This comparative study belongs to a collective research project directed by Louis Dumont and Daniel de Coppet and based at the RCP 436 of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris, which considers the relation, in a given society, between the patterns assumed by the hierarchy of values and those which feature in the circuits of ceremonial exchange. It is based upon a shorter, unpublished study (1977: Diplôme d'études approfondies, under the supervision of Marc Augé, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) of Nyamwezi classification, which had made use of the method developed by Masao Yamaguchi in his study of Jukun symbolism (see chapter 4 note 7 below). These arguments were discussed at the RCP's seminar (Atelier d'anthropologie sociale), and also at seminars led by Louis Dumont and by Marc Augé. I would like to thank the participants at these seminars for their suggestions, which have enabled me to broaden my discussion. I have drawn heavily upon Louis Dumont's works in my own analysis, and his comments, his encouragement, and the interest he has taken in my research have played a crucial part in stimulating me and in helping me to complete this book. My intellectual debt to Claude Lévi-Strauss is self-evident. I would never even have conceived of this book had it not been for the ever-renewed sense of discovery that my reading of The savage mind, and of the other pages devoted by him to the logic of classification, has aroused in me. It is Claude Lévi-Strauss's work which provides the context for the investigations into aspects of the structural method that I have sought to develop here.

In this chapter I shall try to give some idea of the range of forms assumed by Nyamwezi taxonomies. Nyamwezi society is particularly interesting, in that one cannot help but see it in global terms, adopt a ‘holistic’ perspective, and therefore conceive of it as hierarchical. There are two linked features of this society which deserve special mention. First, the Nyamwezi, like so many living in ‘stateless’ societies, live entirely enclosed within the whole that relations with their ancestors (the mizimu) define. Tradition, law and values are vigilantly upheld by all the mizimu, and ritual activity essentially consists in sustaining this relation by means of a wide range of sacrifices and ceremonial exchanges (kuhoja mizimu). Second, Nyamwezi society differs from that of some of the other groups described above, in that it enjoys a degree of institutional stability. There is a ‘divine’ kingship, related to those of interlacustrine Africa, which guarantees the permanence of the society. These two defining features of Nyamwezi society are interconnected, in that the king is the representative on earth of the law of the ancestors. Kingship clothes itself in the attributes of the collective ancestrality, even to the extent of being confused with it.

This is the reason why, although I have chosen the most outstanding rituals to elicit the taxonomies which are operative there, I do not propose to drift into formulating my analysis in terms of statutory oppositions (‘the king's people’ or nobles/commoners) or into considering conflicts in terms of ‘power’.

The various paths we have taken across the range of classificatory schema bring us to a small number of cross-roads in symbolic analysis. Though few in number, these cross-roads are hard to identify, and resemble the ‘crossings of the roads’ in the bush where the Nyamwezi sometimes feel the need to call upon their ancestors with sacrifices and, when a risky journey has removed them from familiar landscapes and daily certainties, to ask questions of the beyond.

HIERARCHICAL OPPOSITION

We have contrasted binary opposition and hierarachical opposition, with symmetry and complementarity characterising the former, and asymmetry and the existence of different levels defining the latter. In the case of the former, the opposition a/ā (‘a/not-a’) corresponds to a logic of addition: a + ā = ā + ā = the set (or = zero), no matter what difference in value is allowed between the two poles. The totality is then simply a ‘complementarity’, such that one effectively intuits a ‘homogeneity’ between a and a, right and left, summer and winter, black and white. In the case of the latter, commutativity (a + ā = ā + a) is no longer meaningful, ‘a’ is posited as value, and thereby defines an actual domain for its contrary, ‘not-a’. This domain is delimited by that of a and encompassed by a. We are no longer on one plane only, but have to take two different levels into account. The totality is composed of two terms, but it pre-exists them and gives them their meaning.

My critique of Needham's analyses has led me to question both the general definition of binary opposition and the narrower conclusion it entails regarding the ‘duality of powers’. I shall therefore conclude my analysis of Nyamwezi oppositions by enquiring into the possible existence of an antithetical pair of ‘mystical powers’ and ‘political powers’. This involves distinguishing between two types of question which are often confused: what is the nature of the opposition between the figure of the ‘Chief’ and that of the ‘priest’? What is the relation between power and values? Not only must we distinguish between these questions, we must also avoid comparing them in the name of a supposed homology.

