Anthropos 86.1991 
Rezensionen 
Adelberger, Jörg: Vom Sultanat zur Republik. 
Veränderungen in der Sozialorganisation der Für (Su 
dan). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990. 246 pp., Fig., 
Tab., Ktn. (Studien zur Kulturkunde, 96) Preis: DM 58,- 
The social organization of the Fur, who currently 
may number some 700,000 people in the Western Su 
dan, has been documented by an unusually impressive 
ethnographic record, culminating in the anthropological 
work of Fredrik Barth and Gunnar Haaland and in the 
historical findings of Rex O’Fahey. Rural development 
plans for Sudan’s Western Savannah region have fur 
ther produced a body of, mainly quantitative, economic 
and ecological data which have benefitted from the 
participation of social anthropologists. Given such a 
well-ploughed field, this doctoral thesis sets out to relate 
the macrolevel economic and political transformations 
of the region, formerly subsumed under the distinctive 
Keira Sultanate, to the microlevel changes in Fur social 
organization. The enterprise is plausible, possible, and 
potentially rewarding. 
The study aims at combining the historical and 
ethnological record in order to research the articulation 
between local social organization and supralocal chang 
ing conditions. This articulation appears most clearly in 
the domain of the household, where monetization of the 
economy, labour-migration, and metropolitan cultural 
influences have come, by and large, to strengthen the 
dependency of women upon men. Far more intricate is 
the tracing of large-scale dynamics when it comes to 
the contending systems of the häküra, land granted to a 
holy man, and, predating it, the orre, a residential group 
claiming landrights by appeal to, ostensibly patrilineal, 
norms of descent. Adelberger uses hitherto unpublished 
archival data and interviewees’ recollections clearly to 
make two points: firstly, the orre system may have been 
styled, by informants or ethnographers, into a system of 
endogamous yet patrilineal descent groups; but appears, 
and seems to have functioned, as little more than a 
network of bilateral clusters of kinship and affinity, 
contingently validated by co-residence. Secondly, orre 
and häküra structures have overlaid, and interacted with, 
each other for at least two centuries. Both points are 
w ell-taken, and the author could have gone further in 
questioning the idea of “corporate groups” and further 
in validating individual strategies over group-orientated 
functions. 
The author’s meticulous scholarship allows him to 
assemble a wealth of painstaking documentation. Some 
of it is quarantained in elaborate appendices, since, 
methodologically, archival materials and oral “history” 
do not ever mix easily. Using both, the author makes 
it clear that the search for the articulation between 
macro- and micro-scale changes will not produce facile 
transitions, but contending layers of social organization 
that coexist at any one time. Individuals, groups and qua 
si-groups, one takes it, veer between these in pursuing 
their claims, and the ambiguity reigning between them 
may well afford actors their greatest asset in day-to-day 
disputes. Case studies of land acquisition, were they still 
available, might have illustrated the point. 
The author validates his study in a comparative 
vein. It is the first such body of data from one of the Sa 
vannah Belt sultanates, thus pursuing the social history 
of the Fur to serve as a model for further historical eth 
nographies of pre-nation states in that region. To pursue 
the point, more prominence would have to be granted, in 
future, to ecological change. More trenchant, it seems to 
me, is the study’s merit in giving a closely documented 
desavouement to descentist theories of pre-nation-state 
societies. In this, it accords with the reanalyses of other 
putatively “lineage”-based societies of the Sudan, with 
neighbouring ethnographies such as the Berti’s, and with 
theoretical reassessments of descentist approaches to 
pre-state societies. It lends renewed strength to these 
by pursuing a historical method in the course of ethnog 
raphy. Gerd Baumann 
Amborn, Hermann: Differenzierung und Integra 
tion. Vergleichende Untersuchungen zu Spezialisten und 
Handwerkern in südäthiopischen Agrargesellschaften. 
München: Trickster Verlag, 1990. 476 pp., Tab., Fig., 
Kt. (Notos Ethnologische Studien, 1) Preis: DM 110,- 
Zwar verweist der Spencersche Titel auf ein all 
gemeines Entwicklungsgesetz, doch was Amborn in der 
voluminösen Arbeit zu rekonstruieren versucht, könnte 
auch ein Sonderweg sein: Die arbeitsteilige Differenzie 
rung der Gesellschaft nicht in Richtung Klassenbildung, 
sondern zu einem komplementären Nebeneinander („In 
tegration“). Bauern und Handwerker sind aufeinander 
angewiesen und erkennen einander „ehr-fürchtig“ an.