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Comparing Impossibilities: Selected Essays of Sally Falk Moore

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COMPARING IMPOSSIBILITIES Hau BOOKS Executive Editor Giovanni da Col Managing Editor Sean M. Dowdy Editorial Board Anne-Christine Taylor Carlos Fausto Danilyn Rutherford Ilana Gershon Jason Throop Joel Robbins Jonathan Parry Michael Lempert Stephan Palmié www.haubooks.com COMPARING IMPOSSIBILITIES SELECTED EssaYS OF SallY FALK MOORE Sally Falk Moore Foreword by John Borneman Hau Books Chicago © 2016 Hau Books and Sally Falk Moore Cover and layout design: Sheehan Moore Cover Photograph © Sally Falk Moore Typesetting: Prepress Plus (www.prepressplus.in) ISBN: 978-0-9861325-5-1 LCCN: 2016902725 Hau Books Chicago Distribution Center 11030 S. Langley Chicago, IL 60628 www.haubooks.com Hau Books is marketed and distributed by The University of Chicago Press. www.press.uchicago.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. For my always lively daughters, Penelope and Nicola Moore, who, with lots of attention and cheerful skepticism have seen me through many many years. Contents Acknowledgments and Sources xi Foreword by John Borneman xv An Oblique Introduction xxxi PART I: THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AND ANTHROPOLOGY chapter one Part of the Story: A Memoir 3 chapter two Comparisons: Possible and Impossible 31 chapter three Encountering Suspicion in Tanzania 45 PART II: PERSPECTIVES ON AFRICA chapter four From Giving and Lending to Selling: Property Transactions Reflecting Historical Changes on Kilimanjaro 79 viii COMPARING IMPOSSIBILITIES chapter five History and the Redefinition of Custom on Kilimanjaro 105 chapter six Treating Law as Knowledge: Telling Colonial Officers: What to Say to Africans about Running “Their Own” Native Courts 129 chapter seven Individual Interests and Organizational Structures: Dispute Settlements as “Events of Articulation” 167 chapter eight Explaining the Present: Theoretical Dilemmas in Processual Ethnography 195 PART III: EXCURSIONS INTO MYTHOLOGY chapter nine Descent and Symbolic Filiation 215 chapter ten The Secret of the Men: A Fiction of Chagga Initiation and its Relation to the Logic of Chagga Symbolism 229 PART IV: SOCIAL FIELDS AND THEIR POLITICS chapter eleven Law and Social Change: The Semi-Autonomous Social Field as an Appropriate Subject of Study 251 chapter twelve Political Meetings and the Simulation of Unanimity: Kilimanjaro 1973 277 CONTENTS ix chapter thirteen Changing African Land Tenure: Reflections on the Incapacities of the State 301 References 319 Index 337 Acknowledgments and Sources I want to acknowledge my considerable early debt to two people, Sarah Robin- son and Jane Bestor, both anthropologists—Robinson also a lawyer, Bestor also a historian. Many years ago, when I was house-bound for some months, they encouraged me to think about putting together a book of readings. They not only assembled many of the necessary materials with which I could proceed, but gave the project liveliness by being interested in similar theoretical questions themselves. Conversation with them was an indispensable start. I would also like thank the original publishers of this collection’s chapters for extending their permission to reprint them. The sources, also attributed in the editor’s notes at the beginning of each chapter, are as follows: chapter one 2005. “Part of the story: A memoir.” Ethnos 70 (4): 538–566. chapter two 2005. “Comparisons: Possible and impossible.” Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 1–11. xii COMPARING IMPOSSIBILITIES chapter three 2009. “Encountering suspicion in Tanzania.” In Being there: The fieldwork en- counter and the making of truth, edited by John Borneman and Abdellah Ham- moudi, 151–82. Berkeley: University of California Press. chapter four 1991. “From giving and lending to selling: Property transactions reflecting his- torical changes on Kilimanjaro.” In Law in Colonial Africa, edited by Kristin Mann and Richard Roberts, 108–30. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann and James Currey Educational Books. chapter five 1989. “History and the redefinition of custom on Kilimanjaro.” In History and power in the study of law: New directions in legal anthropology, edited by June Starr and Jane F. Collier, 277–301. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. chapter six 1992. “Treating law as knowledge: Telling colonial officers what to say to Africans about running ‘their own’ native courts.” Law and Society Review 26 (1): 11–46. chapter seven 1977. “Individual interests and organizational structures: Dispute settlements as ‘events of articulation.’” In Social anthropology and law, ASA Monograph No. 14, edited by Ian Hamnett, 159–88. London: Academic Press. chapter eight 1987. “Explaining the present: Theoretical dilemmas in processual ethnogra- phy.” American Ethnologist 14 (4): 727–36. AcknOWleDGments AND SOurces xiii chapter nine 1964. “Descent and symbolic filiation.” American Anthropologist 66: 1308–20. Reprinted in 1967. Myth and cosmos, edited by John Middleton, 63–76. New York: Natural History Press. Also reprinted in 1976. Selected papers: 1946–70, American Anthropological Association 75th anniversary commemorative vol- ume, edited by Robert F. Murphy. Washington, D.C.: American Anthropologi- cal Association. chapter ten 1976. “The secret of the men: A myth about Chagga initiation.” Africa 46 (4): 357–70. chapter eleven 1973. “Law and social change: The semi-autonomous social field as an appropri- ate subject of study.” Law and Society Review 7: 719–46. chapter twelve 1977. “Political meetings and the simulation of unanimity: Kilimanjaro 1973.” In Secular ritual, edited by Sally Moore and Barbara Myerhoff, 151–72. Amster- dam: Royal Van Gorcum. chapter thirteen 1998. “Changing African land tenure: Reflexions on the incapacities of the state.” European Journal of Development Research, Special Issue on Development and Rights, 10 (2): 33–49. Also published in 1999. Lund, Christian, ed. Devel- opment and rights: Negotiating justice in changing societies. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass. Sally Falk Moore Cambridge, MA August 2015 foreword Recording Uncertainty and Disorder on the Ethnographic Scene John Borneman For nearly a half century, Sally Falk Moore has been giving us ways to explain the present. Comparing Impossibilities brings together some of Moore’s key ar- ticles on law, anthropology, and Africa. Trained as a lawyer before pursuing a PhD in anthropology, at a time when few women were admitted into either profession, she brought classic concerns of anthropology, such as kinship, tra- dition, political organization, and the state, into conversation with the most heated contemporary debates about law. She was a pioneer in making the depic- tion and theorization of law an object of anthropological inquiry, influencing its study in ways that still remain underappreciated, and thereby changing the ways we think about law, process, and historical transformation today. In dialogue with classic and contemporary social theory, yet avoiding tenden- tious discussion, two themes run across the body of Moore’s work. First, the signifi- cance of temporality as “process” in the depiction and analysis of social phenomena. Second, the integration of the principles of uncertainty and unpredictability—and of unintended consequences—into our understanding of objects. Influenced by the ethnographic work on events by the British anthropologist Max Gluckman, Moore at an early date independently and rigorously developed a theory of “pro- cess” that has had an impact on anthropology and related fields far beyond the xvi COMPARING IMPOSSIBILITIES number of citations she receives for her concepts. She identifies “diagnostic events” as the key concept of a processual approach: “I wanted to suggest a time-oriented method that could take the transitional, the temporary, and the changing into ac- count, and examine its larger social ramifications, its more enduring consequences” (p. 25, this volume). The analyst construes, in retrospect, some happening wit- nessed during fieldwork as a diagnostic event, occasions of significance in which one can see the unfolding of history in the present as predictive of the future. Attention to such events, either everyday happenings or rituals, requires a departure from static notions of social structure and from a focus on social re- production. Diagnostic events suggest how the non-normative and accidental might provide windows into change and the future as well as reproduction of the present. Although one of Moore’s major innovations has been to create “secular rituals” as an object of study, the articles in this volume focus instead on the everyday, and analyze events such as automobile accidents, a court-directed auction of a piece of land, and unconventional ways of acquiring land. While most of the articles are deeply and passionately about law and Africa, they address the great anthropological tradition of raising and anticipating—of- ten by decades—topics of enduring significance in all of the social sciences and legal study: How is custom reframed by modernity? What part do states and other political actors play in the mobilization, disappearance, renewal, or creation of custom and tradition? What is secular ritual? Moore also raised crucial and lasting questions concerning gender and the body, incest, development, property transactions, events, knowledge, and politics. All of these articles have been pre- viously published between 1973 and 2009. They are given much deeper signifi- cance by their collection in a single volume, and by the inclusion of two original chapters in which Moore reflects on the history of the discipline and its coher-
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