Dans la littérature ethnographique, le sens des mots religion, magie et sorcellerie reste trés vague. Aucune définition n'a, jusqu'ici, résisté à l'épreuve comparatiste. Longtemps enlisée dans la spéculation sur les origines, l'évolution et la fonction des faits religieux, l'anthropologie se montre actuellement trés prudente à l'égard de toute tentative de théorie générate. L'emploi de méthodes fécondes et l'approfondissement du travail ethnographique ont permis de mieux connaitre les mécanismes mis en oeuvre par le pensee symbolique, mais les concepts de religion, de sacré, de magie, de sorcellerie restent à construire. Le chercheur se trouve done, sur le terrain, privé de référence decisive, qui puisse l'aider à opérer un découpage de la réalité sociale sans négliger une partie de celle-ci.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, a change came about in the hereditary régime of the Bemba kingdom during civil strife between members of the kingdom's royal and noble strata. The rulers of the kingdom, who shared in the Central African trade of slaves and ivory for guns and calico, fought to defend their positions and to meet the competition from opponents who could enter into new relations of power. Past conceptions of the kingdom in terms of centralization have obscured this, hindering understanding of the specialized structures of authority among royals and nobles, the differences among the ruling strata, and the variable interlocking of their federal administrations. Richards has argued, in somewhat contradictory fashion, that the kingdom, primarily unified through ritual beliefs, was nevertheless centralized owing to an apparent concentrating of control over territorial administration in the hands of royals:

In Northern Rhodesia the kingdom of the Bemba was kept united by the strong belief of the people in the ritual powers of their king. All district chieftainships were filled by princes of the blood who moved in succession by genealogical seniority from one chieftainship to another. Clan leaders were unimportant politically and the king's favourites never held office. A royal dynasty in control of all territorial posts seem to have been sufficient to achieve centralization of a loose type.

The present study embodies some of the results of a survey conducted in July 1966 among a sample of 268 rural wage-earners in the territory of Lukula in central Mayombe, Western Congo. The survey focused on two points: first, the labour market, and second, the social and economic ties persisting between the workers and their village kinsmen. This article deals exclusively with the latter.

In her lucid and persuasive Henry Myers Lecture on ‘The power of rights’ (Man, 1977), Professor La Fontaine argues that since the Gisu themselves cite transition from one status to another as the purpose of their initiation rites, this transformation cannot logically explain them. Taking up Maurice Bloch's idea that religion is concerned with inequality and hierarchy (1974; 1977), La Fontaine argues convincingly that the explanation of Gisu initiation rites lies in their functions of validating traditional knowledge and of maintaining traditional authority. The relationship between religion and political power had been noticed before but it had not previously been applied to the field of rites of passage nor had the mechanism of the supportive role of traditional knowledge been so clearly analysed.

The Swahili people are unique among the Bantu of East Africa in possessing an heritage of written literature of considerable range and antiquity. The earliest reasonably authentic examples consist of mashairi, song-poems, attributed to Liongo Fumo, prince of Ozi, c. A.D. 1150–1200. Many of the well-known mashairi were impromptu compositions of the minstrels who vied with one another at the songtourneys.

Native Education in the Union is in an unhealthy state. Three years ago, the doctors were called in to diagnose and prescribe a cure. The result was the Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Native Education, 1935-1936. Some of its recommendations displeased another set of doctors, viz. the Native Affairs Commission, who, on their own initiative, offered their view of the case, agreeing on the symptoms of sickness, but prescribing, in the Report of the Native Affairs Commission for the Year 1936, quite a different mode of treatment.

Predominant in a territory which extends roughly 500 miles north from the lower Zambezi and from the eastern shore of Lake Nyasa to the Luangwa Valley, there is a body of Africans who have for their mother tongue some dialect of the language widely known as ‘Chinyanja’. The chi- (or ci- in modern orthography) is the local form of the usual Bantu prefix to the tribal name, designating the language rather than the district or personnel of the tribe, and may be discarded in English usage. Following a now general convention, the language will be referred to here simply as ‘Nyanja’.

