Stigma and separation: parian status and community persistence in a scottish fishing village
This paper addresses the problem of how and why a small, dependent, and stigmatized occupational community may maintain its social identity long after the material basis for its existence has disappeared. It examines the life history of Ferryden, an east coast Scottish "fishing village" which does not fish. It will argue that the ideology ofthe fisherfolk, who have historically been marked as a distinct and low-prestige occupational, residential, and kin-based group, has been used to redefine and preserve village unity in the face of drastic ecological change. It argues further that this means of cultural adaptation contains the seeds of its own destruction and will, in the long run, prove fatal for community identity. Studies of occupational communities in complex societies suggest a strong link between work, residence, and social image (Horobin 1957; Dennis, Henriques et al. 1969; Lummis 1977). The example of Ferryden suggests the possibility ofa consider? able lag between the ecological and the symbolic transformation ofa community's status. The dynamics of boundary-making between fisherfolk and nonfisherfolk will be placed within a context of economic and political dominance and dependency in eastern Scotland. The discussion is based upon data collected during a year of fieldwork and archival research in Ferryden and Montrose in 1975 and 1976. Villages may now have surpassed tribes as archetypal anthropological units of study. They have become our preserve in the sociological wilderness of complex societies. There is even some concern that villages, like tribal societies, might be endangered (Mead 1980). However, the term "village" suffers from very nearly the same epistemological ambiguity as "tribe" (Fried 1975). That is, everyone uses it, and few bother to define it. Villages may be large or small, isolated or enmeshed in an urban matrix. Villages may house semi-autonomous rural cultivators or industrial wage-slaves. They may be found in tribal, capitalist, or socialist economies (Halpern 1967:122-123). Often, however, it is assumed that villages share a crucial attribute which is often considered to be lacking in the urban setting: a sense of community, of emotional as well as interactional boundedness. Cohen (1982) stresses this affective component in the introduction to his edited volume on rural British communities, which he aptly titles Belonging. However, the literature on British communities also informs us that not all who live in villages "belong" (Fleming 1979; Strathern 1981; Elias and Scotson 1965; Jenkins et al. 1960). As Strathern (1982:249) points out, "an unwarranted
A Substitute Name System in the Scottish Highlands
The high incidence of identical names among Gaelic speakers in East Sutherland leads to the use of “by-names” almost to the exclusion of official names. Several varieties of by-names are highly offensive. Appropriate use of the offensive varieties demands an intimate knowledge of the communities' social structure available only to their members; by-name misuse is consequently a source of social tension between Gaelic speakers and English speakers in the area. Nonetheless the practice of by-naming has spread to the English-speaking population, where the entertainment value of by-names takes precedence over their utilitarian value in distinguishing individuals bearing the same name. [Scotland; Gaelic, Celtic, names, sociolinguistics.]
Drivers of Live Cattle Price in the Livestock Trading System of Central Cameroon
Livestock production and trade are critical for the food security and welfare of rural households in sub-Saharan Africa. In Cameroon, animal trade consists mainly of live cattle commercialized through livestock markets. Identifying the factors contributing to cattle price formation is critical for designing effective policies for sustainable production and for increasing food availability. In this study, we evaluated the influence of a range of individual- and market-level factors on the price of cattle that were sold in all transactions (n = 118,017) recorded over a 12-month period from 31 livestock markets in the main cattle production area of the country. An information-theoretic approach using a generalized additive mixed-effect model was implemented to select the best explanatory model as well as evaluate the robustness of the identified drivers and the predictive ability of the model. The age and gender of the cattle traded were consistently found to be important drivers of the price (p < 0.01). Also, strong, but complex, relationships were found between cattle prices and both local human and bovine population densities. Finally, the model highlighted a positive association between the number of incoming trading connections of a livestock market and the price of the traded live cattle (p < 0.01). Although our analysis did not account for factors informing on specific phenotypic traits nor breed characteristics of cattle traded, nearly 50% of the observed variation in live cattle prices was explained by the final model. Ultimately, our model gives a large scale overview of drivers of cattle price formation in Cameroon and to our knowledge is the first study of this scale in Central Africa. Our findings represent an important milestone in designing efficient and sustainable animal health management programme in Cameroon and ensure livelihood sustainability for rural households.