Acephalous Societies Research Articles

Deconstructing The Conundrum in the Historiography of Acephalous Societies in Nigeria 1900-1990

An ambivalent appellation, acephalousness or non-centrality led to misinterpretations of the political systems and structures of Nigerian societies that obviously were not as professionalized as those in the erstwhile Empires and Emirates. Yet, the acephalous societies had political structures as much as the centralized ones. From the times of David Hume, Friedrich Hegel through to Hugh-Trevor Roper, African history faced distortions; and presented as unworthy of any kind of academic study. This was, unarguably, a crop-up from a Eurocentric misperception and misconception whereof Africa became labelled the “Dark Continent: waiting to be discovered by Europeans. Seemingly a justification of the colonization of Africa, African historians, nonetheless, became challenged to the best approaches in writing her history. Another challenge was the misconception that documentation or written history was the only acceptable history. Arab/Muslim scholars effectively covered the socio-political and economic activities in the centralized societies where they found employment as scribes or chroniclers. This study, first, attempted grasping at the contents, perspectives and methodology of African history; second, it examined the challenges inherent in the study of acephalous or stateless societies and, third, provided ample ways of addressing the challenges. The findings revealed that beyond written documents, oral traditions and the application of the interdisciplinary research approach were integral and indispensable parts in the historiography of African societies, especially of the acephalous. Using the primary and secondary sources, the study concluded that in spite of the limitations of oral traditions, they remained indispensable in interrogating the history of acephalous societies.

‘Peri-urbanisation and loss of arable land’: Indigenes’ farmland access challenges and adaptation strategies in Kumasi and Wa, Ghana

Rapid urbanisation, particularly in Africa is leading to the transformation of peri-urban landscapes in several ways. In many instances, it affects indigenes of peri-urban communities and their access to farmland. Drawing from lived experiences among indigenes, traditional authorities, and planners in four peri-urban communities in two Ghanaian cities with differing tenure systems, Kumasi (a centralised society) and Wa (an acephalous society), this study used the case study strategy conducted through qualitative research to understand indigenes’ farmland access challenges and adaptation strategies after former agricultural land is converted into peri-urban plots amid rapid urbanisation. The study revealed that rapid urban expansion has drastically reduced available land for farming in both acephalous and centralised case studies. In effect, indigenes who previously farmed on peri-urban lands are now adopting various strategies including moving to farther communities for agricultural land and off-farm retail businesses. However, these strategies were found to be ineffective for various reasons. The paper discovered emerging contestations between indigenes and peri-urban developers as the former sought to continuously use allocated plots for farming activities whereas the latter wanted to develop the same into other urban uses. The study further revealed that increasing peri-urbanisation and the attendant farmland losses were negatively affecting the wellbeing of indigenes that used to live on the proceeds from on-farm economic activities. The study recommends that land use planning in peri-urban areas should consider urban agriculture as an integral part of the urban land use process.

The Moving Parts in Michèle Magema's Body of Work

The Moving Parts in Michèle Magema's Body of Work

Identity Crisis and Inter-Ethnic Conflicts in Northern and Upper East Regions of Ghana

The paper examines conflicts in Northern and Upper East regions of Ghana from the perspective of identity crisis in an ethnically heterogeneous section of the country. Notwithstanding the long periods of co-existence among the heterogeneous ethnic groups the melting pot effect has not emerged as attachment to primordial identity lines still prevail. This is most manifested between the traditionally acephalous societies and the chiefly societies. The relationship between these two societies has been antagonistic, especially as the acephalous societies seem to be besieged with identity crisis. The rejection of the chiefly hegemony is at the root of the identity conflicts. The cases examined in this paper illustrate two of such ‘wars of emancipation’ but with differential results. Whereas the Kusasi had been ‘successful’ in wrestling out of the chiefly hegemonic control of the Mamprusi, the Konkomba have not been all that successful against their antagonists. In both situations, however, the acephalous societies tend to slough off their past ‘anarchic’, systems to adopt and/or adapt the chiefly political culture. This adaptation has become the mode of assertion to redress the low social categorisation of the acephalous societies. It is concluded that observance of peace in two areas continue to be tedious as primordial cleavages are still alive. It is thus recommended, among others that the National Peace Council should work with stakeholders to sustain peace.
 Keywords: Identity, Conflict, Kusasi, Mamprusi, Konkomba

