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Space, Time and Culture among the Iraqw of Tanzania

Thornton's book on the Iraqw takes the position that what distinguishes the Iraqw from neighboring peoples of Tanzania is their use of territorial continuity as a principle of social structure. In this work he explores Iraqw culture and society in terms of this principle and seeks to discover the historical background to this development among the Iraqw. Examining concepts of time and space in African societies is not a novel enterprise. Numerous studies, from Evans-Pritchards' calssic exposition in The Nuer through the articles of Beidelman, Bohannon and Middleton, among others, to Michael Jackson's recent and exemplary work The Kuranko, use concepts of time and space to understand indigenous frameworks for the interpretations of experience, especially the understanding of ideas about concepts of the person. In this book Thornton has developed E. H. Winter's earlier account of Iraqw social organization as based on territoriality rather than descent and has chosen to examine ideas rather than social action. The basic problem that both Winter and Thornton struggle with is whether societies with descent groups can have nondescent based principles of organization. This would seem to be a non-problem given recent developments in the theory of kinship and descent. It has been commonplace in anthropology to recognize that descent may be realized only in social categories and not necessarily used to form corporations. Fortes pointed this out as early as his article on unilineal descent groups in the mid-forties. Certainly few anthropologists take seriously evolutionary typologies such as Maines' distinction between societies bases on status and those based on contract. In spite of the use of pretentious jargon derived from phenomenology, Thornton's conclusions about Iraqw social organization are not as original as he claims, although he does provide a useful study of territoriality in one social setting. His primary contribution is to show how Iraqw use ritual to compose space and to relate ritual processes to territorial expansion among the Iraqw. Unfortunately, his discussion of the Masay, the ritual through which a new territory is composed, is marred by a brief and cursory description and analysis of the symbol system displayed in the ritual. Also inadequate is Thornton's account of Iraqw cosmology as it related to time and space. This is surprising since we have descriptions by Beidelman and Rigby for other Tanzanian peoples that do examine time and space from the perspectives of cosmology. While Thornton concludes that inside-outside oppositions are important in understanding Iraqw principles of space, the reader is left with little appreciation of the system of metaphor and analogy in which particular oppositions are embedded. The same