Elizabeth Colson

Social Control and Vengeance in Plateau Tonga Society

I am here concerned with social control as it exists in Tonga society, where there are no obvious political institutions concerned in the maintenance of order. As in any society, control rests eventually on the sanction of force, here applied through a resort to vengeance on the part of an organized group if it feels that this is the only way to enforce its rights.

Tradition and contract : the problem of order

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Ten Thousand Tonga: A Longitudinal Anthropological Study from Southern Zambia, 1956–1991

The Gwembe Study was launched in 1956 to monitor the responses of 57,000 Tonga-speakers from the Middle Zambezi Valley to involuntary relocation. Since then, periodic censuses and frequent field visits have generated a wide variety of information. This article examines the demography of four Gwembe Tonga villages from 1956 to 1991, a period characterized first by relocation, then prosperity, and finally by economic hardship. White nuptiality does not respond significantly to socio-economic trends, marital fertility falls sharply during relocation, rebounds with the onset of prosperity, and decreases slowly during the most recent decade of economic hardship. Mortality of the very young and old is also sensitive to such changes. There is striking excess male mortality in all periods, especially among male infants and in particular male twins. The sex ratio at ‘birth’ is 92. This abnormal sex ratio at birth may be the result of conscious sex preference favouring females.

FAMILY CHANGE IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICA

In it I shall attempt to relate certain common trends in family organization to a number of social features widely found at the present time in sub-Saharan Africa. The focus will be upon adaptations forced upon the family unit by the present economic and social milieu. The adaptations are of organization rather than of structure. In other words I shall not be concerned primarily with changes in the legal rights and obligations that govern the family and its members and form the structural framework within which the family operates. Structural changes may also be occurring, but in this connection it would be even more difficult to generalize than it is when we speak of organizational change. The family, as I am using the term throughout this paper, refers to a domestic group, that is, a group sharing common residential space and cooperating for the purposes of daily life. Such studies as we have of traditional African family groups indicate that the primary or nuclear domestic group is one composed of a woman and her dependent children. Rarely is such a primary group found as an independent entity. It may be incorporated into larger units in a multitude of ways, and to this fact is due the complex and highly diversified family structures described in monograph after monograph. Usually this nuclear group is incorporated into some larger domestic grouping, which may be a polygynous extended family, a patrilocal extended family, an uxorilocal extended family, or any one of a number of other differentiated types. The larger domestic unit is typically headed by a man who is the general manager of the group and also its representative in dealing with outsiders. In addition to the male head, the large domestic group may include a number of other men who stand to the head as sons, sisters’ husbands, sisters’ sons, or daughters’ husbands, depending upon the structure of the group. The power of the head over his subordinates, both men and women, varies from one society to another. This is true not only with regard to his control over assets utilized by the group, but also with regard to his right. to prevent members from moving out to establish new family units of their own. In some African societies the normal pat tern of family development calls for the emancipation of subordinate units that become the focal points for the growth of new independent domestic groups similar to the parent one. In others, the breakup of the old unit is seen as a disruption of what should be a permanent corporation. Everywhere formal independence comes only when a subordinate man can establish his right to remove a woman with her living or potential children from the authority of the head of the old group. From what has already been said, it should be apparent that it is impossible to generalize about the African family if one is speaking in terms of the structure

The Resilience of Matrilineality: Gwembe and Plateau Tonga Adaptations

Publisher Summary The field of kinship appears to have a greater resilience to political and economic forces that change lifestyles and life opportunities. The “modernization” literature stressed the inevitable demise of matrilineality and of extended kinship groupings with the rise of cash-crop economies, occupational diversification, and capitalism. The nuclear conjugal family was accepted as the inevitable outcome of urbanization and industrialization. This chapter examines the case for persistence among the matrilineal Plateau and Gwembe Tonga of southern Zambia, many of whom are living in the cities as wage workers and are dependent on a cash income. Gwembe and Plateau Tonga have not regarded their kinship systems as immutable but have had little need to change formal rules. They have used their kinship systems to obtain their objectives.

Rain-Shrines of the Plateau Tonga of Northern Rhodesia

This is a preliminary report on the social and political significance of the rainshrines as an integrating force in Tonga society. In a sense it is a misnomer to refer to them as rain-shrines, for they are also appealed to on any occasion of general community disaster, such as epidemics or cattle plagues, but to the Tonga themselves the dominant aspect of the shrines is their efficacy in ensuring the proper rainfall.

Land Law and Land Holdings among Valley Tonga of Zambia

W HEN WE ANTHROPOLOGISTS speak of land tenure, we may mean y one of a number of things, such as: the legal rules regulating the acquisition and use of land, the pattern of holdings existent in a community at some given moment of time, the distribution frights in land among a population, or a combination of these. All may be interrelated, but there is no necessary close reflection ofone in another. The pattern of holdings depends upon a great many circumstances which do not have a place in the land law of the community. The same legal rules may therefore be conjoined with quite different patterns of land holding depending upon the circumstances within which they are applied. A knowledge of the land law does not permit an observer to predict the likelihood of finding any particular pattern of land holding unless he can also predict a great many other influences which may be operating upon the community.2 This lack of a close relationship between legal rules and actual rights in land was brought home to me when I began to analyze data on the land holdings of residents of three villages of Chezia, a Valley Tonga neighborhood in the Southern Province of Zambia.3 I have quantitative data on the ownership of fields at two different periods in Chezia history: 1956-1957 and 1962-1963. In both years men and women were asked how they had obtained each field they claimed. The data refer to a universe of fields, not to the total acreage of land; even so, they

The Intensive Study of Small Sample Communities

Publisher Summary This chapter explains the intensive study of small sample communities. The interest in the comparative method reflects the fact that anthropology has reached a new stage in its struggle to become a science. The new techniques of analysis, as well as the new problems with which anthropologists are engaged, have already affected the fieldwork, which is being done. Fieldworkers are producing more meticulous descriptions with a good deal of quantitative material to back up generalized statements and at the same time, they are narrowing their areas of investigation. The comparative method contributes to the understanding of social organization and the field of cultural phenomena in general until one shifts from the all-or-none classifications so largely used at present to a method based on the comparison of rates constructed from quantitative information collected in a systematic fashion. The comparative method and the interest in problems of cultural or social change are, therefore, creating a new demand that the fieldworker should collect information on critical factors in such a way that direct comparisons may be possible.

