Eating Time: Capitalist History and Pastoralist History among Samburu Herders in Northern Kenya

Abstract

This article examines food and eating practices as a central domain for understanding the changing politics of everyday life for Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya. The analysis engages with longstanding debates concerning the historical models applied by western analysts to non-western peoples, as well as contemporary issues concerning the contours of ethnography within the context of global processes. Until recent times Samburu were wealthy livestock keepers, with a central cultural emphasis on a pastoral diet of milk, meat and blood. Patterns of provisioning, eating and food sharing constituted a domain densely packed with core cultural values, and thickly entangled webs of social relations. Over the past several decades, however, there has been a significant decline in the Samburu livestock economy. A diet centrally constituted of livestock products is now impossible for most Samburu, while problematizing those wide-ranging social and cultural domains closely entwined with food and eating. Thus, food and eating practices have become a crucial site where Samburu both experience and shape aspects of change, as well as an important indigenous historical idiom through which they understand their own social transformations. I argue that a model of Samburu history centred upon food effectively situates Samburu within broader political-economic forces without subjugating the agency and the meanings of Samburu actors to those concerns most centrally raised by attention to western notions of modernity and global processes. An approach centred upon the mundane realities of everyday life has a value in forging a unique and meaningful alternative to western models of change.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the National Science Foundation, which provided funding for the research upon which this paper is based, through a Dissertation Improvement Grant (1992–94) and a Grant for Senior Research (2001–02). In the earlier research period, the Population-Environment Dynamics Project, the Centre for African and Afro-American Studies of the University of Michigan, and the Rackham Graduate School provided additional funds. During both research periods the Institute of African Studies of the University of Nairobi generously provided institutional affiliation in Kenya.

Notes

1. Ortner, ‘Theory in Anthropology’.

2. Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity; Miller, ‘Introduction’; Piot, Remotely Global.

3. Appadurai, Modernity at Large. This is not, of course, an unproblematic assumption. While some – for example Piot, Remotely Global – have taken Appadurai to task for ignoring the understandings of the global creation of ‘local’ peoples. It has been suggested that particular areas of the world, especially the Caribbean, have effectively been global melting pots for centuries: see Wolf, Europe and Mintz, ‘The Localisation of Anthropological Practice’.

4. Lavie and Swedenburg eds., Displacement, Diaspora and Geographies.

5. Holtzman, Nuer Journeys.

6. See also Donham, ‘Thinking Temporally’; Englund and Leach, ‘Ethnography and Meta-Narratives’.

7. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic.

8. White, Speaking With Vampires, 43.

9. Taussig, Devil and Commodity Fetishism.

10. Shipton, Bitter Money.

11. Comaroff and Comaroff, Ethnography, 4.

12. Geschiere, Modernity of Witchcraft. Geschiere does not, of course, insist that we accept this.

13. White, Speaking With Vampires.

14. Holtzman, ‘Transformations in Samburu Domestic Economy’.

15. Spencer, The Samburu and Nomads in Alliance; Straight, ‘Altered Landscapes’ and ‘From Samburu Heirloom to New Age Artifact’; Kasfir, ‘Samburu Souvenirs’; Sperling, ‘Labour Organisation of Samburu Pastoralism’; Holtzman, ‘Transformations’ and ‘The Food of Elders’.

16. Galaty, ‘Being “Maasai”’.

17. Arhem, ‘Meat, Milk and Blood’.

18. Nkanyit and lkiti are very close in their meaning and usage, and some informants disagree with the distinction that I make here, arguing that the two terms are wholly synonomous. Irrespective of this question, however, respect and shame are two emically distinct facets of this aspect of the Samburu moral system.

19. For an in depth elucidation of nkanyit see especially Spencer, The Samburu.

20. Holtzman, ‘In a Cup of Tea’.

21. Holtzman, ‘Transformations’.

22. Holtzman, ‘The Food of Elders’. For a somewhat contrasting view, see Straight, ‘Altered Landscapes’. While Straight concurs on the problematic nature of commodified eating, she finds that, particularly in town contexts, cash is a much more gender-balanced resource.

23. Holtzman, ‘Politics and Gastropolitics’.

24. I intentionally speak of cooking in both the present and past tense here. Certainly in most areas cooking is an everyday necessity, such that a life in which cooking is less frequent is a thing of the past. Yet in other areas (particularly those remote areas which remain wealth in livestock) large portions of the daily diet consists of milk or other pastoral products through much of the year.

25. Connerton, How Societies Remember ; Donham, ‘Thinking Temporally’