Marc R. Schloss

Winner of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology, The Hatchet's Blood is the first ethnography of the Ehing, a farming people of southern Senegal. The ritual complexes of the Ehing embody an elaborate set of prohibitions on social behavior and prescribe the general rules of Ehing social organization. Power is distributed and maintained by the concept of Odieng (“hatchet”), which as a spirit acts upon human beings much as an ax does upon a tree, falling from above to punish its victims for transgression. Marc R. Schloss’s ethnography is a study of the meaning of Odieng’s power, explaining why its rules are so essential to the Ehing way of life.