ABSTRACT
Schism and Continuity in an African Society1 is dominantly a study of social conflict and of the social mechanisms brought into play to reduce, exclude, or resolve that conflict. Beneath all other conflicts in Ndembu society is the concealed opposition between men and women over descent and in the economic system. Influenced by this basic opposition, but possessing their own autonomy, sets of struggles arise within the social structure: conflicts between persons and between groups who invoke different principles of residential affiliation to support and justify their own specific interests, political, jural and economic; struggles between persons and groups couched in terms of a common norm which each party claims the other has broken; and conflicts between persons, united by a single principle of descent and residence, for positions of authority determined by that principle. Struggles around succession to village headmanship are instances of the last type of conflict, and it is with these that I wish to commence the analysis of what I propose to call ‘social dramas’. Formal analysis of a social system enables us to locate and isolate critical points and areas in its structure where one might expect, on a priori grounds, to find conflicts between the occupants of social positions carried in the structure. In the examination of the Ndembu system I have isolated the matrilineal descent group and shown how the office of village headman is vested in this group.2I have looked at different categories of matrilineal kin and shown how struggles for succession may be expected to take place between adjacent generations and between specific kinship positions, notably between mother’s brother and sister’s son. It remains to test out these hypotheses in a number of cases, regarded as typical, and to see whether struggles do in fact take place. But the task does not end at this point. If conflicts occur, we want to see in what way they are handled by the members of the society. In Ndembu society conduct has been regulated over what we can assume to have been a very long period of time by norms, values, beliefs and sentiments associated with kinship. Conflicts of interests arising out of the social structure are perpetuated by the observance of these norms. Hence, the conflicts must also follow a regular course dictated partly by these norms, and take a shape grown familiar to the people through repetition. We can expect to find, in fact, a number of social mechanisms, of institutionalised ways of behaviour,
which have arisen in response to an almost endless reduplication of such conflicts, and which have been designed by group experience to mitigate, diminish, or repair them. Conflict and the resolution of conflict have effects which are observable in statistical and genealogical data. But the hints and indications afforded by such data must be followed up by a close study of social dramas. There we observe the interlinked and successive events which follow breach, and make visible the sources of conflicts. This, in turn, leads to action which may restofe the earlier set of relations, or reconstitute them in a different pattern, or even recognise an irreparable breaking of relationships between particular persons or groups. These last, nevertheless, fit into the wider pattern of the Ndembu system.
