Friends for Life, Friends for Death: Cohorts and Consciousness among the Lunda-Ndembu

James A. Pritchett

320 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4

10 b&w illustrations and 1 map

Cloth 978-0-8139-2624-7 • $49.50

Paper 978-0-8139-2625-4 • $24.50

Breaking away from traditional ethnographic accounts often limited by theoretical frameworks and rhetorical styles, Friends for Life, Friends for Death: Cohorts and Consciousness among the Lunda-Ndembu offers an insider’s view into the day-to-day lives of a self-selected group of male friends within this society in northern Zambia. During his two decades of fieldwork in this region, James Pritchett followed a group of Lunda-Ndembu males, here called Amabwambu (the friends), revealing the importance of the clique both as a principal agent for receiving and interpreting information from and about the world, and as a place where strategies could be hatched, tested, and applied. Viewing friendship, versus kinship, as a critical rather than peripheral element of the Lunda-Ndembu and other groups, the author offers new insights into the ways social structures are able to stay viable even in the face of radical change.

Divided into two parts—the first half examining the friends’ vicarious experience with and orientation to the world through stories heard from their grandfathers and fathers, and the second half representing a compilation of their own direct experience in the world—this book reveals how such groups not only provide companionship and mutual support throughout life but also act as major vehicles for elaborating accounts of their own history, accounts that differ radically from those Western scholars could construct. When the political and economic systems of old are crumbling, when new powers attempt to impose their will, when it is evident that the past provides little insight into the future and the accumulated wisdom of the elders offers few solutions to the problems of the day, it is within these cohorts that new contingencies are processed, consciousnesses fashioned, and strategies deployed.

Transporting the reader to a place few have heard of, to examine the lives of people few will ever meet, Friends for Life, Friends for Death is both an accessible and fascinating account of day-to-day life and social construction in contemporary rural Africa.

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James A. Pritchett, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the African Studies Center at Boston University, is the author of Lunda-Ndembu: Style, Change, and Social Transformation in South Central Africa.