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.

‘Children never used to stay around old people’, said my cantankerous old friend Lmomonyot Lempirikany contemptuously, as we rested under his shade tree. The new ways of eating, he explained, had mixed everyone together, old and young, men and women. Everyone just sits huddled around the same cooking fire now, and respect has been lost even to the point that ‘these days, if you tell a child to go look after the goats, they will refuse if the tea pot is on the fire’.

In this essay I examine food and eating practices as a central domain for understanding the changing politics of everyday life for Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya. Through this analysis I seek to engage with both 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 the Samburu were among the wealthiest livestock keepers on record, 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, a variety of processes have led to a significant decline in the livestock economy. This has rendered a diet centrally constituted of livestock products impossible for most Samburu, while problematising 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 centered 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. I suggest, as well, that an approach centered upon the mundane realities of everyday life – though certainly not the only possible approach – has a value in forging a unique and meaningful alternative to western models of change, without ‘Other-ising’ our subjects in the process.

Analysing Change: The Global and the Local, the Magical and the Mundane

The turn to a historical perspective in anthropology through the 1980s engendered conflicts concerning the framework and content of our accounts of the diachronic processes of non-western peoples, and the ways in which we might best construct our accounts of these in relation to global processes. Some have suggested that these debates might best be viewed as a conflict between ethnohistorians who were most centrally concerned with indigenous dynamics of change, and political-economically oriented anthropologists interested in situating non-western peoples within a history of global capitalism.1 While ethnohistorians criticised political economists for paying inadequate attention to indigenous dynamics and processes driving cultural change – suggesting that the history provided by political economists was something which arrived with Europeans, like a ship upon a shore – political economists suggested that ethnohistorians ignored the historical realities of global capitalism in shaping a diverse range of processes throughout the world.

While perhaps reframed, I suggest that these same issues persist within the contemporary context, as narratives of change stemming from issues of globalisation and modernity have become a pervasive focus within recent anthropology. The increasing spread of global processes to even the most remote areas of the globe has presented challenges to a discipline founded on the study of culturally distinct, non-western peoples. While to some this has hearkened a crisis in anthropology, others have looked optimistically to the novel research opportunities it has presented. Perhaps the most common reaction to these developments, however, has been to retain a largely traditional anthropological fieldsite, while seeking to use these sites as a lens for understanding global political, economic and cultural forces through particular local forms of modernity, in short to look at the global in the local.2

It is, indeed, tempting to construct our ethnographic accounts through the dominant features of global capitalism, as transnational processes assume increasing importance in even the most remote areas of the globe. Appadurai has suggested that we live in an era where the unique qualities of the local community have in a sense ruptured, such that a transnational anthropology might well trace the ramifications of an intersecting array of global ‘scapes’ – entertainment-scapes, financial-scapes and the like – in varying locations around the world.3 There is, perhaps, something almost intoxicating to anthropologists about the fact of Samoan gangsta rappers in Los Angeles,4 or, as I have noted elsewhere, that certain Nuer in Minnesota have an unusual attachment to Barney, the beloved purple dinosaur of American children's television.5 It invokes a world of dizzying time-space compression, where anything is possible and nothing is as it seems.

Yet, however alluring such images may be to the irony-conscious anthropologist, to what extent do these speak directly to the realities of the lives of our informants, particularly for those of us who work in the developing world? Moreover, in an excessive concern with ‘the global’, I suggest, we risk paying inadequate attention both to indigenous understandings of change, as well as to the forms through which transnational processes enter into, and affect lives within local communities (not to mention those aspects of local meanings and social processes which may have little or nothing to do with ‘the global’ at all). While ‘the global’ or ‘modernity’ are certainly useful analytical tools for looking at specific types of processes, they are, after all, no less western constructs than ‘love’ or ‘the family’ or ‘the supernatural’. As such, seeking to frame our accounts around overly reified notions of ‘the global’ or ‘modernity’ may provide not dissimilar ethnocentric limitations.6 Situating our analyses within global–local interactions creates a largely western centred worldview in explicating how processes from the centre – our processes, even as they have become part and parcel of cosmopolitan locations around the world – affect the lives of non-western others throughout the globe. Yet, while it shares some characteristics with the ‘world systems’ view of the centre penetrating the periphery, it is in some ways more pernicious as even the distinctive identity of non-western peoples is increasingly constructed in our analyses only in relationship to an all-encompassing globalisation.

