Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology – serie

Of all the great world religions, Islam appears to have the most powerful political appeal in the twentieth century. It sustains some severely traditional and conservative regimes, but it is also capable of generating intense revolutionary ardour and of blending with extreme social radicalism. As an agent of political mobilisation, it seems to be overtaking Marxism, arid surpassing all other religions. The present book seeks the roots of this situation in the past. The traditional Muslim society of the arid zone has, in the past, displayed remarkable stability and homogeneity, despite great political fragmentation, and the absence of a centralised religious hierarchy. The book explores the mechanisms which have contributed to this result - a civilisation in which (in the main) weak states co-existed with a strong culture, which had a powerful hold over the populations under its sway. A literate Great Tradition, in the keeping of urban scholars, lived side by side with a more emotive, ecstatic folk tradition, ill tile keeping of holy lineages, religious brotherhoods and freelance saints. One tradition was sustained by the urban trading class and periodically swept the rest of the society in waves of revivalist enthusiasm; the other was based on the multiple functions it performed in rural tribal society and amongst the urban poor. The two traditions were intertwined, yet remained in latent tension which from time to time came to tile surface. The book traces the manner in which the impact of the modern world, acting through colonialism arid industrialisation upset the once stable balance, and helped the erstwhile urban Great Tradition to become the pervasive arid dominant one, culminating in the zealous arid radical Islam which is so prominent now. The argument is both formulated in the abstract and illustrated by a series of case studies and examinations of specific aspects, and critical examinations of rival interpretations.

In her study of domestic organization in Gonja, a formerly important West African state, now part of Ghana, Esther Goody has concentrated on tracing the interrelationships between political and domestic institutions in a bilateral kinship system, untypical of the area. After outlining the problems which she is seeking to solve and describing the domestic, political and economic context of life in central Gonja, the author examines the several aspects of marriage fundamental to the establishment of domestic groups and their development. The practice of sending children to be reared by kin is then discussed and is related to the strong ties binding kin together however far apart they may live. Dr Goody examines patterns of residence through time, and seeks to relate these to both the political context and the form taken by authority in the kin group. The study concludes with a comparison of the Gonja system with other bilateral and unilineal African kingdoms, and the book is completed by appendices presenting the statistical material gathered during research.

In the last twenty years, immigration has become one of the most contested issues in Western Europe. The arrival of Africans, Asians, Eastern Europeans and others in Italy has reversed earlier trends of emigration. Debate, political activity and violence have raised questions of rejection and integration, of anti-racism and the new racism. Studies of these issues commonly focus on political activity and the plight of minorities, but this book breaks new ground in its emphasis on the everyday reactions of Italians to immigration and related issues. Drawing on research carried out in Palermo, Jeffrey Cole considers the role of class, culture, local history and political economy in the ambivalent responses of Sicilians to immigrants. He places Italian attitudes in a European context, and investigates why anti-immigrant politics are concentrated in the wealthy Italian North.

The theme of this book is the analysis of the changes that have occurred in the kinship patterns of the Toka of South Zambia as a result of a shift in their form of production from hoe agriculture to ox-drawn ploughing. Dr Holy uses the rich, detailed ethnography that he provides about these changes to confront several theoretical issues of current anthropological interest, as well as to examine the basic methodological problems of anthropological enquiry. Emphasizing the distinction between the conceptual and cognitive world of the actors, and the transactions and events in which they engage, he argues that anthropological explanation has to account not only for structure, but also for the purposeful interaction between actors that generates that structure.

Tradition is a central concept in the social sciences, but it is commonly treated as unproblematic. Dr Boyer insists that social anthropology requires a theory of tradition, its constitution and transmission. He treats tradition 'as a type of interaction which results in the repetition which results in the repetition of certain communicative events', and therefore as a form of social action. Tradition as Truth and Communication deals particularly with oral communication and focuses on the privileged role of licensed speakers and the ritual contexts in which certain aspects of tradition are characteristically transmitted. Drawing on cognitive psychology, Dr Boyer proposes a set of general hypotheses to be tested by ethnographic field research. He has opened up an important new field for investigation within social anthropology.

