legal multi-level marketing companies have been able to flourish. In contemporary Johannesburg and Soweto the originators of money multiplication schemes and the agents who ‘work’ to recruit new members position themselves in this context as financial entrepreneurs and brokers who embody a range of seemingly contradictory discourses, drawing on discourses of ‘empowerment’, ‘self-help’, ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘religiously sanctioned wealth and prosperity’ in the course of their risk taking in the field of finance. Based on a series of case studies of female agents of ‘push-push’ schemes, the article shows how many of these discourses reflect some of the conditions of contemporary capitalism: citizens are expected to be active investors, active entrepreneurs and hard workers who are able to work from home and without a boss. Moreover, the schemes use sophisticated technologies, marketing strategies and other practices which simulate formality, legality and sincerity – echoing religious practices and discourses. At the same time a set of cultural values and social logics that are not necessarily produced by neo-liberal capitalism and financialization, but are certainly activated by them, makes it hard for citizens to recognize or admit the forms of deception involved, unless deception is seen to be central to the operation of the modern state or the present ‘get-rich-quick’ culture. Risk taking, and pursuit of social mobility, originate in dual economy legacies, with their unfulfilled expectations, wealth disparities and frustrated class aspiration. Participants in pyramid schemes have ideologies combining ‘progress’ with ‘imminent doom’, entrepreneurship with greed: contradictory attitudes reflective of financialization in the broader world.

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.