Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State

Drawing on twenty-four months of field research among the Nuer of southern Sudan, this book examines how the Nuer have experienced the last six decades of turbulent history and have incorporated that experience into their contemporary culture. More specifically, it shows how Nuer men and women have been actively reassessing local forms of power and sociality in their efforts to keep pace with the expansion and contraction of State and market structure between, roughly, 1930 and 1992. It explores the roots of contemporary Nuer debates over the'interchangeability' of cattle and money as everyday media of exchange; describes the gradual intermeshing of State and local power networks in the Nuer region; analyses the shifting bases of power and authority between Nuer men and women, with particular reference to the impact of government chiefs' courts on local patterns of courtship, marriage and divorce; explores Nuer rethinking of incest and exogamic prohibitions with respect to apparent changes in their definitions of the transgenerational reach of various kinship connections; traces the development, from the late 1940s, of the debate on male initiation; shows how the sacrificial role of cattle in Nuer social life was steadily being undermined during the 1980s and early 1990s; and demonstrates how orthodox forms of evangelical Protestantism contributed to the secularization of vast areas of contemporary Nuer social and moral life.