Bartered Brides is a detailed study of marriage among the Maduzai, a tribal society in Afghan Turkistan. It is the first study of the area which looks in depth at both the domestic aspects of marriage and its relation to the productive and reproductive activities of women, as well as marriage as a means of managing political and economic conflict and competition. The fieldwork was carried out in the early 1970s before the 1978 coup and Soviet invasion. In this respect the book offers a unique account of a world that has disappeared. Nancy Tapper presents both male and female perspectives, detailed case studies and historical and statistical material. As an ethnographic and historical record, Bartered Brides breaks new ground in the study of Islam, the Middle East and South-west Asia. As the most detailed and extensive discussion of a Middle Eastern marriage system to date, it contributes to wider anthropological studies of marriage, politics and gender.

The Vezo, a fishing people of western Madagascar, are known as 'the people who struggle with the sea'. Dr Astuti explores their identity showing that it is established through what people do rather than being determined by descent. Vezo identity is a 'way of doing' rather than a 'state of being', performative rather than ethnic. However, her innovative analysis of Vezo kinship also uncovers an opposite form of identity based on descent, which she argues is the identity of the dead. By looking at key mortuary rituals that engage the relationship between the living and the dead, Dr Astuti develops a dual model of the Vezo person: the one defined contextually in the present, the other determined by the past.

Among the Berti of Northern Darfur (Sudan), as among many Muslim societies, the formal religious practices are predominantly the concern of men, while local, unorthodox customary rituals are performed mainly by women. It is usual to dismiss such local, popular practices as pre-Islamic survivals, but Professor Holy shows that the customary rituals constitute an integral part of the religious system of the Berti. Carefully analysing the symbolic statements made in Berti rituals, Professor Holy demonstrates that the distinction between the two classes of rituals is an expression of the gender relationships characteristic of the society. He also examines the social distribution of knowledge about Islam, and explains the role of the religious schools in sustaining religious ideas. The work is not only an ethnographic study of ritual, belief and gender in an African society. It also makes a significant contribution to current anthropological discussion of the interpretation and meaning of rituals and symbols.

In this innovative study, David Parkin shows how indigenous African rites and beliefs may be reworked to accommodate a variety of economic systems, new spatial and ecological relations between communities, and the locally variable influences of Islam and Christianity. The Giriama people of Kenya include pastoralists living in the hinterland; farmers, who work land closer to the coast; and migrants, who earn money as labourers or fishermen on the coast itself. Wherever they live, they revere an ancient and formerly fortified capital, located in the pastoralist hinterland, which few of them ever see or visit. Their different perspectives sometimes conflict, but together provide a shifting idea of the sacred place. As the site of occasional large-scale ceremonies, moreover, the settlement becomes especially important at times of national crisis. It then acts as a moral core of Giriama society, and a symbolic defence against total domination and assimilation.

Ethnobiology is concerned with the social and cultural transformation of biological knowledge. Roy Ellen, who has worked among the Nuaulu people of eastern Indonesia for more than twenty years, argues here that ethnobiology is a key theoretical area of anthropological enquiry, because it relies on accessible ethnography to explain the interrelationship between collective representations and cognitive processes. He demonstrates this through a detailed analysis of Nuaulu classification of animal knowledge: the relationship between animal words and animal categories; the construction of different categories and their relationship to one another, and the actual language of classification. The classifications are shown to be context-bound and socially embedded, of practical importance to their users, and to reflect an interaction between culture, cognitive processes and the material world. This is an innovative study, which takes our understanding beyond the taxonomic abstraction characteristic of earlier work in the field.

Among the Tuareg people in the Air Mountain region of Niger, women are sometimes possessed by spirits called 'the people of solitude'. The evening curing rituals of the possessed, featuring drumming and song, take place before an audience of young men and women, who joke and flirt as the ritual unfolds. In her analysis of this tolerated but unofficial cult, Susan Rasmussen analyses symbolism and aesthetic values, provides case studies of possessed women, and reviews what local people think about the meaning of possession.

The first new religion in the Caribbean since Rastafari, the Earth People draw on West African sources, assert a renascent African identity, and celebrate female creativity. They argue that Black people are the guardians of a natural environment, which is constantly under threat from European science. In this 1993 book, Dr Littlewood, who is both a psychiatrist and a social anthropologist, criticizes received ideas about pathology and creativity. The founder's ideas emerged in her experience of cerebral disease, and Dr Littlewood shows how the Earth People reinterpret radical personal experiences to build a community. While naturalistic and personalistic interpretations of human life are both valid and necessary, neither can be reduced to the other.

