This collection of 5 essays focuses on cultural transformation, whether within the context of ritual or in that of resistance against (post) colonial rule. Like the first volume in this series, it advocates a social and cultural anthropology of the everyday, the common, the quotidian. It examines the way common people in eastern and southern Africa deal with violence and trauma, with development efforts (which, in the context of African pastoralism, are directed mainly towards famine relief and wildlife conservation), with the power exerted by a colonial regime aimed mainly at eradicating the basis and source of their life and livelihood, with the way they continuously re-invent their 'tradition' (and hence themselves) to overcome alienation and with the way they deal with animals and the sociology of gift and exchange.