Theory from the hills

Highlander suggests that geography, and especially, altitude matters. And indeed things look different depending on where you stand. Climb a mountain and the perspective changes as does the landscape itself; the flora, fauna, smells, the air and much more change. High altitude gives a sense of clarity, you can see further out in the distance, things otherwise hidden reveal itself and patterns, traces, paths emerge. It is perhaps no surprise that mountains are places of introspection and spiritual quests. Yet again how altitude matters in a more precise manner in the workings of society is harder to tell. James C. Scott famously argues that hills are difficult to govern and therefore allow for more egalitarian, democratic and non-state types of polities to flourish (2009). His take on “Zomia”, originally proposed by Willem van Schendel, has encouraged scholars to think regions, and geography more generally, outside the dominant framework of nation-states. For Scott, the hills carry a political vision of an anarchist or acephalous society. Indeed, we need to be reminded that another world is possible. Zomia is a powerful image for this.

Baka and the Magic of the State: Between Autochthony and Citizenship

Abstract:While Baka “Pygmies” are regarded as among Africa's most indigenous peoples, their autochthony seems lacking in features that would give them standing for special consideration by die state. Somehow, indigenousness does not equal autochthony. Other mobile indigenous peoples such as traders and pastoralists have also been seen as less than autochthonous. These groups lack “roots in the soil,” which makes them less subject to the authority of the state than farmers. Further, as an acephalous society, Baka political culture cannot be appropriately adjusted to interact with the hierarchical structure of the state and related institutions. For this reason the problematic autochthony of Baka is less an issue of rights within the existing structure of the state—of civil rights—than of human rights. Unfortunately, this human rights issue is not really on any policy agenda, not even that of the working group for the U.N. Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

After Government? On Representing Law Without the State

For the greater part of the 20th century, representations of law as state law were dominant in the legal scholarship of the West. But over the last thirty years sustained attempts have been made, notably under the self-conscious banner of legal pluralism, to loosen the conceptual bonds between law and government. Early on, acephalous societies in formerly colonial territories and local groupings within the metropolis were represented as legal orders. Latterly, as attention shifted to orderings at regional and global level beyond the nation state, attempts have been made to delineate a general jurisprudence. It is argued here that these conceptual revisions have for the most part been problematic, made in the face of strong evidence linking the cultural assemblage we have come to call law with projects of government. The lecture concludes with a plea that we should be very cautious in representing what are essentially negotiated orders, whether at local or global level, as legal orders; these remain significantly different from those at the level of the state. Today, under an onslaught of jural discourse and institutional design, the distinctive rationalities and values of negotiated order, while arguably deserving to be celebrated, are effectively effaced.

