Sally Falk Moore

Certainties Undone: Fifty Turbulent Years of Legal Anthropology, 1949-1999 [*]

This article reviews the broadening scope of anthropological studies of law between 1949 and 1999, and considers how the political background of the period may be reflected in anglophone academic perspectives. At the mid-century, the legal ideas and practices of non-Western peoples, especially their modes of dispute management, were studied in the context of colonial rule. Two major schools of thought emerged and endured. One regarded cultural concepts as central in the interpretation of law. The other was more concerned with the political and economic milieu, and with self-serving activity. Studies of law in non-Western communities continued, but from the 1960s and 1970s a new stream turned to issues of class and domination in Western legal institutions. An analytic advance occurred when attention turned to the fact that the state was not the only source of obligatory norms, but coexisted with many other sites where norms were generated and social control exerted. This heterogeneous phenomenon came to be called ‘legal pluralism’. The work of the half-century has culminated in broadly conceived, politically engaged studies that address human rights, the requisites of democracy, and the obstacles to its realization.

Changing African land tenure: Reflections on the incapacities of the state

State legislation and international development agencies may envision grand programmes revising African systems of land tenure, but local pressures and competitive struggles actually determine many of the terms and conditions of African land holding. This contribution shows how such programmes can be frustrated by the strategies of individuals. It shows that actions on the small scale can cumulatively demolish state policy without the individuals involved ever being collectively mobilised in movements of resistance. Though claims to land in Africa can be translated into human rights terms, this analysis proposes that if human rights discourse omits the political and practical aspects of implementation, it is not very useful.

The Secret of the Men: A Fiction of Chagga Initiation and Its Relation to the Logic of Chagga Symbolism

IN the I 9th century, there were Chagga chiefdoms which initiated their young men into adulthood by putting them through an elaborate series of rituals and ordeals. The first was circumcision. No sooner had the young men fully recovered from their circumcision wounds than they had another trial to undergo. They were sent to the forest for a period of seclusion and instruction. Children and young women were told that during this time in the Kilimanjaro forests the newly circumcized youths were subjected to another operation, this one to plug and stitch closed their anuses (Gutmann, Recht: 321-338; HRAF trans.: 289-304). According to this fiction full-grown men of procreative age did not defecate, but digested their food completely, and this state of being closed was the very essence of manhood. In reality, once secluded in the forest grove, though the initiates were subjected to various ordeals, part of what they were immediately taught was that the tale of the stitching of the anus was a fraud. Nevertheless, they were obliged to take a number of solemn oaths to keep this a secret. They swore to conceal from children and young women the fact that they defecated. No young woman nor any child was ever to see them relieve themselves, nor find their faeces. The secret was to be guarded at all costs, and any youth who fell ill was to be cared for by his fellows, not by a young wife. No doubt the closed anus was an open secret as far as many of the women were concerned (Gutmann, Recht: 186; HRAF trans.: 164). Male faeces were essential to the performance of the female initiation rites (Raum, 1940: 35 ). This peculiar tale requires explanation. Why was this the mens secret? Why construct this particular lie? What did it mean? It is not a sufficient explanation to remark on the psycho-analytic evidence of common, probably universal fantasies about fecal pregnancies, homosexual intercourse and the like. These are so ordinary a phenomenon, and the Chagga initiation fiction so rare a one, that the first cannot explain the second. Why did the Chagga elaborate such dream-stuffby making it a part of an official cultural myth? The complete answer to such a question is probably not accessible, given the present state of knowledge about choices of symbols and the impossibility of recovering information on the invention of the myth. What is possible, though, is to show to what other circumstances of Chagga life and thought this particular set of ideas seems logically related. This also will provide an occasion for making some comments on dual symbolic classification, both as it pertains to Chagga symbolic orders, and in general. The form of Chagga initiation that involved a collective period of seclusion in the forest has not been practised for a long time. But fortunately, there are detailed accounts in the literature, which, if put together with evidence of other rituals and information culled in the field, enable one to propose an interpretation of the initiation myth that makes it seem far less anomalous. The mysterious notion of anal stitching