Preface

The pair were undoubtedly man and woman. In him was a mimicked dignity, as of Adam; in her the womanliness of a miniature Eve.
—Henry Morton Stanley, 1891. In Darkest Africa, vol. 2:44, on the appearance of an Mbuti [Pygmy] man and his wife

Although this book is not primarily about foragers, it grew out of my participation in a longitudinal investigation of the Efe (Pygmy) foragers of northeastern Zaire: the Harvard Ituri Project. Since 1980, Irven DeVore has led a series of researchers to explore questions regarding the health, nutrition, demography, child development, and ecology of the Efe, and, to a lesser extent, of the Lese, their farmer neighbors. Despite greater emphasis on the Efe, few of us were able to exclude the Lese from our analyses, for each group is an important constituent of the other, and they are deeply interconnected in every area of social life.

I owe my focus on the Lese not only to the wide-ranging and interdisciplinary research of the Ituri project but to the work of anthropologists who criticize the anthropological fascination with foragers as windows to the Paleolithic, as living fossils, or models of a lost prelapsarian past. R. K. Dentan (1988), C. Schrire (1984), E. Wilmsen (1990), Wilmsen and J. R. Denbow (1990), and H. Vierich (1982) are just a few of those who argue that foragers have a history, that they are intimately involved with farmers and pastoralists, and that the search for a "pure" hunting and gathering society is illusory. As Vierich argues in describing the Basarwa of Botswana, "If the hunting and gathering way of life has survived in the Kalahari it is not because of isolation" (1982:213). The various Pygmy groups, and the San, living in the heart of Africa, where we now locate our human origins, have been seen to exemplify the purest forms of a timeless hunting and gathering way of life shared by the first human beings, and yet we know that they live side by side with

nonforager groups. P. M. Gardner (1989) points out that since the beginnings of anthropology as an academic discipline there have been warnings that foragers were neither pristine nor isolated, yet it took years for this fact to be fully appreciated by the field. Even where anthropologists explicitly recognized the complex social and historical contexts in which foragers lived, including relations with farmers, herders, colonial powers, and other political powers, that recognition seldom altered the conventional treatment of foraging societies as closed systems. By 1989, a flurry of articles on the relations between foragers and farmers appeared in most of the major anthropological journals. T. N. Headland and L. Reid (1989) made it clear that foragers and farmers are integrated all over the world; Wilmsen and Denbow (1990) placed forager-farmer interaction in the Kalahari desert of Botswana as far back as A.D . 500, and Robert Bailey and his colleagues (1989) suggested that foragers do not live, and never have lived, independent of farming in tropical rain forest environments. Following recent studies by K. Endicott (1984), and Nurit Bird-David (1988), even the category "forager" has been questioned because its use to designate some societies distorts intracultural variation. For example, some Dorobo foragers of East Africa are also pastoralists, and some Twa foragers from Rwanda and Burundi subsist not by hunting and gathering but by being potters or wandering musicians, among other things (Dentan 1988:279). In short, foragers cannot be considered as social isolates.

Nonetheless, though it has been acknowledged that we must study the farmers with whom the foragers live, the farmers have been more or less neglected. Nearly every ethnographer or explorer to encounter the Lese or the Efe has remarked upon the elaborate relations between the two groups, yet when I began my fieldwork no one had done extensive ethnographic work in the native Lese or Efe language. Jan Vansina points out that, of the one hundred or so scholars working in the central African rain forest between 1875 and 1985, in an area with as many as 450 different ethnic groups, one-third of them worked with the Pygmies:

There exists an enormous literature indeed about pygmies, and the field certainly suffers from a fatal flaw: it studies only part societies. It studies the hunter-gatherers, but not the farming people with whom they are linked. . . . So, yes, there exists a vast amount of valid information, but it is always incomplete—the farmers are missing—and it is often flawed by strong preconceptions. (1990a:29)

Colin Turnbull recognized this gap, and in the final paragraph of his major publication on the Mbuti Pygmies regretted that no ethnographer had studied the Pygmy-farmer relationship from the point of view of the farmers (1965b:300).

