Prestations on the occasion of marriage are commonly exchanged in African societies, past and present. Anthropologists have analyzed these exchanges – often misnamed “bride price – from a number of different theoretical perspectives, stressing the rights and duties conveyed by them, their social, political, and economic implications, and their structural effects. This essay reviews, critically, those received anthropological approaches to marriage prestations, but goes on to ask what they actually mean to those involved in them, what vernacular messages might they carry, how do we make sense of them both as material and meaningful cultural practices.
Publisher: Academic Press
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Talking Politics
In this analysis of political oratory in a South African chiefdom, John Comaroff analyses the ways in which public speech is deployed as a vehicle for the negotiation of relations of power and authority – and their contestation. Isolating two different forms of oratory that are used in juxtaposition with one another as a means of establishing and extending – or conversely, undermining – the legitimacy of rulers, the essay explores the connection between the grammar of expressive practices in strategic public performances and their impact on the exercise of sovereignty. And on freedom of speech in everyday political life.