Cultural Change, Shame, and Cultural Distribution

An aspect of the cultural dynamics involving the arbiters which has not yet been considered is who judges the members of this status. In fact, the arbiters, like everyone else, have more than one status, and in some of their statuses (father, government official, community member, Muslim, etc.) they

are liable to judgment more or less as anyone else is. Having seen the case of the corn thief, however, it will be clear that separating an arbiter from his status is difficult. Arbiter seems to be one of the statuses, like priest, prostitute, and president in the United States, that "spills over" into other statuses occupied by the same individuals and affects the understandings that apply in those other statuses.

There is little question in the minds of the community members that arbiters have aibu. Community members agree that everyone, even Prophet Mohammed, has aibu, and only God is without it. Informants agree that the men I am calling arbiters are more concerned about aibu—their own as well as others—than anyone else in the society, which, they say, accounts in large part for their scrupulous maintenance of high standards. So long as group members show them deference and inhibit their behavior when they are present, the arbiters retain their prestige. Since no one is free of aibu, it is the arbiters' constant effort to avoid it, as people see it, that is the foundation of their prestige and of their ability to instill "fear" in others (kuwatisha ).

Arbiters and Cultural Change

Earlier, it was suggested that if arbiters countenance behavior, that behavior is almost certainly not aibu. A fortiori, if arbiters actually engage in behavior, it is likely to be viewed as free of aibu. This suggests that the cultural complex centering around the arbiters provides, inter alia, the basis for a culturally constituted means for the acceptance of new understandings about what can and should be done and how to do it; a culturally constituted means, that is, for the acceptance of cultural change.

There is little reason to believe that arbiters can adopt new behaviors entailing new standards without any limits on how radically those standards depart from the status quo, since if an arbiter behaves in ways that make people stop fearing him, he loses respect (i.e., he is no longer "feared"). I would predict with great confidence that in the extraordinarily unlikely event that an arbiter were to convert to Christianity, that would not establish the understanding that such conversion is acceptable. It would only lead to the arbiter's immediate loss of prestige and raise questions about his mental health.

There are actual changes, however, that arbiters are involved in, and a brief look at one of them may be instructive. A senior man of substantial prestige who is undoubtedly an arbiter played an important role in making movie attendance relatively aibu-free some years ago.

As Muslims, the Swahili have, at best, an ambivalent attitude toward pictures of any kind, and activities that are purely for amusement, upuzi , are by no means completely admired. The fact that women in films are sometimes

shown in revealing costumes, that scenes of sexual activities are shown, and that men and women attend the theaters together adds further possibilities for movie attendance being viewed as likely to entail aibu.

The arbiter, however, began to attend selected films in the late 1960s and went several times a year beginning in the 1970s. Sometimes other men of roughly equal prestige accompanied him. Their presence at the films together with the fact that none of them lost respect and all continued to be feared may have contributed to what both informants and I see as an increase in movie attendance during the 1970s by Swahili.

There are still men who report that they do not attend films and never did so. These men are all well into middle age, highly conservative, and generally suspicious of activities associated with the West. Many of them are themselves of the sort I would call arbiters, and it may be that the aura of acceptability of behavior stemming from other high-prestige individuals participating in it is more influential for lower-prestige individuals than for others with prestige comparable to those who participate.

For a considerable proportion of the community, however, film going is now accepted, and even those who do not go themselves seem to indicate no active disapproval of those who do. It is difficult to establish without doubt that attendance by the arbiter and his peers is the only factor involved in this change, but the time of their beginning to go to movies corresponds with the beginning of open and general attendance by increasingly large numbers of male community members.^[6] A number of informants have told me that now any group member, even the "strictest," might go to the films without shame, if there is some attention to what films are seen and what theaters are attended.

The general hypothesis being advanced here is that the Swahili distribution of culture with its particular set of understandings included in the status "arbiter" results in the members of that status being in a special position compared to other group members in different statuses. They can engage in behaviors that might lead others to be judged as committing aibu, without being so judged, at least initially. If following their engaging in these behaviors, they retain their ability to "frighten" others and to be generally respected, the behaviors appear free from aibu and thereby become more acceptable to other group members than they might otherwise be.