We are deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Sally Falk Moore on May 2, 2021. An intellectually generous scholar of Africa, her theoretical contributions grew out of her fieldwork among the Chagga in Tanzania. In what was a first, she investigated the interactions between indigenous, colonial, and post-colonial social and legal systems in the context of the new socialism after independence. What, she asked specifically, did state attempts to decolonize mean for kinship, landholding, and law? Through her research, she shifted the study of law from its textual products and debates among legal scholars to its execution and effects in lived time, and demonstrated how “customary law” is not prior to state law but a modern product of this encounter with the state. HAU is honored to have published her final book, Comparing Impossibilities (2016), which includes essays published throughout her long career. We will miss Sally, above the scholarship she inspired and the many students whose lives she touched. Kriti Kapila, Anne-Christine Taylor, John Borneman, and Carlos D. Londoño Sulkin Board of Directors, Society for Ethnographic Theory |
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