ABSTRACT
At the time of research I had had the good fortune to attend lectures in Oxford on Nuer sacrifice and on Tallensi ancestral cults. It was impressive to learn how the specialised religious institutions gathered up the varied strands of social and psychological experience and affirmed the normative values in dramatic rituals. The tribal religions were saying something, expressing something, if you must, that was happening independently at a secular level, in clan and lineage organisation. In spite of assertions to the contrary (EvansPritchard, 1956: 313) the approach was strongly Durkheimian: religion crystallised the great moments, the deepest emotions, it focused for the individual his relation to society. Lele had no lineages, did not perform sacrifice or venerate ancestors. Most of their cultic energies were devoted to warding off sorcery. Since for them specialised religious institutions were not so apparent as for those other tribal societies, they promised a fertile ground for interpreting ritual more broadly. The Lele case should have been able to show the link between the great moments and the minor ones, the structuring of thought and response in every aspect of lived experience. The principles of classification, when their burden of social concern had all been revealed, would show how culture is created. Obviously, if such a programme lay ahead, it would not do to leave the analysis of animal classification where I put it down in 1957. That article concludes tamely that once the implicit framework of Lele metaphysical ideas had been uncovered, the ‘different cult groups no longer seemed to be disconnected and overlapping, but rather appeared as complementary developments of the same basic theme’. Left out of this conclusion was practically everything that really preoccupied the Lele. One gets the impression of a lot of squeamish, hypochondriac old maids, worried about absurdly elaborate etiquette and superstitious hygiene. No sign of their truculence, their raiding and abductions of women, their harping on violent revenge and sexual virility. These values come to the fore in the book on their social organisation (1963). But their principles of classification merely relate their cult groups to their assertion of male dominance over females, human dominance over animals, both given in terms of finer discrimination of food and table manners. And on that platitude the matter rested.