This article examines artist André Sanou's individual agency in the invention and popularity of ‘portrait masks’ in and around Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso. Rather than depicting abstract qualities of unseen natural forces, common among masks in this region, Sanou created the first portrait mask headpiece in a stylized but highly naturalistic manner, using a photograph as reference. It clearly depicted a specific human being, redefining the mask as a portrait of the deceased whom it honoured. Sanou's act gave rise to a wildly popular mask genre. However, portrait masks have aroused debate about the (im)propriety of naturalistic representation in masquerade. I argue that the features that make André Sanou's portrait mask genre so popular – celebrating specific individuals who are visually identifiable by their physiognomic likeness – are the same ones that make the genre controversial. The controversy illustrates the messy business of reconciling creative differences with societal values that individual artists, patrons, organizers, performers and audience members who serve as gatekeepers of cultural institutions maintain and at times negotiate. As the portrait mask genre demonstrates, masquerade is not necessarily a steadfast, uncompromising institution. Individuals can unsettle or disrupt accepted mask practice, even as they broaden its scope and invigorate audiences.

There are no such people, any more than there were such people as the Philistines.

In ‘L'origine du nom Fulani’, I showed that the words ‘Philistine’ and ‘Fulani’ come from a common root F-L which in the Indo-European languages means ‘foreigner, stranger, alien’ and, by a secondary meaning, ‘inferior’. Consequently there is no single group of people represented by the word ‘Philistine’ any more than there can be any special group represented by the word ‘Foreigner’. Such names are coined on the well-known principles of ethnocentrism, whereby one calls one's own group ‘The Men’ and all others ‘Outsiders’. Thus Meek writes that the Bachama tribe, Northern Nigeria ‘. . . call themselves the Gboare or Men, a term which is doubtless the same as Gbari (the name of a large tribe in the Niger and Zaria provinces), Bari (in Eastern Sudan) and Ka-Bwari (Tanganyika). The root gba = man is also found in the Upper Ituri regions of Central Africa under the form mu-gba or ba-gba.’

A drinking party in 1963 precipitated a crisis over newly independent Uganda's sovereignty and the respectability of a new postcolonial ruling elite. Under Kampala's multiracial veneer in the early 1960s lurked bawdy British youth culture and radical African youth politics. When Europeans at a party in the elite suburb of Tank Hill allegedly mocked African aspirations for urban respectability and political sovereignty, UPC (Uganda Peoples Congress) Youth Wing activists used the affair to elicit public expressions of anger at the collusion of conservative politicians and racist former colonizers. Prime Minister Milton Obote attempted to channel that anger into nationalist unity but soon found common cause with British diplomats in expelling intemperate youth from Uganda's governing bureaucracy. The affair points to both the power and the limits of the affective politics of decolonization as well as the relationship between youth wings and the politics of respectability in early postcolonial Africa.

This article juxtaposes a series of vignettes that feature the attitudes of the Manjaco of post-revolutionary Guinea-Bissau to traditional rulers with a similar series of vignettes E. E. Evans-Pritchard used to paint a portrait of Azande attitudes towards aristocrats. It poses the question: if what Evans-Prichard wrote about the Azande reflects the desires and preoccupations of a typical colonialist anthropology, what might the way we write about Manjaco reveal about postcolonialist anthropology as it is currently being constructed? Evans-Pritchard drew a sharp distinction between the idealised ‘before’ and the all too unpleasantly real ‘after’ of the colonial encounter. In the Azande version of this dichotomy authority is ultimately intact and unquestioned on one side of the historic divide. On the other side authority is about to disappear, with colonialism's impositions being the catalyst of this disappearance. By contrast, Manjaco were more likely to revile than revere their kings, and they tended to treat this as an enduring fact rather than to historicise it. Manjaco were also bad subjects and citizens. Or so it has seemed to colonial administrators and revolutionaries. Are we to frame this pervasive cynicism about authority and order as a kind of degeneration—an extension of colonial-era malaise into the era of the postcolony? Or are we to take Manjaco attitudes at face value? The article suggests that, in posing such questions, an emerging postcolonialist anthropology is inevitably a reflection of our view of the capacity of people like the Manjaco to make society work in the postcolonial era.