Defining “the Manchester School of Anthropology”

Bruce Kapferer, in his chapter in The Manchester School (p. 312), asks whether those associated with Manchester ever formed anything as cohesive as a school. He makes an interesting point. Certainly, in its search for commonalities, The Manchester School omits many who worked at Manchester and much of the work that began there. Contributors to the volume pay homage to Max Gluckman, who founded the Manchester department in 1949 and chaired it for many years. They are his students or descendants of his students or claim affinity through common methodology. My review is a response to the volume as a whole rather than an evaluation of the individual essays. On the whole, these are well-written appraisals of the strengths and limitations of certain methodologies considered characteristic of the department, though they tend to underrate the diversity of its interests, including Gluckman’s own. They most often cite the article known as “The Bridge,” published in 1940 at the beginning of Gluckman’s career, probably because it is an early instance of what came to be known as situational analysis. Gluckman’s (1941, 1955a, 1955b, 1955c, 1958 [1940]) later work on economy and ecology, law, ritual, gossip, conflict, and the importance of crosscutting ties influenced the research of others but did not inspire his own students, who may have feared being seen as intellectual rivals. This book, therefore, is about practice rather than theory. Contributors write of social networks, the extended case method, situational analysis, and the social drama as defining characteristics of Manchester, but these were neither unique to nor invented at Manchester. Gluckman himself advocated rather than used them, for his fieldwork after 1947 was confined to a brief return to Barotseland in 1965. Kapferer provides a critique of the volume that rings true to my own memories of the department as it was in 1951–53, when I was there as Simon Fellow and senior lecturer. But whereas I remember most the probing discussion of whatever anyone was working on, which at times seemed to be regarded as a joint enterprise, Kapferer (p. 119) locates its distinctiveness in an openness to experimentation and a recognition that if anthropology were to continue to find inspiration in ethnographic studies, it would have to study “crisis and change” resulting from what is now called “globalization.” Gluckman’s early recognition of this was implicit in the seven-year research plan he drew up in the early 1940s for the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI), which he directed from 1940 to 1949. Inspired by Karl Marx and by his own experience in southern Africa, he stressed the transformative effects on even the most remote villages of industrialization, international markets, and the exercise of increasing control by centralizing governments. Here he followed in the footsteps of Godfrey Wilson, his predecessor as director, who studied African miners in the town of Broken Hill. For work with mobile populations or those variously affected by the play of external influences, ethnographers needed to find new ways of conceptualizing, investigating, and presenting their subject matter. Though Gluckman may not have thought this through explicitly, this called for an anthropology that defined its subject matter as individuals making decisions rather than as social structures composed of interconnected social roles: hence the search for field methods that focused on individual actors, a criterion met by social networks, situational analysis, the extended case method, and the social drama. In his early years at Manchester, Gluckman continued to maintain links with the RLI, which looked to him to provide training for many who joined its staff. This affected the workings of the department, as many contributors to this volume emphasize, but from the beginning students’ interests also lay elsewhere. In 1951, other than three RLI appointees, the department had only a handful of graduate students: F. G. Bailey, William Newell, and Ronald Frankenberg, whose dissertations focused on India, Malaysia, and Wales, respectively. Scarlet Epstein, one of two undergraduates, already planned work in India. The first permanent appointment other than my own was of Emrys Peters, a specialist on North Africa and the Near East. My replacement was Kathleen Gough, whose research had been in India. In the early days of the department, students were also encouraged to explore across disciplinary lines. Eli Devons and Arthur Lewis from economics, William Mackenzie from government, Dorothy Emmet and Michael Polanyi from philosophy, and Werner Stark from social history might attend our seminars, and we attended some of theirs. Gluckman’s own research interests were eclectic and empirical. Case studies, situational analysis, etc., were tools for gathering, organizing, and presenting information, not ends in themselves. He was not interested in theory for theory’s sake, and it was taught largely in the context of working through bodies of ethnographic data. In the early 1950s he read and talked about the work of legal theorists in conjunction with his study of Lozi jurisprudence. He encouraged students to read Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and Arnold Van Gennep; Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and Vilfredo Pareto were not mentioned. He knew something of Freudian psychology but considered it irrelevant to social

Sahel Visions: Planned Settlement and River Blindness Control in Burkina Faso

When an international health initiative succeeded in wiping out river blindness in Burkina Faso, it allowed the settlement of the sparsely populated Volta Valley by the Mossi people--a development plan by which the Burkinabe government sought to relieve population pressure, establish communities, and increase cotton production. Anthropologist Della McMillan followed this visionary plan over twelve years as people relocated communities, founded farms, dealt with officials, entered the market, and in some instances moved on. Her study examines the question of how development occurs or fails to occur and offers unusual insight into how visions of progress--held by developers, settlers, and even researchers--originate and are revised.