272 AFRICAN AFFAIRS had he presented it within the modest frame of, say, a Zambian Paper, though one appreciates the problems of local publication on such a topic. As it is, he seems to have decided to address rich political scientists who know little of Africa and still need to be persuaded that African villagers respond 'rationally' to economic sticks and carrots. It seems in peculiarly bad taste, especially these days, to produce a book about the problems of poor people which is full of such surplus fat.

School of Oriental and African Studies, ANDREW ROBERTS Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/afraf/article/76/303/272/29559 by guest on 29 September 2021 London

Studies in African Social , edited by Meyer Fortes and Sheila Patterson. Academic Press, London & New York, 1975. 267pp. 1 plate, index. £7-50; $19-50. The title of this well produced volume reveals neither that it is a 70th birthday tribute to the distinguished anthropologist, , nor that its essays deal almost exclusively with southern Africa. Since Shapera is internationally known above all for his exceptionally thorough studies of the Tswana, this geo- graphical limitation is not inappropriate; but it does mean, as the editors apolo- getically note, that the contributors are less than a cross-section of those who have worked with 'Schap' as friends, pupils or colleagues. However, 5 of the 12 contributors are women which is a revealing sidelight on the anthropological profession as it developed in the colonial era. In addition to a characteristically elegant essay on 'strangers', which includes material comparing Tallensi and Akan procedures with those of the Tswana, Fortes offers a concise appreciation of Schapera's work. He brings out the extraordinary productivity and range of Schapera's contribution to the classical era of African studies. Fortes also reveals that African Political Systems, perhaps the most widely known—and, in some quarters, notorious—anthropological product of this period, was inspired by a suggestion from Schapera. Fittingly, therefore, Lucy Mair's essay charts progress in the field of political anthropology since its publication in 1940, while Monica Wilson examines the range and altera- tions in lines of cleavage based on examples from throughout southern Africa. E. J. Krije analyses change and development in the divine kingship of the Lovedu in response to the historical challenges of the nineteenth century. J. F. Holleman illuminates the nature of evidence in Shona tribal law and G. Fortune analyses a Shona Nheketertua to show the corrective moral function of this form of poetry. reviews the problem of dose-kin marriage among the Tswana, partly attempting to revise Schapera's own work on the topic; R. P. Werbner has a nuanced discussion of some land tenure issues among the Kalanga of Botswana; and J. B. Loudon evaluates the descriptions of travellers to Tristan da Cunha up to 1906. In a substantial offering, Sheila Patterson participates in the current concern for the comparative study of slave systems by g the status and role of the' free people of colour' in the western Cape. By contrast, writes a short—very short—story, but one full of meaning and poignancy. Excellent though most of these essays are, and ably though they relate ethno- graphic and historical detail to wider theoretical concerns in anthropology, they seem remote from the major contemporary issues of southern Africa. The only contributor explicitly to raise wider concerns is the late , but unfortunately his essay 'Anthropology and : the work of South African Anthropologists' is by no means one of his best. Defensive and self-justificatory BOOK REVIEWS 273 in tone, it is also an uncoordinated discussion which slithers uneasily from point to point. As an argument, it suffers from the positivist fallacy that not only facts but also theories can be pronounced accurate. The author, and others who thought like him, are thus pronounced correct twice over—once as scientists and once as liberals. Later generations are not likely to accept Gluckman's 'defence of the ancestors' as an adequate guide to the relationship between South African and anthropological theory in the classical era. Nevertheless, Schapera's own immense contribution to the scholarship of that era, to which this volume Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/afraf/article/76/303/272/29559 by guest on 29 September 2021 pays generous tribute, will undoubtedly be recognized for a very long time to come. University of Sussex RICHARD BROWN

Christianity and Xhosa Tradition, by B. A. Pauw. Oxford University Press, 1975. xiv+389pp. In this careful and scholarly account of orthodox Christianity amongst the Xhosa of the Transkei and Ciskei, B. A. Pauw, professor of anthropology at the University of , sets out to find out 'what Christianity is like among the Xhosajuidjo understand why it is like that' in a rural district of the Transkei as well as in an urban centre, Port Elizabeth. His rich research material enables the author to look at Xhosa understanding of orthodox Christianity, and the way in which traditional Xhosa ideas affect this understanding as shown in their mortuary rituals, their attitudes to the ancestors, to witchcraft and to western medicine. Although he concentrates in the main on Christians within the orthodox mission fold, two chapters on prayer movements both within and outside the church, and the Pentecostal churches—the Reverend Bhengu's Assemblies of God, Bishop Limba's Church of Christ, the Old Apostolic Church and the Zionist churches—contain some of the most fascinating and suggestive material. Though Christianity and Xhosa Tradition never achieves the profound empathy of Bishop Sundkler's Zulu Zion, by and large this is a sympathetic account, by a scholar who is himself a convinced Christian, though one who clearly sees his work as falling within the bounds of 'systematic theology'—which 'proceeds from faith in revelation . . . but is concerned with systematizing in a rational manner the body of knowledge accepted in faith and relating to it knowledge deriving from other sources . . . .' Christianity and Xhosa Tradition undoubtedly makes a considerable contribution towards Professor Pauw's first objective: set in the ethnographic present (the 1960s), it undoubtedly tells us a great deal about 'what Christianity is like among the Xhosa' now. It is less clear that he has achieved his second. Here the author takes an essentially Weberian approach, contrasting 'the emotional, the magical and the particularistic' of what he calls 'small-scale' (following Redfield, the Wilsons et al.) and the 'rational, intellectual, or systematic or non- magical religion and the universalistic beliefs and norms of 'large-scale' society, to suggest the 'intermediate' position of the Xhosa. This approach, however, leaves more questions unanswered than it resolves. To maintain, for example, that the interweaving of Xhosa traditional beliefs, and especially the fact that relations with kinsmen 'are still of some importance while some urban mass movements have a close-knit structure which gives them a certain affinity with small-scale society' does not get one very far. As the professor himself points out, on this kind of argument one could maintain that all societies are intermediate. Not only does the approach blur any historical dimension to the kinds of