Ray Abrahams

A place of their own : family farming in eastern Finland

Acknowledgments 1. Introduction 2. A strange eventful history 3. The origins of modern farming families 4. Family and farm 5. From generation to generation 6. Co-operation between farming families 7. Farming families in a changing world Bibliography Indexes.

Virgin Births and Sterile Debates: Anthropology and the New Reproductive Technologies

Embryo research in Britain has been controversial and the 1984 Warnock report on human fertilization and embryology has been in the center of the battle over the legality of embryo research. Research is permitted under Parliamentary decision as of April 23 1990. The issue arouses feelings and thoughts about the nature of motherhood paternity biological inheritance the integrity of the family and the naturalness of birth and adds to the already difficulty struggles over sexuality reproduction gender relations and the family. Reproductive technologies raise questions 1) about the ethics and practicality of embryo experimentation 2) that challenge the structure of parenthood 3) about the feminist perspective on female reproductive capacity and male-dominated medical professions and 4) about anthropological concerns with marriage parenthood childbirth kinship and cultural patterns. Studies are cited which reflect an anthropological perspective on the impact of reproductive technologies on kinship and family structure. In vitro fertilization began in 1978 with the birth of Louise Brown. In 1984 the Warnock committee made recommendations that human embryo research 1) must be considered ethically acceptable and subject to stringent controls 2) subject to licensing up to the 14th day after fertilization 3) be monitored by a new independent statutory body 4) surrogacy be subject to criminal penalties when provided through surrogacy services by agencies or individual health professionals. Proposals for legislation based on 2 white papers were developed. The proposed Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill of 1990 established a statutory licensing body and either a ban on embryo research or authorization for limited research up to 14 days. Only the 2nd part of the Bill was approved. Embryo research is supported by medical and scientific establishments and justified as providing potential health benefits. Opposition to the bill included fear of criminal prosecution and religious belief about the protection of human life from conception. Scientific objections referred to violations of medical ethics and the Hippocratic oath. Feminists objected to the loss of identity to women. Artificial insemination raised issues about social parenthood and biological procreation and surrogacy raised ones about family integrity and social order. The legal issue of freezing embryos was dealt with in the Commission report. Many institutions in society have a vested interest in controlling reproduction and the repercussions of the new reproductive technologies challenge basic ideas.

Law and order and the state in the Nyamwezi and Sukuma area of Tanzania.

My aim in this article is to look at some features of the development of legal and political institutions in this area during the colonial period as one phase in the larger history of governmental influence and control over the people there. I suggest that the state--in its various forms of chiefship the colonial regime and the independent Tanzanian government--has co-existed with and overlain a village level of political and legal organisation and know-how and that all these forms have at some time come into conflict with this village polity. This is not to deny important differences between the forms of government involved and I will attempt to highlight some of these in my discussion but it seems worthwhile to pay attention also to apparent continuities in the situation. (excerpt)

Heating, lighting and a decent funeral: Wills and contracts among Finnish farming families*

The paper examines succession practices on eastern Finnish farms through an analysis of the use of wills and other documents of transfer. Wills are relatively rarely used, and the most important documents are contracts inter vivos between parents and children and between siblings. Such documents, with their detailed and precise conditions and provisions, may appear to mark the invasion of the family by the form and spirit of legal rationality and economic individualism. A deeper investigation of the contexts of their use, however, shows the situation to be more complex than this, and there is even a fictional element in some documents. Rural Finnish families organise succession to their farms within the framework of the law and state bureaucracy, but they do not play a merely passive role in their relations with such institutions.

Time and Village Structure in Northern Unyamwezi: An Examination of Social and Ecological Factors Affecting the Development and Decline of Local Communities

N October 1974 I returned to the Kahama District of Tanzania for a further period of research in northern Unyamwezi where I had previously worked between late 1957 and early 96o.1 The present paper arises from a consideration of the implications of two facts which impressed me strongly on this second visit. The first of these was that a substantial number of the homestead heads who had been my neighbours in the village of Butumwa for the larger part of my first fieldwork were still alive though some of them had moved to other parts of the District and beyond. The second was that those who had remained, along with many others from surrounding villages, had been moved as part of the Tanzanian Governments national resettlement programme into a new large nucleated village shortly before my return there.2 These two facts have led me to pay further attention to the nature and functions of preI 974 settlement patterns and to examine the relation between these and the form of the new scheme. One of the main points which will emerge from my discussion is the need, in trying to understand these settlement patterns, to take careful account of how villages change and develop over time as part of a complex combination of social and ecological processes. This processual aspect of village organization in the area has, I may add, not previously received sufficient attention in my own and other accounts of the situation there.3