Based on field research in eastern Finland not far from the Russian border, this book is an account of the main features of rural society in the area. It pays detailed attention to the adaptability of farming families in a rapidly changing world. Subjects treated include marriage and the family, work and mechanization, succession to farms, and the paradoxical combination of fierce individualism and co-operation. Two major themes of the book are the relation between law and custom, which is not always what it seems on the surface, and the complex interlocking of farm, family and the wider society.

Among the people of Avatip, a community in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, the most prestigious and valued forms of wealth are personal names. In this intriguing study, Simon Harrison analyses the significance of names in the context of Avatip ritual, cosmology and concepts of the person, and shows how the Avatip system of names parallels the gift-exchange systems of many other Melanesian societies. In ritualized debates, which form the public arena of Avatip political life, rival leaders and the groups they represent struggle in oratorical contests for the possession of strategic names, and, as they do so, continually manipulate possibilities of this symbolically constituted economy, these competitive processes over the past century have been progressively egalitarian type to one based on hereditary inequality and rank. The author offers a critique of the analytical arguing that it obscures the processes of political evolution in Melanesia and disguises the fundamental similarities underlying the sociocultural diversity of the region.

Over the past few decades a series of Catholic shrines have sprung up in Sri Lanka which draw hundreds of pilgrims. Although best known as centres for the exorcism of the demonically possessed, their miraculous efficacy also extends to helping people find jobs and preferment, and to alleviating suffering. Dr Stirrat, who has worked in Sri Lanka over a long period, is interested both in how people behave at the shrines, and in the historical and social contexts in which the shrines have appeared. He argues that an understanding of their religious importance is intricately connected with power, religious and political. This view challenges the conventional distinction between 'religion' and 'politics', and accordingly, religious suffering is seen as a complex metaphor linking together various social domains and a means through which conflicts over power and authority can be expressed.

Children in the Taiwanese fishing community of Angang have their attention drawn, consciously and unconsciously, to various forms of identification through their participation in schooling, family life and popular religion. They read texts about 'virtuous mothers', share 'meaningful foods' with other villagers, visit the altars of 'divining children' and participate in 'dangerous' god-strengthening rituals. In particular they learn about the family-based cycle of reciprocity, and the tension between this and commitment to the nation. Charles Stafford's 1995 study of childhood in this community (with additional material from north-eastern mainland China) explores absorbing issues related to nurturance, education, family, kinship and society in its analysis of how children learn, or do not learn, to identify themselves as both familial and Chinese.

This 1991 study deals with a specific set of institutions in nineteenth-century Athens. Relying on matrimonial contracts, travellers' accounts, memoirs and popular literature, the authors show how distinctive forms of marriage, kinship and property transmission evolved in Athens in the nineteenth century. These forms then became a feature of wider Greek society which continued into the twentieth century. Greece was the first post-colonial modern nation state in Europe whose national identity was created largely by peasants who had migrated to the city. As Athenian society became less agrarian, a new mercantile group superseded and incorporated previous elites and went on to dominate and control the new resources of the nation state. Such groups developed their own, more mobile, systems of property transmission, mostly in response to external pressures of a political and economic character. This is a persuasive piece of detective work which has advanced our knowledge of modern Greece. It is a model for scholarship on the development of family and other 'intimate' ideologies where nation states encroach upon local consciousness.

Ron Brunton revives a problem posed by the great anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers in History of Melanesian Society (1914): how to explain the strange geographical distribution of kava, a narcotic drink once widely consumed by south-west Pacific islanders. Rivers believed that it was abandoned by many people even before European contact in favour of another drug, betel, drawing his speculations from the ideas of the diffusionist school of anthropology. However, Dr Brunton disagrees. Taking the varying fortunes of kava on the island of Tanna, Vanauta, as his starting point, he suggests that kava's abandonment can best be explained in terms of its association with unstable religious cults, and not because of the adoption of betel. The problem of kava is therefore part of a broader problem of why many traditional Melanesian societies were characteristically highly unstable, and Dr Brunton sees this instability as both an outcome and a cause of weak institutions of authority and social coordination.

