The values of ‘anarchy’: moral autonomy among Tubu‐speakers in northern Chad

Abstract

The Tubu of northern Chad have long been described as ‘anarchic’, in first travellers' accounts as much as in colonial sources and the (scant) academic literature. The term ‘anarchy’, as used throughout descriptions, is of little use analytically, however, as it tends both to conflate an absence of political institutions with a general unpredictability of social relations, and to define political relations by what they are not. This article suggests that a focus on value might provide a more fruitful and less normative way of understanding Tubu imaginings of the social.