ABSTRACT
Human agency alone has the capacity to reproduce and/or transform the substance of social life, its manifest modes of representation and relationship; human agency at once culturally constituted yet, very often, historically unpredictable. In the context of exchange, sacrifice, and ritual commensalism they could construct or disentangle human identities and relations, and during rites de passage their slaughter was required to alter social status. Each had a wide spectrum of social and material correlates extending into such diverse realms as the division of labor and gender relations, household organization and the functioning of the public domain, the symbolic representation of the social order and the degree of its internal stratification. The very construction of the Tshidi world, then, demanded that men manage relations and identities—a fact that conduced to the fluidity, ambiguity, and evanescence of their social lives.