It is worth noting, too, that the history I seek to construct is essentially a history of the mundane. As such, I situate this study in contrast to recent studies of capitalism and modernity that elucidate understandings of change through indigenous understandings of the supernatural. These are important and forceful accounts of what might be regarded as alternative cosmologies of capitalism. Yet at the same time they suffer to varying degrees from Evans-Pritchard's famous caveat in his essay ‘Witchcraft Explains Unfortunate Events’, namely that we know, of course, that witches do not exist.7 This is to a great extent implicit, and sometimes explicit, in recent anthropological accounts of social change. It is most clearly expressed in Luise White's fascinating study of what she terms vampire beliefs in colonial eastern and central Africa. White sees vampire stories as a particularly good way to explore colonial history not because of their accuracy – White seems convinced that the rumours do not depict actual events – but rather because ‘[c]onfusions and misunderstandings show what is important. … Their very falseness gives them meaning’.8 The same may be suggested – if less explicitly argued – by similar studies of change. In Taussig's classic study of indigenous South American understandings of capitalism, he does not ask us to believe that the devil really is in Bolivian silver mines.9 Nor does Shipton insist that Luo who become wealthy from the ‘bitter money’ gained in gold or the bhang trade really fall quickly into ruin.10

This is not to suggest that, in order to be meaningful, ethnographies of change must frame their accounts within a Western metaphysics in which the supernatural plays no role. Indeed, the studies I cite are notable for their importance, lucidity and analytical power. Yet, at the same time, taken as a genre, they risk recapitulating ‘the old opposition between secular mundanity and spectral mystery, between European modernism and African primitivism’.11 Indeed to a great degree, within these studies our subjects remain the inhabitants of a magical Other world of anthropologies past, albeit now with sunglasses and wearing a digital watch. That is, while such studies richly portray indigenous metaphors of change they fall short of portraying an alternative, but equally valid understanding of change, unless we are willing to accept that emerging elites gain their wealth through the work of armies of zombies moving with their unseen hand.12 Indeed, what they portray at some level, rather than indigenous understandings of change, are – more or less in White's words – indigenous misunderstandings of change.13 As such, they reinforce, albeit inadvertently, the global validity, centrality and reality of the processes underlying the metaphors that our subjects have overlaid upon them, for instance capitalism, modernity and the like.

I suggest that what is useful about examining change through a domain such as food is that its equal validity does not insist on our acceptance of a Samburu metaphysics (although I also, of course, do not insist that we deny it). Rather, it relies upon an understanding of Samburu meanings and social relations as they are entwined, historically and today, with pastoral praxis and processes of change. That is, such a model gains its explanatory power neither from western taken-for-granted assumptions about capitalism and modernity, nor from indigenous models of change which, however fascinating, must be regarded by most observers outside of the group in question to be essentially metaphorical in nature. Instead, I argue, a food-centered model of Samburu history – and similar histories of mundane, everyday processes – gains its power from their centrality to ways in which actors forge and give meaning to their everyday lives.

I suggest that food provides a rich site for engaging with both externally driven aspects of change, as well as the agency of local actors in structuring and bringing meaning to processes of change which are simultaneously both of, and not of, their own making. In doing so I seek to give due weight to the external forces involved in these transformations, not simply because of what they tell us about the local correlates of global forces, but because of what the y say, ethnographically, about what is important in the lives of Samburu, at this particular place and this particular time. I suggest that changing food practices are central to a historical and historicised reading of their politics of everyday life – both in the sense of the ways in which the macro-level processes of broader political economy are expressed and experienced within everyday realities, as well as in the ways that these become fused to small-scale politics of daily life – of the domestic group, of the community, of gender, age and local stratification.

