Among most groups of people in Nigeria, land is a basic and high value resource. This is not due simply to the people's dependence on agriculture to gain a livelihood. It owes more to the fact that the pattern of traditional rural life has continued to raise the demand for the available land.

The agricultural land is used as a fund-type resource which is exploited and abandoned, rather than as a flow-type resource whose productivity is maintained indefinitely. Every new farming season numerous old farm sites not considered, because of their low estimated nutrient status, to be adequate for exploitation are left idle. What then becomes available for use is, in most cases, not enough to meet the demand. This built-in idle capacity in the land utilisation system is a key factor conferring high scarcity value on agricultural land.

The prominence of the eland in San thought is suggested by the frequency with which this antelope was depicted in rock paintings and also by the myths and rituals in which it features. In this paper we describe and compare certain eland beliefs and hunting rituals drawn from two San groups, the !Kung of Botswana and the now extinct \Xam of the Cape Province. The relevance of material obtained from the northern !Kung to the explication of the limited southern \Xam ethnographic record and rock paintings has been regarded as questionable in view of the ecological and linguistic differences between the two societies. Using the results of recent field work among the !Kung, we attempt to show that, in spite of the linguistic and ecological differences, there is evidence for a conceptual framework common to both groups.

Among the Akan-speaking peoples of Ghana the fundamental notion about the nature and composition of man—a notion which has a significant bearing on their view of the relation between man and his social, natural and spiritual worlds combined—is that each person at his or her conception receives specific physical and spiritual elements from the genitor, genetrix and Nyame, the Supreme Being. These gifts are conceptualised as bogya (or mogya in the Asante dialect), sunsum and kra, equivalent English translations in literary and popular usage being ‘blood’, ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’ respectively.

Although Redfield's (1947) folk–urban continuum has been subjected to valid theoretical critiques (Miner 1952 and Mintz 1953) the tempting simplistic dichotomy this construct implies is still basic to our view of the social universe. Apparently anthropologists, like many of the groups they study, often prefer to conceptualize in dyadic terms. Thus, in an almost complete disregard for historical processes this proclivity has manifested itself in African studies by a contrast between a static ‘tribal’ hinterland opposed to a more dynamic urban domain. More recently as a mediating agent the tribal notion wound its way into African cities via a theoretical migration and re-emerged somewhat inelegantly as ‘supertribalism’ (Rouch 1956: 60), ‘urban tribalism’ (Gluckman 1960: 55) and ‘retribalization’ (Cohen 1969: 1–6). As a consequence the ‘tribe’ remains a basic conceptual category assumed applicable to both urban and rural Africa.

Much ink has been spilled over the problem of bridewealth, its meaning and its functions. As Gray (1960) has summarized it, the debate first focused on refuting the idea that bridewealth was a kind of payment for the purchase of a wife, and this question still lingers on without having been quite solved. Others have seen in bridewealth a transference of rights and duties over a woman from the woman's group to the husband's group. Leaving aside the economic aspect of the transaction, this view seems particularly valid with regard to societies in which different amounts of bridewealth may be given to obtain different sets of rights and duties over spouses and their offspring (Bohannan 1949; Horton 1969; Williamson 1962). These ideas about bridewealth as a regulator of rights and duties over spouses and children are now generally agreed upon so that Goody (1973: 3), one of the acknowledged experts in these matters, can write that: ‘the relative size of payment is in a general sense linked with the quantum of rights transferred.’ Thus, generally, in societies having several kinds of marriages with a concomitant variation in bridewealth between the kinds of marriages, the rights over the woman and her children will also vary according to the amount paid, more rights being conveyed with a more expensive payment (Goody 1973: 16-17).

In this paper I shall describe the rites performed for Luguru girls at puberty, and attempt an interpretation of their symbolic significance and sociological functions. In a recent article (Brain 1977) I have re-examined the whole question of initiation rites, and I propose to treat the Luguru case in the light of the ideas developed therein.

Briefly, I see the rites as having both psychological and sociological importance. Psychologically, they compensate for male envy of female precreativity (Bettelheim 1954); affirm the culturally prescribed sex roles (Freud 1962 [1905] and Rank 1929); and provide a means of dealing with the threateningly anomalous nature of the transition from an asexual to a sexual world (Douglas 1966). Sociologically, they effect a transition from one status to another; clarify male and female roles and the nature of legitimate authority; and provide instruction in traditional lore and sexual conduct. It is plain that the psychological and sociological aspects overlap considerably. This is most evident in what I regard as the prime function of the rites: to correct any tendency on the part of women to assume a dominant role in a society where political and economic factors might permit them to do so.