Aidan Southall: A Tribute and Partial Memoir

I appreciate the privilege to highlight and to share the ideas that I think intellectually fascinated Aidan Southall. These include: gender relations, the politics of identity, religious ritual and symbols as important aspects the structure of social relationships, the segmentary state, the exigencies of colonialism and hegemonic cultures. I have also included snippets from some condolence letters his students wrote. Finally, I make a few references to his diaries to provide some experiential texture to his ideas.

The title comes from message on a card presented to Aidan at his departmental retirement party in 1990. That year, carrying as usual a rucksack for luggage, Aidan flew to Mumbai and traveled for two days by bus and train to visit and spend the Christmas season with a priest friend, he had met many years ago and who ran a school in a remote part among the Bhil. He enjoyed his stay, attended a lot of Masses in Hindi (a language he did not understand) but at Christmas he admitted in a letter that he missed Christmas Carols.

Aidan was born with anthropological tendencies. His diaries when he was 17 years old and had never heard of anthropology consist of descriptions and analyses of the beliefs, economic and social relationships between his family and those of his two best friends and childhood playmates; and the employer patroness off course. He was a feminist before men were referred to as such and this is a direct result of his domestic life. When Aidan was fourteen his father died of cancer at age 47. Until he went to Jesus College Cambridge, Aidan lived with his mother and sister walking or cycling everyday to Perse school. There were always visiting aunts and sister's friends. Recently two female classmates, retired judge and doctor, told me that they survived Cambridge because Aidan was generous at sharing his well written notes.

Researchers who visited Makerere (in Uganda) when he was director of the East African Institute for Social Research have singled out his generosity with information and time. In recent years Some Alur and Jopadhola have been consulting his field notes check or construct their genealogical background.

Aidan believed and lived the mission of anthropology with its emphasis on holistic and comparative approaches. He insisted that " In the long run, the strongest card anthropology has is fieldwork, concentration, intensive participation and observation". What people are doing? : whether cooking, hoeing or drinking they are thinking and talking.¹

The fieldworker must sort out the relationship between language and agency. Here knowledge of language is imperative because thoughts and utterances are worked out, transformed and passed on in reproductive relationships. He said, The Alur taught him the social and cultural things generally but especially the relativity of social groups and of boundaries of politics and ethnicities. "The Alur made me think about history, first with genealogy and myth but eventually with their straddling the British and Belgian Colonial System." All this suggested the road of relativity both in time and space. This, he insisted, was an essential aspect of holism that inhibited the drawing of false geographical and analytical boundaries. It was the foundation from which the formulations of the Segmentary States theory emerged. Aidan followed the Alur to the South of Uganda and to the essentially and exclusively expatriate city of Kampala in the 1950s, and found that the segmentary principle continued to be practiced in social organization. During his last visit to Uganda in 1991, he celebrated with new Makerere graduates at a gala organized by the Nebbi Association (used to be Alur Association) in Kampala, talked to Alur civil servants and members of Parliament, managed to get an army escort so he could witness the Alur voting and he discovered reinvented political and healing rituals. He stayed with Nyapapoga, a woman he first interviewed in 1948 and was still engaged in the anthropological enterprise.

He said that cultural anthropology "cannot be regarded as a discipline as it was in another dimension. Its commitment in practice to participant observation, and in theory to the reflexive and reciprocal interpretation of other cultures...