Samburu Eating and Social Relations

Samburu are Maa-speakers, using a dialect that is mutually intelligible with Maasai. Their economy is based on the rearing of cattle, sheep, goats, and sometimes camels. Until recently, no form of agriculture was practiced,14 and they relied primarily on the products of their herds, trading for grain from agricultural neighbours during times of want, or utilising wild foods which they either collected themselves or traded from foraging neighbours. Currently they number approximately 150,000, and are best known through Paul Spencer's seminal research conducted in the late 1950s.15 As Spencer emphasised, the Samburu are characterised by a well-defined age–gender system. Elders practise polygyny at high rates, while young men are not allowed to marry until approximately the age of thirty, following a period of about fourteen years as unmarried bachelor warriors, or murran.

In many ways these and other key features of the social system are constituted through the culinary system. Food and eating practices have for Samburu long been a domain crucial to social action and the symbolic world, with the types of food one eats, the context for eating, and the company with whom one eats constructing key aspects of individual and group identity across the lines of ethnicity, kinship, gender and age. Eating practices construct core social relations and core cultural values in diffuse ways. Food serves to construct individual and group identity, while also constructing key differences among Samburu. While on one hand food practices construct closeness where it is appropriate (or even obligatory), it also constructs proper forms of social distance.

At the most obvious level, food is deeply tied to ethnic identity. Like other Maa-speakers, Samburu ethnic self-definition is entwined with being ‘people of cattle’,16 their daily work routines centred around the care of animals, their wealth and prestige tied up in their animals, their ritual life involving their animals. Moreover, as Arhem has noted for the pastoral Maasai, this distinct identity is embodied in maintaining as closely as possible a pastoral diet of milk, meat and blood.17 In the case of the Samburu, their diet distinguishes them not only from cultivators and foragers, but moreover from their arch-rivals the pastoral Turkana who are said to ‘eat almost anything’. While Samburu will eat a closely specified range of wild ungulates during times of want, Turkana are said to eat a range of unsavoury and forbidden creatures, ranging from donkeys to elephants, the latter being regarded by Samburu as similar to a human being.

In more complex ways core Samburu values are constituted at multiple levels through food. This is seen most explicitly in regard to the most fundamental of Samburu values, nkanyit (a sense of respect) and its counterpart, lkiti (a sense of shame).18 While the two concepts are closely related, nkanyit refers most specifically to evenhandedness, showing respect, giving everyone their due, and subjugating one's interests and desires to the greater good.19 In contrast, lkiti requires the maintenance of proper social distance, particularly as prescribed by the age–gender system. While proper patterns of food sharing are a core aspect of nkanyit, lkiti is most centrally embodied through eating avoidance.

Nkanyit may be expressed in a number of ways through eating, namely eating the right foods, in the right company (and not in inappropriate company), but most importantly by sharing properly, and not displaying greed. Diffuse and obligatory patterns of food sharing are carried out owing to both love and fear, as well as due to notions of proper social behaviour which are both internalised and externally enforced. Food sharing is a central means of creating and cementing good social relations. As one informant told me ‘friendship is through the stomach’. Eating together is obligatory as a murran, and eating alone, though not prohibited, is not favoured by Samburu generally. Certain foods must be shared. For instance one hind leg of a slaughtered animal must be given out to others, as having two of them roasted in the same fire is strictly prohibited. When an elder goes away on a journey, his wife is expected to put aside milk (mbaran) for him to await his return. Yet he may not drink this mbaran alone (and according to some informants he should not drink it at all). Rather he must call the neighbouring elders and share it with them. On one hand, this is regarded as an important way to cement friendships, and to give and receive news from someone who has been away on a journey. Yet on the other hand, to drink the mbaran alone is regarded as a grave, even fatal offence. To do so is to risk one of the most deadly Samburu curses: ‘May you be killed by your own food’. Because he has been away, neighbours know his wife has been putting aside milk for him; the existence of the mbaran is public knowledge. Consequently, to drink it alone is to deny local elders the milk that they may reasonably expect to receive. Moreover, men fear that an age-mate may have ‘touched the calabash’ that the milk was stored in. This age-mate may have been very hungry, but would have been denied the milk that was being reserved for the husband. By touching the calabash (and thus being aware that there was milk in the house) the milk essentially becomes cursed for its owner. Elders who drink their mbaran, especially alone and repeatedly, are said to develop a horrible and usually fatal stomach affliction.

