Maintaining Continuity in a Dualistic World:

Symbolism of the Age Grade Succession Rituals among the Hoor (Arbore) of South-Western Ethiopia

抄録

This paper illustrates age grade succession rituals of a society that has a dualistic world view. The Hoor are Cushitic agro-pastoralists who dwell along the Weito River in south-western Ethiopia. The Hoor have a developed age grade system, on which their political activities in local communities are founded. The age set is organized at an interval of 8 to 10 years, and four adjacent age sets are put together and organized into a generation set. The generation set is a unit which takes responsibility for administration of a territorial group. Once every 30 to 40 years, they have two successive rituals, in which a senior generation set transfers political authority to a junior generation set.
The society of the Hoor is saturated with a dualistic world view which consists of binary symbols. This dualistic world view is especially apparent in the arrangement of their settlement, where symbolic orientations permeate every corner of their social life. The age grade system has anomalous effects on the binary symbolism since the former is associated with the concept of continuity. Based on research on the Gandarab, one of the northern regional groups, this paper attempts to show how the rituals transform dualistic symbols and introduce a concept of continuity into the dualistic world of the Hoor.