Study of Inherent Logic among Changing African Societies

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African pastoralists have developed social and cultural systems which are consistent with their use of livestock for the livelihood. These systems, however, are changing drastically in the process of modernization of African nations under the influence of spreading world capitalism.This study focuses on how pastoral people conceive, interpret and cope with the drastically changing social environment. The study is planned on two hypotheses. The first one is that new complex situations are produced by the process, in which people interpret and counter the changing environment which is mostly triggered by such external influences as implementation of developmental projects, infusion of monetary economy, spread of school education, infiltration of national management and judicial systems, etc. The second hypothesis is that the above process is shaped by two types of logic, one is characteristic and specific to each society, and the other is common to all pastoral societies. On these hypotheses, we concentrated our studies on the commoditization of livestock, diversification of rights to own and use livestock, changes in the sexual division of labor, redefinition of ethnic boundaries, diversification of the ways to cope with such misfortunes as diseases.Our research findings are that people are coping with changing social environment based on an inherent logic which is common to all pastoral societies, and that this logic discord with and run counter to the modern logic which is the basis of external interventions. The characteristics of the inherent logic is, in short, "flexibility/opportunism", which is in striking contrast with the modern logic whose distinctive feature is "regularity/prescription". In order to fully understand pastoral societies in transition, it is an effective measure that we take these contrasting logic into consideration.