Food and eating practices are most important in constructing and representing the age–gender system. Both nkanyit and lkiti, which are an intrinsic component of the age–gender system, emerge within it through patterns of food sharing and eating avoidance. The age–gender system is, indeed, mapped onto the culinary system in the case of meat, with every part of the slaughtered animal ‘belonging’ to a particular age–gender sector of Samburu society, ranging from small children, to the oldest man or woman. In domestic life women's identity is constructed around the provisioning of food, and in most contexts they both prepare the food and allocate it according to their perceptions of the needs of various household members. Central to the construction of masculinity is discipline and restraint in eating, particularly in domestic contexts, so that the desires of men's stomachs do not interfere with their responsibilities towards the well-being of women and children.

Food choice and eating practices are most significant within the age–gender system in regard to murran, the age set of bachelor warriors. Rituals which serve to initiate youths into manhood centrally involve food, and, indeed, murranhood is most centrally defined through the lminong (prohibitions) which restrict the ways in which murran may eat. Most importantly, murran must not eat at home, and should not eat any food that has been seen by women. Murran also may not eat except in the company of an age-mate, inculcating not only self-restraint, but also the value of thinking of others before oneself, and of oneself only in relation to others. Moreover, murran are said to belong, collectively and individually to the whole community. As a group they are responsible for the defence of the community as a whole, while at the same time they are expected to perform whatever task they are directed to do by any elder (relative or not) in the community. Conversely, the whole community is expected to assist in feeding murran, with calabashes of milk set aside for them in every home. Thus, the mutual dependency of the murran and the community are created through food sharing. While the whole community is expected to take part in feeding them, they conversely are obligated to assist in any ways that they are called upon.

Digesting Change

Just as food and eating practices are central to traditional Samburu social life, they are central to processes and understandings of change, too. These transformations are to a great extent driven by broader political economy, yet the contours of change, and the way these are understood are actively shaped by Samburu agents. Salient discourses concerning history and change are structured around changes in food and eating, while changes in eating practices have had important implications in behaviour and discourse. It should be emphasised that the forms these take are neither monolithic nor static. They vary not only across age, gender, and educational lines, but across economic-geographical zones within Samburu District. Moreover, if discourses and practices situating food within broader forms of social change were recognisable by the early colonial period, these were not the same as they were in the 1990s, and nor are those of the early 1990s identical to those found today.

With this caveat, let me turn to the central features of contemporary discourses concerning food and history. These are centred most prominently on the decline of the livestock economy: where once they had many livestock, now they have few. Indeed, while per capita livestock holdings in the late 1950s were approximately seven head per person, today they are somewhat below two head per person in most areas. The reasons for this are various: changing patterns of land use, sedentarisation, increased off-take for external markets, coupled with perhaps a tripling in the human population. One important consequence of this, however, is that it has forced Samburu to rely heavily on purchased foodstuffs, particularly maize meal supplemented with vegetable fat, and smaller quantities of other foods. It is interesting to note that while livestock have both economic and ritual importance, the decline of the livestock economy has affected diet much more than it has transformed the ritual uses of cattle. Thus, for instance, the animals slaughtered for ceremonial purposes have not changed. Similarly, bridewealth has remained relatively constant, though marriages are increasingly taking place without the full payment of bridewealth, the rest of the animals being paid to the bride's family over a period of time.

