Table of contents Table of contents....................................................................................................i Acknowledgements..............................................................................................iii Maps of the fieldwork area ..................................................................................ix Introduction: The invention by tradition ..............................................................1 Introducing the Iraqw..........................................................................................29 Article abstracts ..................................................................................................45 Some reflections on the fieldwork experience....................................................49 Article I: Money, milk and sorghum beer: Change and continuity among the Iraqw of Tanzania, Africa, 66(3):367-386 (1996) ..................55 Article II: When hypothesis becomes myth: The Iraqi origin of the Iraqw, Ethnology, 37(1):17-38 (1998)......................................................85 Article III: “We are as sheep and goats”: Iraqw and Datoga discourses on fortune, failure and the future, in David Anderson and Vigdis Broch-Due (eds.): “The poor are not us”: Poverty and pastoralism in Eastern Africa, London: James Currey (Co- author: Astrid Blystad, in press, 1999)...................................................117 Article IV: Cross-cultural healing in East African ethnography, to appear in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, (1999)...............................151 Article V: Creativity and invention in Iraqw ritual, (submitted to Anthropos, February 1999).....................................................................183 Epilogue ............................................................................................................249 References.........................................................................................................251 Acknowledgements First of all I would like to thank all the people who welcomed me, took care of me, and assisted me in various ways during three periods of fieldwork carried out in the southern Mbulu and northern Hanang areas of northern Tanzania. I am particularly indebted to the people of Maghang, Dang’eida, and Getanyamba, the villages where I lived for almost two years. I am extremely grateful to more individuals than it is possible to mention here; nevertheless, specific thanks goes to Bura Tua, Alphonsi Erro and his family, Gaseri Nanagi, Herman Fabiano, Barhe and Kilay in Maghang, Isaki Bayi, Joeli Bayi, John Qamlali, Elias Mao, William B. Naman, Ezra B. Naman, Akonay Nade, Stephano E. Daudi, Peter Lulu, Ruben Lema, Herman Malleyeck, Bayanga Gurenda, Petro Gasheka, and the late Tua Masay, Iana Tua, and Gurenda Madey. A special thanks also goes to John Bolora and his family who welcomed me to stay with them during the preparatory phase of language studies in Arusha. I am grateful to Haydom Lutheran Hospital and the people working there, especially Ole Halgrim Evjen Olsen and his family, Ester Madsen, Naftali B. Naman, Isaki Gidamalish, and Sven Gudmund Hinderaker. Sincere thanks also go to the various officials in Hanang and Mbulu Districts who allowed me to conduct fieldwork in their areas of jurisdiction, and to the Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology which granted the necessary research permits. Members of the staff at Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, have all contributed in various ways to my development as an anthropologist. My supervisors, Jan Petter Blom and Georg Henriksen, have been deeply involved in the Cand. Polit. and PhD iv projects respectively. Both of them were always there when I needed them, giving valuable advise and encouragement. Various others at the Department and at the University of Bergen have left their marks on the thesis or the other writings that constitute a part of the PhD program. I would like to mention Reidar Grønhaug, Anders Molander, Frode Jacobsen, Frode Storås, Nils Gunnar Songstad and Ørnulf Gulbrandsen in particular. Some of the most valuable criticism, advise, and encouragement came from fellow students during seminars of the “Africa group” at the Department of Social Anthropology. I am immensely grateful to Yusufu Q. Lawi, himself an Iraqw and a historian, who has critically reviewed earlier versions of all five articles that constitute this thesis. His suggestions, corrections, and encouraging comments have been invaluable in the write-up of the thesis. I have benefited greatly from the contact and co-operation with other researchers who have been working on related issues in the area of study, in particular the anthropologists Ellen Selvik, Katherine A. Snyder and Lars Hagborg, and the linguists Maarten Mous and Roland Kiessling. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of Africa, Ethnology, and Medical Anthropology Quarterly, as well as David Anderson and Vigdis Broch- Due, who have all provided valuable criticism and encouragement in connection with the publishing of the first four articles in this thesis. The responsibility for any remaining errors and short-comings is entirely my own. I thank Tom Johnsen and his colleagues at the Social Sciences Library, University of Bergen, for having been helpful throughout the project. I would also like to express my gratitude to the staff at Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and in particular Kristian v Heggenhougen, for providing an inspiring milieu during the year my family and I spent in Boston. The staff at the Centre for Development Studies, the Centre for International Health, and the Norwegian Research Council have been very supportive in various ways; I would like to mention and thank Gunnar Kvåle, Rune Nilsen, Solfrid Hornell, Terje Halvorsen, Eyolf Juul Larsen, and Ellen S. Aa. Vollebæk in particular. The PhD Scholarship was granted by the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Bergen, whereas the fieldwork periods and a one year stay in the U.S.A. were financed by the University of Bergen, the Norwegian Research Council, the Scandinavian Institute for African Studies, Ludwig Meltzers Høyskolefond, and Lise og Arnfinn Hejes fond. Sincere thanks go to these institutions. The individual who has had the greatest impact on the present thesis is beyond doubt my wife and fellow anthropologist, Astrid Blystad, who is also the co-author of one of the articles. When we married shortly after both of us were granted PhD scholarships, we were informed that 50 per cent of married Norwegian PhD students get divorced before they complete their degrees. One of our more mathematically gifted colleagues calculated that this would imply that a marriage between two PhD students would have a 100 per cent chance of being terminated before either of the projects are completed. My suspicions that there was something wrong with these estimates were confirmed in the years that followed. It is hard to try to imagine what the fieldwork experience and the suffering and joy of writing this thesis would have been like without Astrid, and I feel immensely lucky and privileged to have had an individual with whom I could share the many good and the very few bad times of both the Cand. Polit. and the PhD project. vi One of the finest memories of my life was to see my father and my parents-in-law attending the initiation of their grandson in Dang’eida village. At that point of time my father was 76 years old and he had spent at least fifty of them as a travelling evangelist for one of the most conservative, some would say fundamentalist, church denominations in Norway. The gidahalaghweanga of our son, Håvard, who was born during our second fieldwork, involved the engagement of several hundred Iraqw and Datoga, the brewing of numerous calabashes of honey mead and several drums of sorghum beer, the highly unbiblical slaughter of an ox and a goat, and lengthy prayers to a god that was not my father’s. The central part of the ritual was the strangulation of the gidahalaghweanga goat in front of the baby, and the sprinkling of urine from the dying animal on Håvard’s forehead. My father was not, however, abhorred by the “pagan” ritual procedures in which he was one of the main protagonists by virtue of being the senior elder of Håvard’s clan. On the contrary, he was highly impressed by both the scale and the content of the event, and he shared our own strong emotional experience of seeing Håvard being introduced to the world. My father later referred to the event as the “baptism” of his grandson, and I believe that he had captured one of the main messages that anthropology has to bring to the world. Finally, I would like to dedicate the fourth of these articles, which focuses on the tendency to attribute healing and ritual powers to the culturally distant, to Fremskrittspartiet. Just days after I submitted this particular article to Medical Anthropology Quarterly, the leadership of this right-wing Norwegian political party launched a party platform in which they introduced a new concept for what they perceive to be a major threat to Norwegian society: Fremmedkulturelle. This may be translated as “culturally alien/distant”, and happened to be one of the key concepts in vii the article I had just completed. The party, which soared to 25 per cent support in the polls at the time, thus provided further evidence of the human inclination to attribute supernatural power to the culturally distant, and illustrated yet again that a potential