Turnbull's classic works addressed the question of forager-farmer interaction far more completely than any researcher before him (1965a, 1965b, 1968, 1972). He chose to live primarily with the Mbuti, rather than with the Bila farmers, and he presented to his readers the Mbuti perspective on their interactions with the Bila. According to Turnbull, the Mbuti see the farmers and their villages as merely one of several hunting grounds, and they view interaction with the farmers to be a luxury that complements routine exploitation of forest products. Turnbull sees the foragers and the farmers as socially and culturally independent, and he concludes that the ostensible interdigitation of the two groups, as expressed in their cooperative participation in shared rituals, and the political and economic subordination of the Mbuti, is really only playacting by the Mbuti. My study, in contrast, focuses on a group of farmers in the Ituri forest. My view, the opposite of Turnbull's, is that these groups are integral parts of one another—indeed, that they share the same ethnically differentiated social system. My argument is not with Turnbull's choice of the Mbuti perspective—choosing a perspective is a methodological necessity—but with his representation of the Mbuti and Bila as distinct groups whose interactions are meaningful primarily in the service of maximizing the Mbuti's affluence.

This study is not yet another treatise on whether the farmers and foragers "need," "exploit," or "depend on" one another. Arguments about the costs and benefits of their relations, the utilitarianism and practical reason of economic life, are the usual focus in hunter-gatherer studies (Schebesta 1936; Putnam 1948; Turnbull 1961, 1965b; Hart and Hart 1984; Bailey and Peacock 1989). I take issue with the fact that these studies usually stress the terms "forager" and "farmer" as markers of ecological adaptations rather than as markers of ethnicity. Material culture is assumed to be the independent variable in the construction of group boundaries, and the exchange of material goods resulting from subsistence practices is accepted as the dominant discourse of interaction. As a consequence, the ideas and belief systems underlying the interactions between these foragers and farmers, including both the symbolic and social structural aspects of the division of labor between foraging and farming, and the relations of inequality between the two groups, have been largely ignored (Grinker 1990;

Mosko 1987; Ben-Ari 1987). My major concern is with the ways in which the Lese culturally represent their relations with one another and with the Efe; therefore, I shall not deal extensively with the materialist literature on nutrition, optimal foraging, or behavioral ecology.

This book, then, is about the dialectical relations between the Lese farmers and the Efe (Pygmy) foragers as ethnic groups; it is about how the Lese define themselves in terms of the Efe, and how the Lese define the Efe in terms of themselves. It is about how, in the context of intimate interethnic relations, the Lese derive a sense of who they are. My focus is on the ways in which social boundaries are constructed and sustained, and the modes of representation the Lese use to incorporate Lese-Efe cultural differences into everyday discourse and social life. At its most particular, this study argues that the Lese and the Efe must be seen as parts of a larger ethnically differentiated totality. At its most general, this study suggests that ethnicity is tied to inequality and is constituted by the asymmetrical integration of culturally distinct groups. Far from separating groups as distinct entities, ethnicity draws our attention to the relations between groups, not to one group in and of itself.

But my theoretical considerations move beyond a recasting of forager-farmer relations to some of the most basic and problematic assumptions in the anthropology of Africa; namely, the separation of domestic and political domains, and an overreliance on lineage theory for the explanation of social relationships. I shall argue that Lese-Efe ethnicity is best understood as a process of social differentiation and integration occurring within the Lese house. The house is characterized by the relations of inequality between its members (spouses, Lese and Efe partners, parents and children), relations that provide the symbolic material for the Lese modeling of society and economy in general. The role of the house in shaping Lese and Efe ethnicity, and therefore constituting large-scale political relationships, thus challenges the conventional structural-functional boundary between domestic and political contexts, between the house and the larger, more inclusive structures of society. Relations between spouses, for instance, are largely constitutive of the relations between the Lese and the Efe. The house, it will be seen, offers a significant advantage over the concepts provided by lineage theory for the comprehension of Lese and Efe ethnicity. While it is clear that clans and lineages are important aspects of Lese and Efe society, these refer to contexts of idealized equality and brotherhood among male agnates. The house, in contrast, is a context of idealized inequality

and difference, and so leads us to consider the important role played by gender and ethnicity in the constitution of the society. In paying such close attention to the house, I hope to further discussions of inequality in those societies that might fall easily into the category "egalitarian." I would also argue that the recasting of social organization by a focus on houses could be carried out just as fruitfully with groups that are not associated with hunter-gatherers.

