William A. Shack

Troubled lands, troubled people

Kuper, Adam. South Africa and the Anthropologist. New York: Rout‐ledge, 1987. viii + 216 pp. including notes to chapters and index.

Collective Oath Compurgation in Anglo-Saxon England and African states

59.95 cloth. Leslau, Wolf, ed. Falasha Anthology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. xiii + 222 pp. including index, notes and glossary.

Black Muslims: a Nativistic Religious Movement Among Negro Americans

10.95 paper.

Occupational prestige, status, and social change in modern Ethiopia

Social historians and historians of jurisprudence have, on occasion, drawn attention to the close resemblances between Anglo-Saxon society at the time when it is said to have been dominated by kinship relationships and the large kingdom states in Africa. The truth of the matter is not so easily come by, however, since the content of pre-medieval social relationships linking persons of different station was inadequately recorded by early writers. The faulty character of early records becomes evident in the area of jurisprudence, especially whenever attempts are made to assess the extent to which kinbased social relationships invaded the legal principles in Anglo-Saxon society in matters of dispute and settlement. This notwithstanding, it seems an instructive sociological task to reconsider comparatively with African state societies, wherever possible, certain of those legal ideas that allegedly formed the basis for judicial decision-making in early English courts before the introduction of trial by jury. The interpretation of these early ideas, set against the background of rights, duties, and obligations that obtained between persons of set status, should define more clearly than before whatever general agreement exists between these legal principles and those that obtain in African state societies. A more ambitious treatment of the subject than is attempted in this essay would extend beyond Anglo-Saxon society. But, because of the faulty character of early records, I limit this literary exercise to the period before William the Conqueror crossed the Channel.

Land and man in highland Ethiopia

The religious rationale conceived by the Negro of his destiny in a changing American society, a century or more ago, has been aptly stated by the historian W. E. B. DuBois. He wrote: ’To most of the four million black folk emancipated by civil war, God was real. They knew him. They had met him personally in many a wild orgy of religious frenzy, or in the black stillness of the night. His plan for them was clear; they were to suffer and be degraded, and then afterwards by Divine edict, raised to manhood and power; and so

Ethiopia: Anatomy of a Traditional Polity

understanding the nature of the urban system of social stratification, on the one hand, and to providing a baseline for determining indices of social change, on the other.2 In one significant respect, this present study of occupational choices in modern Ethiopia differs from the surveys of prestige ratings of African labourers conducted in Zaire and Zambia. The African populations in these Central African studies were assigned to an inclusive, undifferentiated racial category vis-a-vis Europeans who, in the pre-independence era, occupied the most prestigious skilled technical and professional positions from which Africans had been systematically excluded. No nfeasurement was taken, moreover, of differential attitudes toward specific occupations in either skilled category, which might very well have obtained between the diverse African ethnic groups who gave ratings in the surveys of their occupational choices. This would appear to be a variable of considerable sociological significance for at least two reasons. For one, the surveys would have provided an index of latent, if not manifest, ethnic values as they pertain to an anticipated, if not actual, occupational structure. For another, they might have shown, as studies of social relationships in urban Africa have demonstrated, that Africans tend to act as a social category in their dealings with Europeans in certain kinds of competitive situations but divide along ethnic lines when the nature of the competition differs.3 The fact that urban African social life might very well reveal itself in ways less demonstrable than through observation of diverse daily social behaviour, shaped the guiding question in this present Ethiopian survey of occupational prestige ranking. Specifically, do Ethiopian ethnic groups occupying differential positions in the system of urban social stratification give the same ranking of prestige to occupations available to them? Before I proceed with an analysis of the responses which address that and other

Strangers in African Societies

Allan Hoben. Land Tenure among the Amhara of Ethiopia: The Dynamics of Cognatic Descent. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. xiv + 273 pp. Maps, figures, appendix, glossary, bibliography, and index.

The Life and Times of Menelik II, Ethiopia, 1844-1913

9.50.