The Cows of Dolo Ken Paye: Resolving Conflict among the Kpelle

19??

Filmmaker: Marvin Silverman

Anthropologist: James L. Gibbs, Jr.

This film was shot in the Kpelle village of Fokwele by Marvin Silverman, in collaboration with the anthropologist James Gibbs, Jr. The film shows how conflict is resolved in a chiefdom in which the leaders, elders and chiefs, have real power to adjudicate problems and make their decisions stick.

Silverman & Gibbs first intended to make a film about a day in the life of the village. Then, in the midst of filming, a crime took place, and the camera was fortuitously present as the search for the villain unfolded. Because Gibbs had done research in the village years earlier, the film is able to bring historical depth to the story, even using B&W still photographs from his earlier work.

Also, note in the early part of the film how people hull rice in wooden mortars, winnow it in woven rice fanner baskets, and cook it in clay pots. All this domestic technology , along with the rice growing technology itself, was brought by West Africans to the South Carolina Low Country in the eighteenth century (see L. Ferguson, 1992).

The climax of the film comes when the elders, unable to find the culprit, call in a specialist diviner. This ordeal operator, David Kennedy, arrives and uses a hot knife ordeal (the guilty are supposed to flinch at the touch of a hot knife). As this trouble case works its way to resolution, we learn not only about the political structure of thee chiefdom and the various conflict resolution institutions, but also about the very ambivalent position of the rich cattle owners vis-à-vis the poorer farmers, who must spend an inordinate amount of energy building fences to protect their crops from marauding cattle. (Heider 1997: 230).

Setup Questions

1. Why is there tension between rich and poor? What mitigates this tension? Do the cattle pay off for the poor farmers in any sense?

2. Can you spot Gibbs, the American anthropologist, in this Hitchcock-like cameo appearance?

3. What do the old B&W photographs add to the story?

4. How does the hot knife ordeal actually work? Can it really determine the miscreant? Why does the ordeal operator wear dark glasses?

5. Compare leadership and power in Yanomamo and Kpelle.

6. What can you tell about Kpelle ideas of self-dignity?

7. Why is the informal palaver passed over in favor of the hot knife ordeal?

8. How do the cattle owners justify their ownership of free-ranging cattle?