Francis P. Conant

The Relationship Between Male Circumcision and HIV Infection in African Populations

The relationship between HIV seroprevalence and the proportion of uncircumcised males in African countries is examined to determine whether circumcision practices play a role in explaining the large existing variation in the sizes of African HIV epidemics. A review of the anthropological literature yielded estimates of circumcision practices for 409 African ethnic groups from which corresponding national estimates were derived. HIV seroprevalence rates in the capital cities were used as indicators of the relative level of HIV infection of countries. The correlation between these two variables in 37 African countries was high (R = 0.9; P less than 0.001). This finding is consistent with existing clinic-based studies that indicate a lower risk of HIV infection among circumcised males.

Economic Development and Economic Change: The Case of East African Cattle [and Comments and Replies]

Exploring anew the old question of why East African pastoral peoples tend to be conservative, this paper suggests that a de-Westernized cross-cultural application of economic theory, both statics and dynamics, coupled with transaction theory, (social exchange), reveals a distinction between economic development, the exponential growth of a specific economy, and economic change, a shift from one specific kind of economy to another. Economic development is normal in any economy and is favored by Africans as well as ourselves. Economic change, however, the aim of national and international planners, involves opportunity costs such as those faced by the Chagga as they pursue simultaneously two types of production, bananas and coffee, which to some extent compete. The opportunity costs for pastoralists are likely to be much higher than for people whose wealth is principally in land, because pastoralists incur far greater status losses than nonpastoralists in the shift from indigenous to Western economies. The thesis is supported by examination of important features of traditional African government, kinship, and marriage.

Human ecology and space age technology: Some predictions

Four predictions are made on the future of space age technologies in human and cultural ecology: first, remote sensing systems will generate a need for more fieldwork, not less; second, the services and skills of anthropologists will become essential to the interpretation of satellite data, especially as these relate to areas characterized by non-Western cultural practices; third, training in remote sensing and the use of geographic information systems will become a regular offering for anthropology students; and fourth, since these new systems and methods can be applied retrospectively to the re-analysis of earlier ethnographic works, space age technologies will be with us for some time to come.

The Use of LANDSAT Data in Studies of Human Ecology

Ueli Nagel (Zoologisches Institut der Universitat Basel, Rheinsprung 9, 4051 Basel, Switzerland) Thelma E. Rowell (Department of Zoology, University of California, Berkeley, Calif. 94720, U.S.A.) Euclid 0. Smith, Rapporteur (Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, Emory University, Atlanta, Ga. 30322, U.S.A.) Akira Suzuki (Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, Inuyama, Aichi 484, Japan).

The external coherence of Pokot ritual behaviour

Human ritual behaviour involves a component of sign-symbolism which notably heightens the complexity of its analysis. For participants and observers alike, the meaning of ritual may be ambiguous and arbitrary. Furthermore, the meaning of ritual and its content may change independently of each other with time and circumstance. Using the Nkula ceremony of the Ndembe people of Central Africa as his data, Professor Turner has amply demonstrated for this Symposium the internal coherence of ritual behaviour and the complexity of its discovery (this Symposium, pp. 295- 303). The present paper is written from a different point of view—it emphasizes the external coherence or ‘fit’ of ritual with other aspects of a way of life. The data presented here include the behaviour observed during some of the ritual events by means of which (and at a very generalized level of meaning) the Pokot of East Africa anticipate the summer solstice (1).

Frustration, Marriage Alternatives and Subsistence Risks Among the Pokot of East Africa

The Pokot are a farming and herding people of East Africa who sanction kidnapping and elopement during their annual celebration of the summer solstice. Marriages otherwise are arranged, often with relative strangers and much older (and wealthier) partners, following successful negotiations for bridewealth. Intense psycho-sexual expectations and attachments between Pokot youngsters are thereby threatened, but kidnapping or elopement as alternatives are far more common among farmers than herders. It seems possible to relate this to differing contents of bride-wealth as transacted among farmers and herders as well as to contrasting degrees of risk with which persons in each subsistence system must contend.