However, studying the relationship between two groups poses difficult methodological problems. I spent my first six months of fieldwork (May–October 1985) living half of the time in a Lese village and half of the time in an Efe camp. This alternation proved unworkable, however, for both groups eventually made it clear that they wanted me to make a choice of allegiance, and I myself realized that dividing my time between residences could negatively affect my relationship with my informants, and that, furthermore, the shifts might make it difficult to explore either group in depth and detail. Turnbull, in fact, describes the same problem in his decision to live primarily with the Mbuti (1965b). I returned to the United States for about six months, during which time I pondered the ethnographic perspective I would take in the future, and constructed a working grammar and dictionary of the Lese language. During the next fourteen months of fieldwork (August 1986–October 1987), I decided therefore to focus my attention on the Lese, and to study the Efe whenever and wherever they became involved in Lese life and thought. If the two groups were indeed completely interlocked, I would eventually come to see the nature of that connection.

Living in a Lese village did not, as I had feared, severely limit my interactions with the Efe. I saw Efe men and women every day and maintained close relationships with Efe informants. But my choice certainly influenced the kind and quality of information I gathered from the Efe and the Lese. Because I lived in a Lese village and spoke the Lese language, Efe informants quite understandably viewed me as a villager, and it seemed to me that they held back some of their more unkind thoughts about the Lese, either out of respect for me, as a "villager," or because they feared I would repeat what they had said. Also, though I eventually spoke the Lese language fluently (a language mutually intelligible with the Efe language), I had a more difficult time understanding Efe speech and sometimes had to resort to Swahili, a language in which most Efe men maintain a degree of fluency. Lese informants, in contrast, seemed to speak to me more frankly about personal and private matters, and to be quite willing to express their feelings about the Efe. For

these reasons, this book is more an ethnography of the Lese than it is of the Efe; though it says a great deal about how the Lese manage their relations with the Efe, it does not presume to describe how the Efe manage relations with the Lese, or even, except in certain perhaps superficial ways, how they feel about the Lese.

A work such as this depends not only on day-to-day observation and interviews but also on the compilation and study of maps, censuses, genealogies, collected myths, and oral history. My informants, Lese and Efe, represented nearly every status or social role, including children. The majority of informants' statements and narratives reproduced in the book are my own transcriptions from tape recordings. With the exception of the larger and more extensive demographic data that I collected on the ethnic composition of Lese villages and market sellers, the survey data I present in the text include all Lese adult men and women in my study area, stretching a distance of about three kilometers between two rivers, and including twelve villages. Given the fact that the Lese area is sparsely populated, and villages are frequently situated far from one another, it was impossible for me to carry out more inclusive surveys.

The most frustrating aspect of my research was the absence of either written sources or a collected oral history. Vansina has, in fact, called the equatorial rain forest of central Africa terra incognita for the historian. There are only a few archival sources on the Lese and their history. These include a few documents obtained in Zaire by Robert C. Bailey—four pages of correspondence between colonial administrators of the Kibali-Ituri district, 1920–37; three pages of historical notes on the WaLese-Karo, District du Kibali-Ituri (P.V. No. 222); and a 1947 census conducted by the Belgian administration. The 1920–37 documents mention other reports on the Lese-Dese and Lese-Karo filed between 1911 and 1919, but these and all other documents on the Lese groups and on the Efe were lost or misplaced after independence (1960) and the rebellions that followed. I take heart in the creative and ground-breaking efforts of Vansina (1990a) and hope that anthropologists will eventually come to know more fully this region of the world, not only through ethnography but through its oral history, glottochronology, genetics, and archaeological remains.