Fighting the slave trade: West African strategies

Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies. Edited by Sylviane Diouf Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003. Pp. xxxvii, 242. $65.95 cloth, $29.95 paper. Sylviane Diouf, accomplished Atlantic and African historian, has undertaken a labor both of passion and of erudition in editing Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies. In her introduction to this edited collection, she struggles to bring together an uneven set of conference papers with some success. In providing overarching themes for the strategies used by West Africans against the Atlantic slave trade, she reaches beyond (p. x) in an attempt to understand how Africans acted to preserve self, family, and society. She challenges prevailing opinion that seeks to portray Africans as the other in the slave trade, pointing out that Europeans, after all, had deported their own as well, and making reasonable comparisons between the Atlantic slave trade and the Holocaust (pp. x-xi). Yet she does not seek to be an apologist for Africans, does not shy away from either the difficult question of betrayal of Africans by Africans (pp. xiii-xiv) or the African/African-American divide evident to those who have studied roots tourism in Ghana and elsewhere (p. xvi). In twelve chapters and an epilogue, Diouf has collected a far wider and sometimes more incisive set of analyses of West Africans' resistance to the depredations of the Atlantic slave trade than published previously. Despite the title, most of the papers do not describe armed struggle at all, but instead adopt approaches taken by James Scott and others in understanding resistance to colonialism in terms of less obvious strategies avoidance, self-interest, foot-dragging, and even exodus. The Africans in Fighting the Slave Trade flee to defensible or less penetrable environments such as forests and caves, they trade their own slaves and newly won captives to Europeans in exchange for their relatives, they change their cultivation habits, undertake informal boycotts, and give misinformation to raiders. They also engage in both planned and organic social transformations as a defensive measure. West Africans exposed to slave raiding alter their housing construction, village architecture, field arrangement, cultivation methods, settlement size, religion and rituals, central political institutions, and diplomatic arrangements. Many do fight the trade actively: several contributors point to evidence of the growth and increasing sophistication of armies, revolts by slaves within West African states, and revolts on board ships as evidence of a previously understated level, as well as range, of struggle against the transatlantic slave trade within and on the coast of West Africa. Equally gripping although less celebrated is evidence that West Africans chose to become slavers in an attempt to avoid becoming slaves. This is put forward most compellingly by Walter Hawthorne, who elaborates the controversial gun-slave cycle proposed by Joe Inikori and Paul Lovejoy in the early 1980s by suggesting that acephalous societies in Guinea-Bissau traded slaves for iron used in making melee weapons. Similar evidence of escapees and refugees becoming slavers is presented by Elisee Soumonni for Benin and in the oft-noted case of Masina, here simply but authoritatively set out by Martin Klein. Diouf herself notes counter-examples in which slave traders journeying to the coast were seized and themselves enslaved. This evidence, collected in a single volume, highlights the confusing and complex situation in West Africa during the slave trade, and hints at the need for further research. In developing this collection, Diouf has recreated the discourse on the strategies of West Africans in the uncertain times of the Atlantic slave trade in a new, more nuanced and expansive shape. Alas, the chapters themselves are somewhat uneven, as is often the case with such collections developed from conference papers. …

Time's square: deriving cultural theory from rubbish theory

Starting with the hypothesis that duration (the standard idea of time that we associate with the steady tick-tock of a clock) can only exist if it is framed by something that is not duration—eternity or oblivion—it is possible to make sense of the fusing of time and space that is going on, both in acephalous societies in West Africa and in the more familiar dynamic categorizations of modern Western societies: secondhand, rubbish and antique, for instance. The same hypothesis also sheds some helpful light on problems over space and time in comtemporary physics. Forgetting, we now see, is a prerequisite for remembering, and worthlessness a prerequisite for value: insights that suggest we take a closer look at what is involved in the deceptively simple three-category dynamical system in which objects, once produced, have only two possible destinations—the museum or the rubbish dump. Such a dynamical system, it turns out, can give rise to shifts within the social totality across two fundamental dimensions—status and power—thereby generating many of the ‘grand types’ that have been discerned by social scientists: class and caste, for instance. But, if it is to do this, there must be at least four contending ways of organizing and justifying within that totality. Cultural Theory (the four ways of organizing and justifying) is thus revealed to be inherent in the seemingly much simpler rubbish theory the three-category dynamical system): a surprising outcome that has some intriguing implications.

Colonialism, the Shuar Federation, and the Ecuadorian State

This author suggests new avenues for thinking about the relationship between formerly stateless societies and the state. It does so through a detailed study of one particular group, the Shuar, indigenous to the Ecuadorian Amazon. Formerly an acephalous society of hunter-gardeners, the Shuar now constitute a federation with a democratically elected, hierarchical leadership and are at the forefront of indigenous movements in Latin America. The author analyzes this transformation in the context of colonialism but argues that colonialism involves far more than the movement of people from one place to another or the extension of state authority over new territory. Rather, he reveals colonialism to hinge on the transformation of sociospatial boundaries. Such transformations were critical not only to Shuar ethnogenesis but also to Ecuadorian state-building. That is, colonialism involves a dialectical reorganization both of the state and of its new subjects.

Mémoire historique et structure sociale des sociétés lignagères, les Gouin et les Lobi du Burkina Faso

By comparing two burkinabe societies, lineage and acephalous societies, the author proposes to show the connection between memory of the past and social structure. The Gouin and the Lobi have both known a long migration. While the Gouin have not kept this experience in their memory, the Lobi use it as the main sequence of their initiation wich is then imprinted in the memory of the initiated. This difference might have something to do with the fact that the Gouin have remained matrilineal while the Lobi have become bilineal : their secret patrilineal structure is revealed at the time of initiation along with the migratory and initiatory route. The memory of the migration seems to serve as operating concept in setting up bilinearity. On the contrary the Gouin convert neighbourly relationship into symbolic paternal kinship, thus creating mobile links that vary with neighbourhood changes.

