Culprits, Culpability, and Crime: Stocktheft and Other Cattle Maneuvers among the Ila of Zambia

Abstract

This article examines stocktheft, cattle rustlers, and responses to stocktheft victimization within the broader context of overt and covert cattle manuevering among the Ila of Zambia. This article is concerned with setting the short-term parameters of individual and group decision-making which currently informs concepts of meritability (i.e., behavior meriting praise or esteem) or culpability (i.e., behavior meriting blame or condemnation) in cattle transactions with a historical framework of socioeconomic and legal change. The discussion is approached from the methodological perspectives of legal pluralism (Pound, 1906; Pospisil, 1967; Nader, 1969) and interactionist labeling theories of crime and deviance (Goffman, 1969; Becker, 1973). Both perspectives assert that within any polity there are a multiplicity of normative systems and legal levels which intersect and articulate variously in rule-making and rule-enforcing settings. In such settings, the authority to make decisions regarding the culpability or meritability of a behavior and the authority to sanction the culpable are typically matters of competition between individuals or groups of equal power, or conflict between individuals and groups of unequal power. There is, therefore, a political dimension latent in rule-making and rule-enforcement (Moore, 1978: 208). Moreover, there are often settings where the political dimension looms paramount. In developing nations such as Zambia, which seek to use law and legal prohibitions to integrate culturally disparate populations such as the Ila within a homogeneous national polity (United National Independence Party), the question of what constitutes criminal culpability (substantive law) and what the proper procedures are for processing the criminally culpable (procedural law) has been subsumed within a lop-sided and conflictual dominant/subordinate power relationship. In this relationship, the state has retained sole jurisdiction in criminal matters while local jurisdiction encompasses only civil matters. At the same time, the state administers a criminal justice system largely predicated upon that of the former colonial justice framework.