Lusaka est une ville à l'origine construite pour des résidents européens, pour satisfaire les besoins et le confort de l'européen. A l'époque coloniale, les résidents africains étaient, soit des employés domestiques vivant dans l'enceinte de la maisonnee européenne, soit engagés comme ouvriers salariés alors confinés dans des zones, au sud-ouest de Lusaka, qui leur étaient particulièrement destinées. Comme domestiques, les européens préféraient employer des hommes; les femmes et les enfants vivant dans les quartiers proches étaient considérés potentiellement perturbateurs et on les dissuadait de venir s'installer dans les villes. Un déséquilibre des sexes entre ville et campagne se forma; ainsi se créèrent les présomptions culturelles sur l'inégalité des femmes, le logement et l'emploi, encore largement estimées de nos jours.

La pression pour trouver un emploi salarié en Zambie se fait davantage sentir, et, en conséquence, la population de Lusaka augmente rapidement, alors que les abris sont de plus en plus limités. L'article indique que les employés de maison constituent encore la part la plus importante de la population salariée urbaine. En raison des présomptions culturelles sur la différence des sexes et sur le logement, les hommes et les femmes n'ont pas les mêmes accès à l'habitation. A travers l'exemple des femmes en relation avec les travaux domestiques, et étant entendu que de plus en plus de femmes cherchent désormais un emploi remunéré, l'article examine l'élargissement de la position des femmes en Zambie et souhaite sensibliser la politique du logement en Zambie au problème de la différence des sexes.

The camel-herding peoples described in our last article differ considerably from the cattle-breeding tribes now to be discussed. Not only do the pastoralists mentioned in Section V accord to the camel the leading position as their standard of value, the ass, sheep, and goat being only of secondary importance, but they are also different in race. Like all herdsmen they have a strong pride of ancestry, which has led to internal gradations of rank, crossed by considerations of wealth. The North African Berber tribes are, however, Mohammedans, and therefore the whole structure of their civilization is different from that of the mainly ‘heathen’ cattle-breeders to be considered below. Their great natural gifts and their connexion with Islam set them apart from most of the remaining inhabitants of Africa ; on the other hand conditions of existence in desert and steppe, combined with specialization in pastoral life, have prevented their uniting to form large states or similar organizations.

After an initial discussion about the nature of Sisala society and the segmentary lineage system of shrine types, I will show that fission of domestic groups in Sisala-land takes place in three successive stages: economic, residential and, much later, ritual. This paper deals with two related problems, (a) Given a collective value of kinship amity and unity (Fortes 1969: 219ff), how are groups able to break the ritual bonds which serve to unite them into one body of ancestor-venerators? (b) How are the Sisala able to maintain the ideology of kinship and unity in the face of continual fission of family units?

The Mende people occupy an area of something like 10,000 square miles in the central and south-eastern part of the Sierra Leone Protectorate. Comprising nearly 70 chiefdoms, they numbered, at the time of the last official census (1931), some 580,000 persons, including about 10,000 resident in the Colony. Available statistics suggest that their numbers are on the increase, and may be in the neighbour-hood to-day of one-third of the whole population of the Protectorate, which is estimated at some 2 millions.

Over a period of some fifteen years I carried out ethnographic studies in north-eastern Uganda, firstly of the Kalenjin peoples on and around Mount Elgon, and subsequently of the Sor, a small mountain community of Karamoja.

The earlier study formed the basis of a thesis on the Sebei of Mount Elgon and lasted for ten years, during which time I was based near Kampala and made intermittent journeys to spend two to three weeks at a time in different parts of the Mount Elgon and western Kenya region.

Ashanti customary law, in common with the law of other branches of the Akan people, recognizes a form of oral will, or rather a form of inchoate gift that takes effect on death. This is called saman-nse, saman being an ancestral spirit and nse (or nseε) meaning a formal or solemn declaration; di nse, for example, means to take an oath as a witness does in court. This is the derivation accepted in Ashanti and, with all respect to Rattray's great knowledge, he is in error if he suggests the root is sie, to put, preserve, take care of. His contemptuous rejection of phonetic spelling makes it a little uncertain what sound he meant to record, but on linguistic grounds it is clear the word is not sie. The second a of saman is not modified; the use of a final eε instead of e in certain positions in a sentence is common in Ashanti; and the corresponding Fante forms are saman-nsew, dzi nsew, and sie.