Complex societies : The evolutionary origins of a crude superorganism.

The complexity of human societies of the past few thousand years rivals that of social insect societies. We hypothesize that two sets of social "instincts" underpin and constrain the evolution of complex societies. One set is ancient and shared with other social primate species, and one is derived and unique to our lineage. The latter evolved by the late Pleistocene, and led to the evolution of institutions of intermediate complexity in acephalous societies. The institutions of complex societies often conflict with our social instincts. The complex societies of the past few thousand years can function only because cultural evolution has created effective "work-arounds" to manage such instincts. We describe a series of work-arounds and use the data on the relative effectiveness of WWII armies to test the work-around hypothesis.

Rulers and Rainmakers in Precolonial South Pare, Tanzania: Exchange and Ritual Experts in Political Centralization

This article applies Bourdieu's notion of symbolic capital to an analysis of political processes in the small chiefdoms of South Pare Mountain in northeastern Tanzania between 1700 and 1900. Regional exchange of cattle and exotic goods interacted with other social processes to create political change in societies with incipient political centralization. Political legitimization was based on the symbolic capital of ritual preeminence which demanded investment of economic resources. Regional exchange and the development of long-distance ivory and slave trade on the East African coast increased the cost of symbolic capital and exacerbated competition for political power. (East Africa, South Pare, history, political economy, chiefdoms, exchange, politics, ritual) The emergence of political centralization and the dynamics of chiefdoms have recently become central issues in archaeology (Earle 1991; Johnson and Earle 1987; Upham 1990; Hayden 1995). Although that research builds upon earlier theoretical work by cultural anthropologists and is based on ethnographic material, the topic has declined in salience in the field of ethnology. Many archaeologists are also now of the opinion that the utility of ethnographic comparisons has reached its limit, and that research should focus instead on long-term archaeological sequences of chiefdom developments (e.g., Earle 1991). However, in a recent article, Roscoe (1993; cf. Thomas 1996) calls for renewed attention from cultural anthropology to the topic and for collaboration between the two fields in order to develop models based on current social theory (e.g., Giddens 1986; Bourdieu 1990). This article takes up that challenge by applying Bourdieu's notion of symbolic capital to an analysis of political processes in the small chiefdoms of the South Pare Mountain in northeastern Tanzania between 1700 and 1900.(1) During this period, South Pare societies were part of an exchange system involving food, ivory, and slaves. These items were bartered for prestige goods in the form of livestock from pastoralists, and exotic valuables such as cloth, beads, and metals from coastal traders involved in the Indian Ocean trade. This article takes a diachronic perspective to demonstrate how the exchange of prestige goods interacted with other social processes to create political change in societies with incipient centralization. The analysis leads to a hypothesis about how political centralization may have emerged in these chiefdoms. Several authors have observed a relationship between the density of exchange networks and availability of prestige goods on the one hand, and the degree of political centralization on the other (Ekholm 1977; Kipp and Schortman 1989). For Melanesia and Polynesia, Brunton (1975), Friedman (1981), and Persson (1983) show that where valuables necessary for social payments cannot be controlled by any group, political organization is highly competitive and acephalous; while in regions where sources of valuables are few and exchange networks circumscribed, chiefly hierarchies occur. However, the development of incipient political centralization from acephalous social organization involves something more than the control of prestige goods. Cross-culturally, chiefly status and institutions were based on legitimacy, often of a ritual nature. The ritual power of chiefs in Africa is well known. The structural-functionalists saw it as an integrative force for maintenance of the social system (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940). The Marxists view ritual power as legitimizing ideology; a smoke screen for exploitation by elites (Meillassoux 1981:86f.). Both approaches pay little attention to the fact that ideology is costly. Emerging elites cannot simply claim ritual power and expect to be believed. Ideology is rooted in prevailing cosmologies and social norms which may not lend themselves to easy centralization. But Bourdieu's (1990) notion of symbolic capital, while admittedly vague, may better reflect the role of ritual in the politics of chiefdoms and acephalous societies (cf. …

The Acephalous Society and the Indirect Rule System in Africa

(1994). The Acephalous Society and the Indirect Rule System in Africa. The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law: Vol. 26, No. 34, pp. 61-85.

