NUER CONSTITUTION
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- Chief Magok Gatluak
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Nuer Warrior
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The Southern Sudanese Community Center will be holding their
first health fair. Executive Director Chul Tut was in studio
with a preview.
- Nuer prophet’s rod finally
arrives in Juba
By James Gatdet Dak. Sunday 17 May 2009 05:33.
- A rapturous reception of a forgotten
heritage of South Sudan
By James Gatdet Dak
May 17, 2009 (JUBA) – -
Ngundeng’s Prophecies (Part III)
By Gatkuoth Deng
September 2, 2009 — Ngundeng prophesied
Welcome to Naath website!
In this chapter we
look backwards on our description of Nuer interest in cattle and of
their ecology and forwards to an account of their political structure.
Their ecology limits and in other ways influences their social
relations, but the value given to ecological relations is equally
significant in understanding the social system, which is a system within
the ecological system, partly dependent on it and partly existing in its
own right.
Ultimately most, perhaps all, concepts of time and space are determined
by the physical ambient, but the value they embody are only one of many
possible responses to it and depend also on structural principles, which
belong to a different order of reality. In this book we are not
describing Nuer cosmology buttheir political and other institutions, and
are, therefore, interested mainly in the influence of ecological
relations on these institutions rather than the influence of the social
structure on the conceptualization of the ecological relations. Thus, to
give one example, we do not describe how Nuer classify birds into
various lineages on the pattern of their lineage structure. This chapter
is therefore a bridge between the two parts of the book, but we cross it
in one direction only. In describing Nuer concepts of time we may
distinguish between those that are mainly reflections of their relations
to environment, which we call ecological time, and those that are
reflections of their relations to one another in the social structure,
which we call structural time.
Both refer to successions of events which are of sufficient interest to
the community for them to be noted and related to each other
conceptually. The larger periods of time are almost entirely structural,
because the events they relate are changes in the relationship of social
groups. Moreover, time-reckoning based on changes in nature and man's
response to them is limited to an annual cycle and therefore cannot be
used to differentiate longer periods than seasons. Both, also, have
limited and fixed notations.
Seasonal and lunar changes
repeat themselves year after year, so that a Nuer standing at any point
of time has conceptual knowledge of what lies before him and can predict
and organize his life accordingly. A man's structural future is likewise
already fixed and ordered into different periods, so that the total
changes in status a boy will undergo in his ordained passage through the
social system, if he lives long enough, canbe foreseen. Structural time
appears to an individual passing through the social system to be
entirely progressive, but, as we shall see, in a sense this is an
illusion. Ecological time appears to be, and is, cyclical. The
ecological cycle is a year. Its distinctive rhythm is the backwards and
forwards movement from villages to -camps, which is the Nuer's response
to the climatic dichotomy of rains and drought. The year (ruon) has two
main seasons, lot and mai. Tot, from about the middle of March to the
middle of September, roughly corresponds to the rise in the curve of
rainfall, though it does not cover the whole period of the rains. Rain
may fall heavily at the end of September and in early October, and the
country is still flooded in these months which belong, nevertheless, to
the mai half of the year, for it commences at the decline of the
rains-not at their cessation-and roughly covers the trough of the curve,
from about the middle of September to the middle of March. The two
seasons therefore only approximate to our division into rains and
drought, and the Nuer classification aptly summarizes their way of
looking at the movement of time, the direction of attention in marginal
months being as significant as the actual climatic conditions. In the
middle of. September Nuer turn, as it were, towards the life of fishing
and cattle camps and feel that village residence and horticulture lie
behind them. They begin to speak of camps as though they were already in
being, and long to be on the move. This restlessness is even more marked
towards the end of the drought when, noting cloudy skies, people turn
towards the life of villages and make preparations for striking camp.
Marginal months may therefore be classed as tot or mai, since they
belong to one set of activities but presage the other set, for the
concept of seasons is derived from social activities rather than from
the climatic changes which determine them, and a year is to Nuer a
period of village residence (cieng) and a period of camp residence (wec).I
have already noted the significant physical changes associated with
rains and drought, and some of these have been presented in charts on
PP. 52 and 53. 1 have also described, in the last chapter, the
ecological movement that follows these physical changes where it affects
human life to any degree. Seasonal variations in social activities, on
which Nuer concepts of time are primarily based, have also been
indicated and, on the economic side, recorded at some length. The main
features of these three planes of rhythm, physical, ecological, and
social, are charted on the opposite page.
The movements of the heavenly bodies other than the sun and the moon,
the direction and variation of winds, and the migration of some species
of birds are observed by the Nuer, but they do not regulate their
activities in relation to them nor use them as points of reference in
seasonal time-reckoning. The curators by which seasons are most clearly
defined are those which control the movements of the people: water,
vegetation, movements of fish, &c.; it being the needs of the cattle and
variations in, food-supply which chiefly translate ecological rhythm
into the social rhythm of the.year, and the contrast between modes of
life at the height of the rains and at the height of the drought which
provides the conceptual poles in time-reckoning. Besides these two main
seasons of tot and mai Nuer recognize two subsidiary seasons included in
them, being transitional periods between them. The four seasons are not
sharp divisions but overlap. Just as we reckon summer and winter as the
halves of our year and speak also of spring and autumn, so Nuer reckon
tot and mai as halves of their year and speak also of the seaons of rwil
and jiom. Rwil is the time of moving from camp to village and of
clearing and planting, from about the middle of March to the middle of
June, before the rains have reached their peak. It counts as part of the
tot half of the year, though it is contrasted with tot proper, the
period of full village life and horticulture, from about the middle of
June to the middle of September. jiom, meaning 'wind', is the period in
which the persistent north wind begins to blow and people harvest, fish
May June July August September October November December January
February March April.
