"Child of the Clan" or "Child of the Priests": Life Stories of Two Fipa Catholic Sisters

This paper analyses some of the consequences of Christian conversion and the process of assimilating Catholicism in an area of southwestern Tanzania known as Ufipa during the middle of the twentieth century. It is based on several conversations with two Fipa Catholic Sisters, Edwina and Ocilia. Their reflections highlight the way in which the Fipa people understood conversion. The period covered is not that of initial mission contact but after substantial conversion to Catholicism had taken place. The paper considers the way in which the conversion process was utilized by different families or lineages or, as Sister Edwina states, one "clan" and another. In the life stories of Edwina and Ocilia, control over their biological and social fertility lies at the heart of the conflict over their futures. In effect, the sisters struggled to determine their own place as "child of the clan," or "child of the priests."     

Strange Encounters: Dreams and Nightmares of High School Students in Papua New Guinea1

The material for this paper is drawn from essays written, as part of their ordinary class work, by a group of Papua New Guinea High School students, under the title ‘Recently I had a Dream’. The paper offers a content analysis of this material. The categories employed to present and analyse the data are rooted in the assumption that a dream may be likened to the performance of a play or a film viewed on the screen. The dream, that is, tends to be a vivid inner visual as well as an affective experience. Focus on the emotional response that the dream evokes yields a simple scheme that enables one to identify and classify the themes and motifs that the dreams reveal: positive affect (i.e. supportive of the dreamer) or negative (i.e. seen as somehow threatening the dreamer). But the picture may also be more complicated as where there are mixed or changing emotions. Positive affect was reported of those dreams experienced as pleasant or ‘good’; most of these were plainly of the wish-fulfilment type. But well over half of the students reported experiencing negative affect, emotions ranging in intensity from nervousness through being frightened or scared to terror or being panic stricken. Anxiety indeed was the predominant emotion that found its most frequent expression in strange encounters with grotesque looking creatures which threatened the dreamer's very existence. In what kind of experience(s) was such anxiety rooted? In seeking an answer the data were approached, after the manner of peeling an onion, from a number of perspectives: the sociological (the social situation of the school), the cultural (the relevance of traditional factors, and the psychological (the role of the unconscious). On the last point, the views of the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, set out in his classic study ‘On the Nightmare’, were not found to be helpful. On the other hand, more recent strands in psychoanalytic thinking appear to offer a more promising line of attack.     

The intensification of production: Archaeological approaches

In this paper I reexamine the Boserup model of agricultural intensification and archaeological reaction to it. Although causes have been extensively debated, little attention has been paid to process, and even those who reject the causal efficacy of population may adopt other aspects of the Boserup model. These unexamined aspects include the assumption that intensification proceeds along a single course, characterized by gradual decreases in the frequency of cropping. I suggest that the course of intensification is complex and variable and that, only by breaking down the process of intensification into its component strategies, can we come to an understanding of both the causes and the courses of intensification.