Study of Inherent Logic among Changing African Societies

非洲牧民发展了与他们以牲畜谋生相一致的社会和文化制度。然而，在世界资本主义蔓延的影响下，这些制度在非洲国家的现代化进程中发生了巨大的变化。本文研究的重点是牧民如何构思、解释和应对急剧变化的社会环境。这项研究计划基于两个假设。第一种假说认为，在这一过程中，人们对发展项目的实施、货币经济的注入、学校教育的普及、国家管理和司法制度的渗透等外部影响所引发的环境变化进行了解释和应对，从而产生了新的复杂情况。第二种假说认为，上述过程是由两种逻辑塑造的，一种是每个社会所特有的、独特的，另一种是所有牧民社会共同存在的。在这些假设的基础上，我们集中研究了牲畜的商品化、牲畜所有权和使用权的多样化、性别分工的变化、种族界限的重新界定、应对疾病等不幸事件的方式的多样化。我们的研究结果是，人们正在基于所有牧民社会共同的内在逻辑来应对不断变化的社会环境，这种逻辑与作为外部干预基础的现代逻辑不一致和背道而驰。简而言之，内在逻辑的特征是“灵活性/机会主义”，这与以“规律性/规定性”为鲜明特征的现代逻辑形成鲜明对比。为了充分理解转型中的牧民社会，我们考虑这些对立的逻辑是一种有效的措施。

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.