Richard A. Lobban

Pigs and Their Prohibition

Little is more central to the study of the modern Middle East than religion. Amidst the differences between the Judaic and Islamic traditions, both are unified about the religious prohibition of swine as a source of food. This taboo is one of the more significant common markers of their ethnicity and religious code. Indeed, violations or poor adherence to the taboo can be considered as grave religious insults or cultural transgressions. In India, the meat of swine has been thrown on mosque steps and has provoked major intercommunal rioting. Even as one flies to the Middle East in modern, high-technology European airlines, the companies commonly inform all passengers that the meals contain no pork. In Spain, the ritual public slaughter of pigs, the matanza , has come to symbolize the resistance of Christians to the Muslim occupation. The matanza ritual has come to be a modern element in the formation of Spanish religious and cultural identity (Castaner 1988). Yet, the debate about the origins of this modern taboo is unresolved and still continues.

New Social Movements in Nubian Identity Among Nubians in Egypt, Sudan, and the United States

Nubia is the general name of the area in the Nile valley south of Aswan in Egypt at the first cataract on the Nile, extending into the northern Sudan to the third or fourth cataracts. Its dominant ethnic group, the Nubians, also occupy the southern portion of Egypt up to the first cataract at Aswan and elsewhere as a result of their migrations and resettlement following the dam construction. This is the land of the ancient kingdoms of Kush and the various small ancient states such as Yam and Irtet. English colonialists, besides exploiting the rich lands of the Nile for cotton production, removed prized examples of Nubian cultural heritage to the British Museum and permitted other institutions, such as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, to do the same.

Book Reviews : Victoria Bernal, Cultivating Workers: Peasants and Capitalism in a Sudanese Village. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, 243 pp.,

Often, macro-level studies of the &dquo;Third World&dquo; offer sweeping generalizations which obscure an understanding of real people and places. For this reason, the finetuned micro-level study by Dr. Victoria Bernal offers both traditional anthropology and the links to the wider context. Dr. Bernal fills a gap in our consciousness and in the ethnographic literature as she adds data which may be usefully compared to the recent work in the same area, by Fruzzetti and Ostor, Culture and Change along the Blue Nile. Her poignant, in-depth view of the rural community of Wad al Abbas, just north of Sennar, in Blue Nile Province in the Sudan, explores such matters as the rural side of migration, subsistence patterns, capital accumulation, and the impact of wage labor upon the traditional practices of subsistence cultivation. These are the variables in which the people of Wad Al Abbas are seen as struggling to sustain themselves.

42.00 (cloth)

Asante, Molefi Kete, and Kariamu Welsh Asante, eds. African Cultures: the Rhythms of Unity. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1985/x + 270 pp. including references and index.

Ethnogenesis in Africa: Some models of unity and diversity

35.00 cloth. Ismagilova, R. N. Ethnic Problems of the Tropical Africa: Can They Be Solved? Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978. 302 pp. including references, selected bibliography, and index.

Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Guinea-Bissau@@@Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cape Verde

5.45 cloth. Zwernemann, Jurgen. Culture History and African Anthropology. A Century of Research in Germany and Austria. Stockholm: Almqvist, 1983. 170 pp. including bibliography and index. SEK 95.00.

The Sufi Brotherhoods in the Sudan

Part 1 Editors Foreword Part 2 Acknowledgments Part 3 Preface Part 4 Acronyms and Abbreviations Part 5 Photographs Part 6 Maps Part 7 Chronology Part 8 Introduction Part 9 THE DICTIONARY Part 10 Appendixes Part 11 Bibliography Part 12 About the Authors