A Ritual Response to Climatic Perturbations in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea

The impression gained by visitors to the New Guinea Highlands is of an equable climate year round with its usual, though not invariable, daily Pattern of warm sunshine in the mornings regularly followed by rainfalls in the afternoons. Yet according to the Wola people of the Southern Highlands Province, their region sometimes experiences weather so inclement that food shortages occur, even famine in extreme conditions. The threat of climatic perturbations has recently attracted popular Western interest (Houghton et al. 1990). The possible environmental consequences of our industrial pollution of the atmosphere are causing concern: the so-called greenhouse effect (Slade 1990; Heymsfield and Miloshevich 1991; Vellinga and Swart 1991), global warming (Maddox 1991; Hecht 1990; Schneider 1990), and acid rain (Pearce 1990; Mason 1990), to mention but three topical issues. While these global concerns may well affect highland New Guinea weather patterns, they do not currently concern people living there, unlike the inhabitants of some of the low-lying islands of the Pacific who fear catastrophic loss of land if sea levels rise as some forecast. Major perturbations in the usual weather pattern however, which they say have occurred for generations, have always been a worry. THE WOLA AND THEIR CLIMATE The Wola speakers occupy five valleys in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, from the Mendi River in the east to the Ak in the west. They live in small houses scattered along the sides of their valleys in areas of extensive cane grassland, the watersheds between which are heavily forested. Dotted across the landscape are their neat gardens. They practice shifting cultivation and subsist on a predominantly vegetable diet in which sweet potato is the staple. They keep pig herds of considerable size. They hand these creatures, together with other items of wealth such as seashells and cosmetic off, around to one another in interminable series of ceremonial exchanges, which mark all important social events. These transactions are a significant force for the maintenance of order in their fiercely egalitarian, acephalous society. Their supernatural conceptions center on beliefs in the ability of their ancestors' spirits to cause sickness and death, in various other forest spirit forces, and in others' powers of sorcery and poison. High annual rainfall and seasonally uniform tropical temperatures characterize the climate of the southwestern Pacific region, dictating the weather over the Southern Highlands, though modified by local controls. The seasonal shift north and south of the thermal equator, together with the associated positional changes in the southerly subtropical anticyclone centers and northerly monsoonal wind system, are the principal seasonal controls on the region (Curry and Armstrong 1959). The seasonal variation in rainfall is small nearly everywhere. High humidity and cloudiness are predictably associated with the combination of high rainfall and temperature. There is a seasonal alternation in the direction of prevailing winds from northwest monsoons to southeast trades; wind patterns being consistent, sometimes strong but rarely violent (see Hounam 1951; Howlett 1967:36-41; Brookfield and Hart 1971:4-21 for more detailed overviews). The climate of the Wola region is of the Lower Montane Humid type (according to the classification scheme of McAlpine et al. 1983:160). It is characterized by high rainfall, the absence of soil moisture, droughts, cool temperatures due to the moderating effect of altitude, and the relative absence of any seasonality (Fitzpatrick 1965). Occasionally serious climatic perturbations occur with potentially serious consequences for food supply. FROST Frost is a dramatic instance of such a disturbance. It is not a hazard commonly associated with equatorial regions, but it is a possibility at higher altitudes (Brown and Powell 1973, 1974; Waddell 1975). …

From village autonomy to modern village administration among the Kulere of central Nigeria

Opening ParagraphIn studies of change in indigenous political organisations under the impact of colonial administration, the precolonial situation in Africa is often depicted as essentially static. Anthropologists tend to project a relatively ‘uninfluenced’ state of affairs from the early colonial period into the past. Change seems to occur under European influence. This picture is the result less of the conviction of the authors that conditions were static than of a lack of information on precolonial development. This is especially true for ‘acephalous’ societies; centralised societies often possess detailed traditions concerning their institutional history. In the following case, of the political development of a village in the Nigerian Middle Belt, it has been possible to record precolonial changes of organisation in an acephalous society.