This study of the Indian cinema is concerned particularly with cinema-goers in Madurai, a city in Tamil Nadu, South India. Sara Dickey reviews the history of Tamil film, explains the structure of the industry, and presents the perspective of the filmmakers. However, the core of the book is an analysis of the films themselves and the place they have in the lives of poor people, who organize fan clubs, discuss the films and the actors, and in various ways relate these fantasy worlds to their own lives. Dickey argues that the effect of these films is ultimately conservative, for they glorify poverty while holding out the hope of a better future. Her rich ethnography makes an interesting contribution to the study of film in India and, more generally, to the understanding of popular culture in an Indian city.

The Minaksi Temple is one of the largest, most celebrated and most popular Hindu temples in India. Situated in the ancient south Indian city of Madurai, it is dedicated to the goddess Minaksi and her husband the god Sundaresvara, a form of the great god Śiva. Minaksi's principal servants in the Temple are the priests who carry out all the elaborate rituals for her and Sundaresvara, and these priests are the subject of this book. Drawing upon his extensive field research in the Temple, Dr Fuller discusses the role of the priests in the Temple and their place in the wider society. He looks at their rights and duties in the Temple, and at the changes in their position that have occurred since the establishment of a modern government and legal system. Throughout his book, the author situates his detailed analysis of the Minaksi Temple priesthood within its wider social and historical context, and relates it to the previous work of anthropologists, as well as of historians, Sanskritists and legal scholars.

Over the last twenty years, Esther Goody has made extensive studies of traditional and contemporary patterns of education and child-rearing in West Africa. In this book she provides an account of the rich variety of institutions, such as fostering, apprenticeship and wardship, which have developed in West Africa either in absence of, or alongside, formal schools, to prepare children for the wide range of economic and political roles now available to them in adult society. Drawing on her work in West Africa and with West Africans in London, Dr Goody shows that among many groups it is common practice to send children to grow up away from home. As a cross-cultural study of a central kinship institution - parenthood - and of processes of change in adult role allocation, the book is of interest to social anthropologists, sociologists, educationalists and social psychologists.

This book is a comparative study of caste and class in two small villages in the Thanjāvūr district of southeast India based on fieldwork done by the author in 1951-3. Differing from the usual village study, Gough's work traces the history of the villages over the past century and examines the impact of colonialism on the district since 1770. The volume's theoretical significance lies in its attempt to define more clearly the characteristics of rural class relations, particularly addressing the question whether Indian agrarian relations are still precapitalist. This study not only provides a vivid account of village life in southeast India in the 1950s (to be followed by a later study done in the 1970s), but also contributes to theory concerning modes of production, class structures in the Third World, and underdevelopment.

In the aftermath of colonial mission, Christianity has come to have widespread acceptance in Southern Tanzania. In this book, Maia Green explores contemporary Catholic practice in a rural community of Southern Tanzania. Setting the adoption of Christianity and the suppression of witchcraft in a historical context, she suggests that power relations established during the colonial period continue to hold between both popular Christianity and orthodoxy, and local populations and indigenous clergy. Paradoxically, while local practices around the constitution of kinship and personhood remain defiantly free of Christian elements, they inform a popular Christianity experienced as a system of substances and practices. This book offers a challenge to idealist and interpretative accounts of African participation in twentieth-century religious forms, and argues for a politically grounded analysis of historical processes. It will appeal widely to scholars and students of anthropology, sociology and African Studies; particularly those interested in religion and kinship.

Set against the historical background of Spain's unification as a modern state, this book is a study of a complex, frequently violent, political phenomenon - Basque nationalism - which after ninety years continues to constitute a major challenge to Spain's established political order. It examines the origins of Basque nationalism in the Basque industrial heartland of Bilbao in the 1890s and analyses its development up to 1980 when the Basque country finally achieved home rule. In particular, the book shows how Basque nationalism operated upon the residents of the Basque country, divided by culture, loyalties, divergent economic and political aspirations and history, to create a new and exclusive political entity - the Basque nation. The main fieldwork was conducted during the two years surrounding the death of General Franco in 1975, a period of exceptional violence in the Basque country that marked Spain's transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one. Using a theoretical approach, the book provides an empirical analysis of one of Spain's most intractable political problems during a decisive period of Spanish history.

