THE
CHIGA
OF
UGANDA
MAY M. EDEL
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY
ABRAHAM EDEL
THE
CHIGA
OF
UGANDA
SECOND EDITION
Foreword and originally appeared in Political Science Quarterly 80, no. 3 (September 1965).
Published 1996 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 95-33213
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Edel, May M. (May Mandelbaum), 1909-1964.
The Chiga of Uganda / May M. Edel ; with an introduction by Abraham Edel. 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Rev. ed. of: The Chiga of western Uganda. 1957.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 1-56000-248-4 (cloth : acid-free paper)
1. Chiga (African people)Social life and customs. 2. Chiga (African people)Material culture. 3. Kabale District (Uganda)Social life and customs. I. Edel, May M. (May Mandelbaum), 1909-1964. Chiga of western Uganda. II. Title.
DT434.U242E3 1995
306.089963956dc2095-33213
CIP
ISBN 13: 978-1-56000-248-2 (hbk)
CONTENTS
CHAPTERS 18 come from The Chiga of Western Uganda by May Mandelbaum Edel, published in 1957 for the International African Institute by Oxford University Press. This material is here reproduced with the kind permission of the International African Institute.
come from a hitherto unpublished manuscript of May Edels by permission of Abraham Edel.
is reprinted, by permission, from Political Science Quarterly 80, no. 3 (September 1965): 35772.
THE present volume contains the entire text of The Chiga of Western Uganda by May Mandelbaum Edel (19091964), published in 1957 for the International African Institute by the Oxford University Press. This is amplified by The Material Culture of the Chiga, a hitherto unpublished manuscript from the papers of May Edel, and by an article of hers that was originally published in the Political Science Quarterly (1964). All of these writings are based on fieldwork she did in Uganda from October 1932 to January 1934.
Another source for securing a fuller account is the weekly letters that she wrote me from Africa. They provide many fresh insights and cultural items that are not dealt with in the book. They have been utilized by me in writing the Introduction.
She also wrote papers on Africa dealing with special topicsfor example, Property among the Chiga (Africa 2: 325341) and The Bachiga of East Africa in Cooperation and Competition among Primitive Peoples, edited by Margaret Mead (McGraw Hill, 1937), as well as in other cooperative volumes. She also wrote on the moral ideas of the Chiga in Anthropology and Ethics, a book on which we collaborated (Charles C. Thomas, 1959; Transaction Publishers, 1970).
A full bibliography of her writings on Africa and on other areas in which she worked, as well as her theoretical reflections, can be found in Ruth Bunzels memorial note in American Anthropologist 68, no. 4 (August 1966).
ABRAHAM EDEL
Philadelphia, 1995.
IN THE 1930s, when May did her doctoral work at Columbia University, the central figure in anthropology there was Franz Boas, commonly called by his students Papa Franz. Boas had come from Germany in the late nineteenth century on an expedition to study geography in the northwest part of North America. He then believed that geography played a determining part in the life of a people. But he found that this did not hold for the Eskimo, who worked out their own life pattern sometimes contrary to what geographers would expect. One had thus to study the full life ways of a people, their full culture in its specific historical setting. He worked especially at that time on the Indians in the northwest of North America. He realized, of course, that civilization was spreading in all directions, that the Eskimo mode of life would be altered by their contact with the peoples of western Europe, now moving into western Canada and through the United States. This imparted a sense of urgency to descriptive anthropology: it had to capture the view of the past before the past disappeared. And it should be captured not only by reports of the people themselvesthe older among them would still remember the ways that had gone bybut by students going into the field to observe, question, and report. Indeed Boas had his doctoral students do their dissertations on the basis of the fieldwork they themselves did. And the Anthropology Department got visiting professors from Europe who had done fieldwork in various parts of the world. He had encouraged Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead to work in the field, and in the 1930s their works were published, for example Benedicts Patterns of Culture and Meads Coming of Age in Samoa. Boas was also aware of the importance of educating the public generally about cultures and cultural differences. He did a number of popular books, chief among which were The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), Anthropology and Modern Life (1928), and Race, Language and Culture (1928), a collection of papers written between 1887 and 1936 (published in 1940).
May did her undergraduate work at Barnard College in the late 1920s, and it was a course given by Mead that first alerted her to the field. She decided to major in it. She was in a group of students, guided by Leslie Spier, that went out to Indian territory in the state of Washington, and she wrote up her work in that expedition. During 193031, for her doctoral thesis, she went to study the Tillamook Indians in Oregon. In the town of Garibaldi she found only an old woman who remembered the stories that used to be told among their people, but she had difficulty in enunciating clearly because of the state of her teeth. Boas simply advised May to get a dentist to deal with her teeth. May was thus able to get from her the stories of the old days and the myths of the past. In the Indian cultures the telling of stories generally played the role that the reading of books plays in our culture. Under such conditions, special story tellers had developed long and precise memories; stories were told to the young in successive generations in almost word-perfect form.
Mays study of the Tillamook was oriented to language, but of course the stories she received gave information about the beliefs and mode of life, just as the ancient Greek stories of the gods and heroes (as in Homer or the tragedies) gave some picture of early Greek life. After this American Indian study, chance led her to develop a strong interest in Uganda. Ernest B. Kalibala, from Uganda, was visiting at Teachers College, Columbia. He had translated a book by Sir Apolo Kagwa, who had been prime minister and regent of the Baganda in Uganda in the latter part of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries. Boas asked May to help out Kalibala in preparing the work for the press. She found that there was quite a complex situation involved.