KING/PRIEST

Royal authority is defined in terms of mastery of the yearly cycle. At the beginning of the year, the king ‘calls’ the ‘black’ rain. Sometimes a human victim, treated as a symbolic equivalent of the king, is put to death (Cory 1951, p. 35). If, however, the rain is too long in coming, the king himself must be killed, or expelled, or replaced. One may also attempt to thrash him, to the point of tears. For the latter, it is said, being royal drops of water, ‘will attract’ those other drops of water that all await for their fields and that the royal ancestors in their wrath are holding back (Abrahams 1967, p. 34). The queen and the priest can then ‘bring forth’ seeds. Then, during tillage, the king and the priest supervise sacrifices which guarantee that the crops will mature. All these rites are performed on the orders of the royal councillors.

DOGON TWINS

The Nyamwezi example has shown how important a role twins play in relation to the value that duality may represent. Duality is not, however, unity times two but a conjunction of asymmetrical opposites. It may therefore prove useful to round off this discussion by giving a rapid account of a study on ‘complementarity’, where the latter also appears as a value which organises levels.

In a conference held in 1967 on the theme of ‘Norm and laterality’, Germaine Dieterlen used the Dogon origin myth to remind her listeners that ‘complementarity’ is at the basis of the whole ‘Sudanese cosmological system’ (Dieterlen 1968). This is not, however, just a complementarity on the logical plane alone, with right + left, sacred + profane or man + woman, but a symbolic configuration which engenders a system and which must be defined in terms of value. On the one hand, there is ‘the ideal image of the universe’: two twins of opposed sex, a ‘non-antagonistic complementary duality’. On the other hand, there is the element which is encompassed, singularity as failed duality: the birth of the ‘prematurely born, conceived as a twin but having lost his female twin forever’. This ‘antagonism’ or, as I would put it, this hierarchical opposition, affects the meaning of both mythical narrative and ritual organisation.

The narrative is a familiar one. First, there is a double genesis, with the first one failing and the second succeeding. God creates ‘the smallest thing’, in the form of a grain, but decides not to build up the world from it. The grain is single. It is then with two grains, twins of opposed sex, that the world is created.

RIGHT/LEFT, MAN/WOMAN, EVEN/ODD

Right/left

If we reconsider this opposition, we find that it does not provide us with a dichotomous model but employs reversal to oppose levels. I have just argued this point in relation to marriage; it is also apparent in the highlighting of situations of the kind that certain important ancestors require, in which right and left are associated.

In case of misfortune, it is sometimes appropriate to honour particular ancestors, namely, twins and persons born in a reversed position (the kashindye, who ‘are born showing their feet’). There are distinctions within these two categories but together they are clearly differentiated from all the other ancestors. A particular type of mafinga calabash is especially associated with them. One fills these mafinga with lwanga (flour and water) and anoints the sick person. The person who does the anointing is the mhoja (a commoner who is equivalent to the ntemi wa mhoja mentioned above, the master, at court, of ‘peace’ with the ancestors) – on this occasion one of the sick person's aunts. Ordinary anointing, for instance to protect someone who is setting out on a journey, which does not involve the invocation of ancestors of a particular rank, is done on the forehead, throat and sometimes on both shoulders. It is one's father who performs it. For other acts of consecration, of animals, and for sacrifices, the mhoja is an uncle (Bösch 1930, pp. 95, 99–100, 103, 146), but here a woman, an aunt, is chosen. The paternal/maternal opposition recurs, for one's father's sister or one's mother's sister is chosen, depending upon whether the kashindye ancestor or the child born a twin is on the father's or the mother's side.

The opposition between the categories of ‘right’ and ‘left’ is a familiar and quasi-universal feature of the ‘symbolic’ classifications of human societies. A given object, depending upon its nature, is placed upon the right or left of a house. A human being, depending upon whether he or she is a man or a woman, is buried lying on his or her right or left side. A different status is accorded to the places on the right and left of the master of ceremonies or host at feasts and banquets. Still more generally, people take care not to confuse the gestures which should be carried out with the right hand with those which involve the left hand. There is, for example, an opposition between amorous caresses and bodily hygiene or, in the case of our own customs, one can distinguish between a respectful greeting, where one invariably uses the right hand, and a friendly wave, where either hand may be used.

Oppositions of this kind were already being studied in the late nineteenth century, and scholars were mainly concerned to account for the special value accorded the right hand. Research was not, however, concerned with the social aspects of this one-sided attribution of value. It aimed, rather, to add further refinements to natural explanation. Thus, in accord with Professor Broca's findings, an asymmetrical development of the nervous centres was held to render the greater skill of the right side inevitable: ‘We are right-handed because we are left-brained’ (Hertz 1960, p.90).