Beer Drinking and Cattle Theft in Ukaguru: Intertribal Relations in a Tanganyika Chiefdom1
DESPITE the attention currently paid to certain political implications of tribalism in Africa, little social anthropological study has been concerned with intertribal relations. Yet we know that none of the tribes in Africa exists as an isolate. Even in the past each tribe's land bordered on that of several others, and trade, raiding, migration, and marriage often linked people over comparatively large and diverse areas. The little that has been written about intertribal relations in East Africa is largely concerned with the conflicts between the Nilo-Hamitic and Bantu tribes of Kenya and Tanganyika, e.g, the Masai, Kamba, and Kikuyu, and the Tatoga and Nyaturu.2 But it seems naive and misleading to picture such relations as wholly warlike. Such relations were and still are far more complex and ambivalent than has been commonly represented. In this paper I shall try to present one example of such intertribal relations. In the chiefdom of Ukaguru in east-central Tanganyika, intertribal dependence may be characterized by beer-drinking, and intertribal conflict by cattle-theft. These two activities serve as foci for the complex and ambivalent relations between two vastly different peoples.
Alcohol use in the perspective of cultural ecology.
Examination of the use of alcohol in traditional agrarian society reveals that drinking and the drinking context is for the most part integrative, conflict-reducing, and reinforcing of corporate identity. With acculturation and modernization, and the introduction of full-scale cash-based economies, alcohol use is more frequently a social and pathological and serves individual as opposed to jointly shared objectives. Analysis of these issues is accomplished through a review of the cultural ecological perspectives on drinking and culture in a variety of societies around the world.
French film theory and criticism : a history/anthology, 1907-1939
These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.