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My table lists the alimentary taboos reported by members of the clans classed as lã-

Ndjuafllã-Ndjuafl, i.e. those with estates in the vicinity of the capital.  As can be seen some are shared by two or more clans, which is remarkable given the richness of the local flora and fauna.  Duplication could be accounted for by the process of clan fission, though I heard of no traditions to support this view; indeed, informants dismissed the idea when it was suggested to them, since they conceived of a clan as a natural unity, no more capable of division into separate entities than is an individual of changing his clan of birth.

Some people are able to recount how these taboos became established.  Set in the remote

past, these explanatory stories invariably tell of a member, or members, of the species in question providing a crucial service for the patrilineal ancestors, most commonly by enabling them to escape from their human enemies.  The leader of the ancestral group then decrees that the members of this species are their “friends” and that henceforth they should not be harmed by them or their descendants.8

These stories firmly associate alimentary taboos with clans.  In theory, and this is also

the Tikar viewpoint, one would expect all the members of a particular clan to share the same taboo, but occasionally one encounters apparent anomalies, as the table indicates.  When an individual reported a different taboo to others in his clan, inquiries were generally able to show that he had made a mistake about which clan he belonged and it was nearly always when he has been brought up in a household farming the estate of a clan other than his own.  Such  errors might well be compounded by the multiple meanings of the expression “the people of ...”, followed by a clan name.

Mistakes which were corrected after that had been pointed out have been omitted from

the table: most often they were made by adolescents and it is probable that they would have been rectified in time anyway, particularly when it came to marriage.  However, a mistake that is not corrected can lead to a genealogical segment of a clan possessing a different alimentary taboo from other clansfolk.

There is no formal procedure for adoption into a clan; the anomalies I recorded

demonstrate that is it possible for people to be fully assimilated into clans without being aware of it.  Their very existence, and the lack of conscious awareness of them, reflect the fact that alimentary taboos are not the subjects of collective clan rituals, nor are they used as clan emblems; rather, they operate at the personal level and their current social significance seems to be mainly associated with a father’s rights over his children.

The Tikar do not make an explicit distinction between pater and genitor; rather, they say

that a child has either one father or many.9  They believe that all the sperm deposited within a 8Such a story is classified as sa, a “true story”, rather than nk, a “fable”. 9In the latter case, the child is termed mwã-tima, a contraction of the term meaning “child of many fathers”.

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