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.
Symbolic mediation and commoditization: a critical examination of alcohol use among the Haya of Bukoba, Tanzania.
Low-alcohol-content fermented beverages are thoroughly enmeshed in the social, economic, commensal, and cosmological spheres of life among most peoples of sub-Saharan Africa. This paper describes and analyzes the role of alcoholic beverages as symbolic mediators and commodities among the Haya of northwest Tanzania. Data gathered during field research in 1985-86 are employed to describe the ways in which the Haya portray excessive drinking and the indigenous strategies they use to address frequent drunkenness when it is perceived as a health problem. A central feature of the paper contrasts the role of a cultural schema of four levels of intoxication in processes of symbolic mediation and commoditization, thereby contributing to critical medical anthropological analysis.
The Story of Troilus
Originally published by J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1934. In this volume Gordon presents the four great medieval versions of the love of Troilus and Criseida: Benoit de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, written in approximately 1160 and the earliest surviving version of the story; Giovanni Boccaccio's It Filostrato (c 1338), which drew on Benoit's tale for one of its two main sources; Georffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde c 1385), for centuries considered his best work; and Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid (c 1490), which functions as a continuation of the story Chaucer tells.