Vivre en conflit dans une France sans État : typologie des mécanismes de règlement des conflits (1050-1200)

Dans la tradition politique occidentale, rendre la justice est, avec le maintien de la paix, une fonction gouvernementale de la plus haute importance. La justice publique est la clé de voûte de l'ordre moderne tant social que politique ; elle a été, pendant plus de six siècles, le but, et souvent le mécanisme de la création de l'État-nation. A l'opposé d'autres sociétés, comme le Japon, où conventions et conflits, à la fois privés et collectifs, ne nécessitent que rarement l'intervention de tribunaux ou de légistes, la société occidentale a pris l'habitude de voir aplanir les controverses et désaccords ordinaires de la vie d'une société complexe par des institutions judiciaires plus ou moins centralisées. Cela ne signifie pas, naturellement, que, dans la société contemporaine tant française qu'américaine, conflits et différends se règlent devant un tribunal ; au contraire, la majorité se résoud, sans l'aide de la justice, grâce à quelque compromis informel ou extra-juridique.

The social organization of water control in the Taita Hills, Kenya

This is a case study of indigenous irrigation in a small, traditionally acephalous society where resource management institutions must operate through highly autonomous local and descent groupings. The physical layout of irrigation canals, access to the fields they serve, and management of irrigation water all hinge on structural and ideational aspects of Taita social organization and the reproduction of that social organization through the generations. By showing how the irrigation system responds to the distribution of status in Taita society, to population growth, to land reform, and to modern agricultural and administrative changes it is possible to shed light on a broad range of policy and theoretical issues. The result is a comprehensive view of traditional and changing interrelations among the technology of irrigation, the ideology of kinship, and the organization of Taita society. [irrigation, Kenya, resource management, social organization, Taita]

Violence et ordre social dans une société amazonienne. Les Yanomami du Vénézuela

Social Organization and Violence among the Yanomami-of Venezuela The Yanomami are a Venezuelan population of hunters practising slash-and-burn agriculture. In their practices and representations, violence is at the heart of social organization. The potential or effective use of violence, whether observable or not, contributes to a constant transformation of intra- and inter-community relations. Violence is used, particularly, to produce and/or maintain social and spatial distance between groups. In this study we examine the modalities and degrees of violence, in terms of capacity to resolve conflicts and as an agonistic conception of social relations. Inter-community warfare, which has characterized Yanomami society, is only one of several possible forms of violence : occult aggressions must also be considered. The various forms of aggression correspond to different levels of socio-political interaction. In this acephalous society, aggression appears to be a constitutive element of social structure. It offers an institutional guarantee of a symbolic relationship uniting both the members of a group and the different local groups.

Charles Atangana of Yaounde

Charles Atangana (c. 1880–1943) is an African chief whose career defies easy categorization. He was one of several thousand Beti headman's sons in central Cameroon, and not in the line of succession to replace his father as lineage chief within this acephalous society. However, he became a houseboy to the Germans who moved to the Yaounde district in the 1880s, was sent to a mission school by them, and rose from being medical assistant, clerk and interpreter to Oberhäuptling, or Paramount Chief, of this group of perhaps 500,000 persons in 1914. No sooner had he achieved a position of power than he lost it with the coming of World War I. Atangana led the German exodus to Spanish Guinea, and then was sent to Spain by the Germans, who expected him to testify on their behalf at the Versailles peace talks, but he was never called on. After returning to Cameroon he was eventually returned to a position of power by the French, who never had the complete confidence in him the Germans had shown. The 1920s and 1930s brought increasing difficulties to Atangana and other appointed Beti chiefs. To begin with, chiefs were an alien institution imposed on the Beti; the French were not satisfied with them because few of them could deliver the tax revenues and workers for public-works projects in the desired quantities; the Beti became increasingly estranged from them because they did not care for the heavy demands they made. As a generation of school-educated Beti emerged in the 1930s, the chiefs' role was increasingly questioned. Atangana could never be considered a resistance figure; he believed it was useless for the Beti to fight the Europeans, and he accepted the religion and culture of the Europeans. At the same time he did much to advance African interests. He often interceded with the Europeans on behalf of individual Africans, and actively supported campaigns like the sleeping-sickness eradication effort of the French. Within the limited possibilities open to him, he steered a middle course, as he saw it.