Changes in diet are seen to be significant in a number of ways. The new foods – commonly referred to as ndaa ngiro, or grey foods – are themselves seen by most to be problematic on a number of counts. Certainly there is a general appreciation of the fact that grey foods are keeping people alive when, if relying only on their diminishing herds, many surely would have perished. Yet most find little value in them beyond this. With the exception of tea,20 introduced foods are regarded in much the same way as wild famine foods of the past, i.e. symbolically empty, nutritionally inferior, and not very palatable. One older woman put her sentiments quite bluntly: ‘These foods are just dirt’. Changes in diet are widely linked to diminished health and vitality, particularly in children. When relying on a pastoral diet, people are said to have been fat and healthy, there were few diseases and they did not feel the effects of cold weather. These effects are seen to be particularly significant among those families who lack other ingredients – such as a small amount of milk or animal fat – to accompany their porridge. There is, as well, a common, though not universally held belief, that the properties of the foods themselves have in some way contributed to a contemporary loss of respect, and other negative behaviours.

Food scarcity (generally, and in regard to pastoral products in particular) has itself become a central means for defining contemporary life, and a central idiom for defining key social processes. One example is migratory wage labour, which has become common among younger Samburu men – particularly as watchmen in Nairobi – and which is typically framed around issues of food scarcity.21 Wage labour has been important for Samburu for almost half a century, although it has increased markedly over the past several decades. At the same time, vocabularies of motivation surrounding wage labour have also been transformed. Early wage labour was largely in the military, and early accounts emphasised the desire to fight and kill, while later ones emphasised the desire to gain wealth in order to buy animals. Today, wage labour is spoken of almost universally within an idiom of contemporary food scarcity. Certainly contemporary food problems are an important motivation behind migratory wage labour; yet for some this is merely one (and not necessarily the most important) reason out of many, and for others it is simply an excuse which enjoys a high degree of social acceptance. Indeed, Samburu seek jobs for many reasons, for example to buy beads for girlfriends, to join friends, to seek adventure, or to avoid the demands of herding back home. Yet most suggest, as one informant indicated, ‘they either go out of food problems or out of purda’, ‘purda’ being recklessness, foolishness, or doing something for no good reason. In this sense the only reason which is a reason, is contemporary food scarcity, such that other motivations are rarely mentioned.

Changes in food have had wide ranging ramifications across all sectors of Samburu society. The identity of women continues to be defined through their role as food providers even as they become dependent on a primarily male resource – cash – in order to fulfil it.22 Food scarcity poses problems for elders, as well, who are expected to show restraint in eating, and to whom the processes of food allocation are often hidden.23 In a more general sense, the commodification of food problematises relationships created and maintained through food. As one elder joked, ‘these days if your age-mate gives you blood, and then you have nothing to feed him he will ask you to pay for it’. Certainly he exaggerates, yet it speaks to the broad perception that food sharing has markedly diminished. While sharing milk, or lending milking stock, was traditionally an important means of redistribution from rich to poor, owing to a scarcity of livestock a rapidly decreasing number of Samburu have milk that they can share. Those who have extra milk may, also, be more inclined to sell this milk than provide it freely to a poorer neighbour. Rather than slaughtering an animal, they might also sell it, using the money to buy a smaller amount of meat and other foods, rather than risk being forced to redistribute the bulk of the meat to friends and neighbours. Moreover, Samburu are highly reluctant to share food they have purchased, such as maize meal. Unlike milk, which comes to them freely at every morning and evening milking, purchased foods are seen as a finite resource, which can be renewed only through the continuing sale of their wealth in livestock.

