Right, left and the Banyoro

Abstract

Opening ParagraphThe collection of republished essays entitled Right and Left: Essays in Dual Symbolic Classification, edited and with a substantial introduction by Rodney Needham (the University of Chicago Press, 1973), has been long awaited. All of the essays are of great interest, and all are concerned with the binary mode of symbolic classification, something which appears to be found, in greater or lesser degree, in all human cultures. The work will no doubt be widely reviewed in the appropriate journals. What follows is not an attempt at an over-all review. It is rather a response to, and a critical examination of, some of the arguments Needham advances in his introduction to the book. As such, I hope that it may contribute, however modestly, to our understanding of some of the problems involved in the application of the ‘binary’ mode of structural analysis to ethnographic data. The context is the symbolism of the Banyoro of western Uganda.