Les Bamiléké ont élaboré des institutions profondément originales dans des domaines en apparence nettement distincts, lignage et parenté, chefferie, sociétés coutumières, organisation des quartiers. L'organisation sociale qui en résulte est fort complexe et présente des variations notables d'un groupement à l'autre, surtout dans le domaine du fonctionnement de la chefferie. L'édifice apparaît surchargé d'éléments secondaires, au point que ses grandes lignes finissent par se trouver masquées.

The general aim of this paper is to test by quantitative methods Mitchell's statement (Mitchell, 1965, p. 193) that ‘we expect the meaning which people read into misfortunes to change when they become part of an industrial urban community’. Mitchell was commenting (and elaborating) on the demonstration by Marwick (1952) that witchcraft accusations are particularly likely to occur between people who are in competition with one another, but who are prevented by the norms of the society from expressing their hostility openly. He suggests that Africans in town continue to interpret their misfortunes in ‘personal’ terms but that ‘the meaning that they attach to the misfortune must be of a type which will allow them to take effective action’. In the towns of the Copperbelt hostility and opposition may be openly expressed toward strangers, so there is no need for accusations of witchcraft (signalling interpersonal tensions), except where townsfolk are linked in co-operative enterprises in which, nevertheless, there is an element of competition, e.g. as between rival beerbrewers or fellow workers. In such cases open accusation tends to be inhibited and the interpretation recouched in terms of ancestral wrath. Mitchell sees, therefore, an increase in ancestor-centred explanation of misfortune in urban areas and implies a decrease in witch accusations. Marwick has suggested, on the other hand, that ‘the immediate effect of contact with Western influence is not a decrease but an increase in the African's preoccupation with magic, witchcraft and sorcery’, due to new social alignments and social, economic and political changes, which create insecurity, anxiety, and impart a ‘dangerous flexibility’ to human relationships (Marwick, 1958, p. 106).

Dr. Jack Goody, in his study of Death, Property, and the Ancestors among the LoDagaa of Northern Ghana, shifts his level of analysis from time to time. On the one hand, in analysing the pattern of sacrifice to the ancestors (i.e. the relationship of donor to recipient in the sacrificial situation), among the two communities of the LoWiili and LoDagaba (collectively referred to as the LoDagaa), he maintains that the crucial variable is the locus of tension in the holder-heir relationship, and the consequent guilt a man feels since he can only inherit the property on the holder's death. Thus individuals sacrifice to those people from whom they also inherit. We are told that sacrifice follows the pattern of inheritance of movable property, which in the case of the LoWiili falls within the patriclan and in the case of the LoDagaba falls within the matriclan. Goody makes much of this holder-heir relationship but does not follow up the implications in his analysis of the cases of sacrifice which he records in Table 12 on p. 398. Rather he shifts his level of analysis and relates the relationship between donor and recipient to the more diffuse level of the relationship existing between members of the corporate descent group, treating all members for these purposes as holders or heirs. In this sense the sacrificial obligations of the heirs are dependent on the continuing interest of the deceased members, together with their rightful expectation to a part of the property which is held by the living members of the corporate descent group in which movable property is inherited. A situation which arises because the descent group is conceived of as being made up of the living and certain dead members, i.e. the ancestors. In the most general sense Goody is maintaining that individuals sacrifice the sacrificial object (cows, goats) to those categories of people from whom they did in fact inherit, or might have inherited, these same objects of sacrifice.

This paper considers age organization as a political means of dealing with problems arising out of the dispersion of men and wealth in varying ecological zones among the Sidamo of south-west Ethiopia.

The Sidamo inhabit an area shaped like a trapezoid beginning 169 miles below Addis Ababa, extending on a north-south axis from Lake Awasa to Lake Abaya, and on the east-west axis from the upper branches of the Loghita River to the Billate River (see Map I). Their cultural boundaries are with the Arusi on the north, Walamo on the west, southward with the Gugi and Darassa, and the Jamjam (Northern Gugi) on the east. On the basis of village census data and registration of the majority of Sidamo household heads for the 1965 parliamentary elections, I would estimate the population to be between 100,000 and 200,000 persons.