In this anthropological investigation of the nature of an underdeveloped peasant economy, Joel S. Kahn attempts to develop the insights generated by Marxist theorists, by means of a concrete case study of a peasant village in the Indonesian province of West Sumatra. He accounts for the specific features of this regional economy, and, at the same time, examines the implications for it of the centuries-old European domination of Indonesia. The most striking feature of the Minangkabau economy is the predominance of petty commodity relations in agriculture, handicrafts and the local network of distribution. Dr Kahn illustrates this with material on local economic organization, which he collected in the field in the highland village of Sungai Puar, the site of a blacksmithing industry, and with published and unpublished data from other parts of Indonesia. Dr Kahn's book is unusual for its combination of a theoretical analysis of underdevelopment with a detailed regional study. It will appeal to those interested in South-east Asian studies, in development, and in neo-Marxist approaches in anthropology.

The word dyula means 'trader' in the Manding language. It is also the name of certain Manding-speaking ethnic minorities in parts of northern Ivory Coast, who, for centuries before the advent of colonial rule, enjoyed a virtual trading monopoly over the local region. In the first part of this book Robert Launay describes two Dyula communities prior to the twentieth-century colonial period: he discusses the regional symbiosis between Dyula traders and Senufo farmers; the organization of Dyula activity; and the division of the communities into relatively small clan wards with high rates of in-marriage. The second part examines the ways in which both communities have adapted to the recent loss of their trading monopoly, and the strategies they have employed, such as emigration, the assimilation of Western education and the adoption of new occupations, to carve out a new economic niche for themselves. As an account of the incorporation of 'traditional' community into a modern town, the book will be of interest to anthropologists and others concerned with development and modernisation in Africa and the Third World.

For centuries Andean civilization and ecology has afforded a special fascination for European travellers and officials. In this volume, eight writers - anthropologists, economists and historians working in Bolivia, Britain, France, Ireland and Peru - describe and analyse aspects of rural society in various Andean regions. They focus on the impact of capitalist development on both the peasant economy and the landed elite in the Andes and the ways in which that impact has been shaped by a specific Andean culture and a characteristic Andean ecology and climate. Their discussion of Andean specificity centres on the notion of verticality, first developed by John Murra to describe political and economic adaptation to climatic variation in the Andean eco-system. The volume represents a substantial contribution to our understanding of Andean rural society and the nature of the Latin American peasantry and peasant economy. It will appeal to all those interested in economic anthropology, Latin America, peasant studies and the capitalist world-economy.

The Jola (Diola) are intensive wet-rice cultivators in the Lower Casamance region of Senegal. In this study, the author examines the reasons behind startling contrasts in the organization of agricultural tasks among three Jola communities located within a 45-kilometre radius from Ziguinchor. In Sambujat, situated in the non-Islamisized region south of the river, wet rice is a monocrop cultivated by both men and women. In Jipalom, in the Kajamutay region north of the river, Islam and cash cropping have been adopted; and in Fatiya, in the so-called 'Mandingized' region of the Kalunay, social relations have become hierarchical and this has had profound effects on the cropping system and on the division of labour. The author examines the shift of power relations over time, and their effects on the way in which production has been organized by age and gender, kin and class. Larger issues dealt with are Islamization, women's labour and the introduction of cash cropping. A concluding section places the history of Jola labour relations within the context of the political economy of Senegal.

This is a study of the effects of 'modernization' on the social and economic world of women in Morocco. Vanessa Maher suggests that three systems of social stratification modify one another: a system of classes based on relation to the means of production; a system of estates, differentiated by inherited status; and a system of segmentary tribal groups, based on territorial rights. Although all Moroccans use all these systems on different occasions it is the women who, faced with their own exclusion from wage-earning, along with the instability of marriage and the inadequacy of most family incomes, respond by perpetually reconstituting the groups on which they must depend, those based on territorial rights and putative kinship. By observing these social networks, Maher has been able to identify part of what inhibits the development of class consciousness, and what favours a clientistic political structure.