Food is a particularly salient idiom for understanding change in regard to the murran, for whom eating is most closely regulated. Their prestige hinges to a considerably greater degree on their adherence to ‘tradition’, while the prestige of many other Samburu (for example, their families, the local community, and to some extent all Samburu) is tied to the murran, as exemplars of core values and of tradition. In the context of contemporary scarcity, murran are faced with the necessity of eating foods which are unbefitting them – such as agricultural products – as well as to sometimes eat in ways which problematises their prestige, and indeed their very identity as murran. By eating at home, and in ways which are more closely linked to the domestic community, the social distance which is a fundamental manifestation of the discipline and respect associated with proper murran behaviour is seen to have eroded.

Let me return now to the example with which I began this paper, namely the simple act of cooking. I do so to suggest that even the simplest, most commonplace, mundane act may form a lens for understanding broader forms of change that is both culturally distinct and highly salient. Indeed, for Samburu, a mode of eating in which all are dependent upon cooking for their daily sustenance, is itself problematic. This is seen less in the additional labour and complexities which go into cooked food, although these are themselves significant. Most centrally, it is the act of eating these foods that is seen as threatening or diminishing key cultural values.

While subsisting on pastoral foods – particularly milk – cooking is not the everyday necessity, which it has become today in most areas.24 Milk is simply collected into separate calabashes by women at the time of milking, a calabash for the husband, one for murran, and individual calabashes for each child. Cooking need not occur on a daily basis, but only in the preparation of famine foods or meat, the latter of which (as I will discuss below) follows a radically different pattern from that of purchased foods. Moreover, the whole rhythm and organisation of eating is transformed in the eating of ndaa ngiro, or grey foods. In a Samburu milk-based diet, there is no meal time, per se. While there are particular times when an individual is more or less likely to eat – particularly following the morning and evening milkings – this is in no sense obligatory. With the milk placed in a calabash, one may choose to d rink their milk at any time deemed suitable. It may be shortly after milking, but it may be hours later, or even days later in the case of fermented milk. Moreover, excepting murran who are required to eat with one another, there is no necessity of taking one's food in a group, family or otherwise. Anyone – child, murran, elder, woman – can, and frequently will, eat at a distinct time of their own choosing.

As a consequence, milk-based meals allow for the maintenance of the social distance intrinsic to Samburu notions of respect (nkanyit) and shame (lkiti). The same may be said – perhaps even more strongly – for the cooking of meat as it continues today, though on a much less frequent basis than when Samburu were wealthy in livestock. Not only do different family members eat different parts of the animals, as I have discussed above, but they typically eat them at different times, in different places, cooked over different fires. Murran may feed on separate animals entirely which they have slaughtered in the bush, though often bringing the appropriate pieces back to be eaten by age–gender sectors to whom they belong at home. The parts for children, such as kidneys and heart, may be summarily roasted, either at home or at the slaughtering site. The head, which belongs to the elder, is slowly boiled as soup, and eaten at a time of his liking. Thus the cooking of meat reinforces notions about the distinctness of different age gender sectors, but also the social distance and physical separation intrinsic to appropriate interactions among them.

In contrast, the cooking of purchased food has the tendency to bring all people – including to a lesser extent murran – together around the same cooking fire and the same cooking pot. Cooking occurs at particular times – morning, afternoon and evening – and while food may be set aside for someone who is not present, there is a strong preference for getting food while it is hot. Moreover, since cooking takes time, there is a tendency for people to wait nearby while the food is being prepared. Consequently, rather than creating physical and temporal distance in the act of eating, and thereby reinforcing the social distance and distinctiveness between various age–gender categories, it blurs these differences. With the cooking of purchased foods, a variety of age–gender groups are brought together to wait together for food, and to eat more or less from the same pot. In this sense, cooking is seen to breed familiarity, and a lack of respect.

