In the face of new beginnings it is always useful to look back at how things got started in the first place. With these words we want to introduce to you a text that was single-handedly responsible for awakening the legal anthropological imagination of one of your devoted moderators, namely Miia Halme-Tuomisaari.
Isaac Schapera: The Sin of Cain. The Frazer Lecture. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Vol. 85, No. 1/2 (1955), pp. 33-43
Admittedly the article may appear hopelessly old-fashioned in the midst of current discussions – which is perhaps appropriate given that it was first published almost seven decades ago – but maybe this tenor also confirms its status as a ‘classic’.
First held as a Frazer lecture in Examination Schools at Oxford in 1954, the article discusses James Frazer’s Folk-Lore in the Old Testament published in 1918, and more specifically still, its third chapter titled ‘The Mark of Cain’. The Chapter is based on the tale of Cain killing his younger brother Abel, only to be driven away by God and condemned to be a ‘fugitive and wanderer’.
The article then continues by linking this isolated instance of homicide into societal structures more generally, recalling how in “early Biblical times, a father had power of life and death over his children”. The article ends up in an almost ‘Agambeniesque’ bare life type feeling as it asks: when is the killing of a person just a homicide, when is it something much more?
To offer a brief biography of Isaac Schapera, he was born on June 23, 1905 in South Africa, and he is known for his detailed ethnographic and typological work on the indigenous peoples of South Africa and colonial Botswana in particular. His work was influenced by his instructors A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronisław Malinowski, and his best known publications include A Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom. He obtained his PhD from the Anthropology in London School of Economics, where he also became professor of Social Anthropology. Schapera died June 26, 2003 in London and the obituary written for the Guardian by professor Simon Roberts from LSI to offers a warm glimpse into Schapera’s life and persona. Roberts’ text also illustrates how his scholarship, ironically, both forwarded a stark criticism of the colonial rule, and was being used as a source of guidelines for governance by the same administration.
Departing from our usual devotion to make life easy and comfortable for Allegra readers, this post contains no link to the full article. Whereas this is admittedly due to our inability to crack the particular licenses protecting the text, we decided that this was actually just as well: what better way to accompany a classic text than by pairing it with an ACTUAL visit to a library?! (Remember those places with stacks of things called ‘books’ as well as all the tools for ‘prehistoric googling’ also known as ‘archives’.) Yet we promise to redress this gap as soon as possible with a fast and easy ‘click-click’ straight to the original text.
Isaac Schapera: The Sin of Cain. The Frazer Lecture. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Vol. 85, No. 1/2 (1955), pp. 33-43. Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
