Sally Falk Moore

Few scholars have had a more varied career than Sally Falk Moore. Once a lawyer for an elite New York law firm, her career has led her to the Nuremberg trials where she prepared cases against major industrialists, to Harvard, to the Spanish archives where she studied the Inca political system, and to the mountain of Kilimanjaro where she studied the politics of Tanzanian socialism. This book offers a compelling tour of Moore’s diverse experiences, a history of her thought as she reflects on her life and thought in the disciplines of anthropology, law, and politics. The essays range from studies of myths of incest and sexuality to those of economic development projects, from South America to Africa. The result is an astonishing assortment of works from one of the most respected legal anthropologists in the field, one who brought together disparate places and ideas in enriching comparisons that showcase the possibilities—and impossibilities—of anthropology.

Selected Essays of Sally Falk Moore

Comparing Impossibilities

This is a study of the role of law in society, using both pre-industrial and modern settings. It argues that the same social processes which prevent the total regulation of society also reshape and transform efforts at partial regulation.

An Anthropological Approach

Law as Process

A study of the difference between law in the life of an African people and in the local courtrooms.

"Customary" Law on Kilimanjaro, 1880-1980

Social Facts and Fabrications

Paul Puritt

The Chagga and the Meru are related peoples living on the rich banana-grove and coffee-plantation slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Meru in Northern Tanzania. While the literature on the Chagga is overwhelmingly large little is generally available on the Meru. This volume, originally published in 1977, provided for the first time a concise, comprehensive and well-documented overview of Chagga society, history and cosmology, drawing not only on the authors’ field work but on the works of the prolific Germans: Gutmann, Raum and others. It also detail original research and uses reports of the famous Meru Land Case to illuminate Meru society and economy and their adjustment in turn to Arusha, German and British colonial, and independent government influences.

East Central Africa

The Chagga and Meru of Tanzania

Barbara G. Myerhoff

Cases and Questions

Symbol and Politics in Communal Ideology

African studies in anthropology throw light on the way Anglo-Europeans and Americans have conceived of the rest of the world and the way academic disciplines have changed in this century.

Sally Falk Moore

Books

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