ABSTRACT
The settled and cultivated part of the Arusha country is divided into a number of named areas with fixed boundaries, the residents of which comprise corporate local groups. Such an area and the group of residents are called embalbal, pl. imbalbali; or sometimes eserit, a vaguer word with the general meaning of ‘group’. In this account these local groups are referred to as ‘parishes’. The use of this word in the Arusha context refers to the smallness of size and to the autonomy of these local groups, and is not intended to imply any particular religious connotations. Nowhere do the Arusha live in compact residential clusters of the village type. A parish is a socially and geographically defined collection of scattered homesteads, each of which is built on the separate land-holding worked by the family which occupies it.
