1 Notes on Sally Falk Moore, Social Facts and Fabrications ...

<strong>Notes</strong> on Sally Falk Moore, Social Facts and Fabrications: "Customary" Law on
Kilimanjaro, 1880-1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“ 法 律 、 社 會 、 文 化 讀 書 會 ”
容 邵 武
17 th December
2005
Brief Biography of Sally Falk Moore
*A lawyer since 1945, Moore worked at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II
before returning to the United States to pursue a doctorate in anthropology at
Columbia University. She held professorships at the University of Southern California
and at the University of California at Los Angeles, and was visiting professor at Yale
before coming to Harvard.
She has written many articles and several books, including Power and Property in
Inca Peru (1958), Law as Process (1978), Social Facts and Fabrications (1986), and
Anthropology and Africa: Changing Perspectives on a Changing Scene (1995).
She was appointed to a professorship in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard
in 1981. Moore also served as Dunster House Master from 1984 to 1989 and as Dean
of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from 1985 until 1989. She was named
the Victor S. Thomas Professor in 1991 and became the Victor S. Thomas Research
Professor in 1996, when she retired.
Background of Social Facts and Fabrications: "Customary" Law on Kilimanjaro,
1880-1980
* In this book, Sally Falk Moore examines a hundred years in the history of an
African people, the Chagga of Kilimanjaro, in order to understand how their present
system of 'customary' laws came to be the way it is, and how the idea of custom is
used today in the very midst of Tanzania's experiment with African socialism. She
discusses the changes that have occurred in the formal legal system, alongside the vast
economic and political transformations that came with cash cropping and colonial rule.
She also presents a 'legal' chronicle of the members of one lineage to illustrate its use
of the formal legal system (editorial review).
A Matter of History
Most of the few descriptive works that were produced in the first half of 20 th century
treated the law of particular peoples in much the same way that “customs” were
treated in the ethnographies of the periods, as an expanded list of rules, sometimes
embellished with illustrative forces. In anthropology concentration on the rule
dimension weakened as individual strategy came to the fore. The questions of choice
of argument, choice of forum of hearing, and choice of occasion became major parts
of the analysis. The active individual with intensions became the object of study. The
unfolding of a case over time entered the models of disputing (p.9-10)
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To the extent that this book asks the question how the distinctive legal aspects of the
way of life of the Chagga people came to the way they are today, the story is an
account of the transformation of a tradition. But it is also the story of the making of a
new polity and economy in which “traditional” law has come to have a very different
significance from what it once had. What has been attempted, in a broad sense, is a
metamorphic analysis which includes both an account of alterations within the
tradition itself and a sketch of the overwhelming changes in its political/economic
context (p.10).
The Practice of Rules
The scope of inquiry changed. The articulation of different levels of organization and
of different social/cultural fields became a major problem to be addressed. Cultural,
social, and structural pluralism was a core issues. The inspection of local communities
as closed unit of analysis made no sense when nation building was the slogan of the
day. Bailey said of the relations between village-level politics and higher political
strata in India, “The search is…to discover hoe the different arenas are connected
through the interaction” (p.324).
Bourdieu uses the precapitalist/capitalist duality to characterize two distinct kinds of
cultural universe, yet in his theory of practice he locates operational change in the
categorical individual. In Bourdieu’s paradigm of “practice” dynamic possibilities in
the “system” are inserted through the generic individual whose actions reverberate on
the plane of cultural as social structure, and sound back. In Bourdieu the logical move
is from “cognitive and motivating structures” located in individuals, through “thought,
perceptions, expressions, actions” to “objective structures (languages, economies,
etc.)”. The circle then closes with “the dialectical relationship between the objective
structures and the cognitive and motivating structures. In both respects Bourdieu’s
approach bears a strong resemblance to many non-Marxist analyses (p. 327)
Bourdieu’s general model of practice like Sahlins’s historical model plausibly and
persuasively interposes the generic individual between culture as received and culture
as practiced, society as given and society as acted in and on… But by focusing on the
universal processes by which cultures and societies may be understood to be
continuously produced and transformed through the medium of the generic individual,
both Bourdieu and Sahlins have produced models that are of little assistance in
addressing nonuniversal regularities.
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