Even murran – who still follow proscriptions against eating food seen by women – are seen to have suffered from this tendency. Although they do not eat foods such as porridge in the company of women, today many will take tea at home. Samburu tea – made with as much milk as possible, and copious amounts of sugar – is calorie rich and an important staple food. Having been fused to the indigenous category of milk, in most areas murran are now allowed to drink it at home. In highland areas, murran are today seen to be particularly close to domestic consumption, even if they do not actually eat the same food as other family members. In these areas murran today typically cook for themselves inside houses in the settlements, rather than in the bush. Thus, even if they do not eat together, they are perceived at times to be basically loitering around the settlement, waiting for someone to empty a house where they may cook. Even if they formally follow the prohibitions of murranhood, they rarely eat in the bush away from settlements, and thus the social distance and respect – which they display and direct towards others – is seen to have radically diminished. As Letoronkos, an Lkishilli elder pointed out, reflecting on his own murranhood: ‘We never used to eat these foods people eat today. We only ate meat away from home. … The murran these days just stay at home.’ The same sentiments are expressed, if more strongly, by Lemantile, an elder from the Kimaniki age set who were warriors during the 1950s. He asserted that ‘[women, elders and murran] are all mixed together now, and that is why we say the place is dead now. We say that the place is dead, and old men are no longer respected. It is these foods which have brought such a change.’

Thus food becomes a centerpiece for understanding broader social transformations. Food is not in this sense simply something one eats, but something that creates socially-proper behaviour at a variety of levels. Through food, these elders and others paint a view of the past when pastoral foods were plenty, and those who deserved respect received respect, in marked contrast to an impoverished present, when food is lacking and behaviour degenerate.

Conclusion

The view of the elder just quoted, though widespread, provides a somewhat idealised view of the past. In documenting the ways in which Samburu view the past and the present, it is essential that one neither ignores the good and the bad in each, nor the many differences that varying Samburu have in their perceptions of these. Certainly there are core themes in Samburu understandings of history through food. Samburu are acutely aware of the decline of the livestock economy over the past few decades, with how they eat – and how they no longer eat – a central component of the lived experience of this collective memory. Yet at the same time these historical understandings are neither simple nor uncontested. While for some younger Samburu their opinions of a life based on livestock products are shaped by anti-pastoralist development discourses about a life they have never themselves fully experienced, older Samburu – regardless of their ideological tendencies – may lack the very strength of tooth to chew the maize delivered by relief lorries from the World Food Programme. Similarly, it is not uncommon for someone to, in one breath, extol the varied virtues of a life based on pastoral products as compared to the ‘poverty foods’ of the present, while in the next breath note how plentiful food is now, or, as a man told me recently, ‘if it were not for the ration no one would have been left standing after the last drought’. Even the notion of food sharing may be read in multiple ways. While typically Samburu speak of food-sharing as part of an idyllic past when ‘everyone loved each other’, and there was always someone to lend a milk cow, or to fill the calabash of a family in need, such food-sharing may be read, additionally, as dependency and submission to a wealthier, more powerful individual. Thus the ability for the able-bodied poor to subsist on a meagre diet furnished by small work contracts is read by some as triumphant independence.

It is essential to keep in the forefront that any model of history – whether our own or a Samburu one – is shaped by a particular lens, a particular point of view.25 We, like various Samburu, fashion our narratives of change from our present concerns; yet I suggest that, as anthropologists, it is essential that we try as much as possible to make them consonant with what is important in the lives of our informants in the particular places and the particular times that we work, rather than relying on the convenient idioms of capitalism, globalisation or modernity. The impact of these on our subjects’ lives cannot be ignored, yet these may mean far less to an understanding of what is important to our subjects than the small, practical, mundane routines which form the locus of social relations, and which constitute the material and symbolic frameworks of their daily lives.

I have argued that a food-centered model of history is more than simply an indigenous idiom for understanding broader political economic processes. Rather, the centrality of eating practices in ordering Samburu social relations renders these a key site for external political economy to impact upon local life in a way which is significant to indigenous practices and social values. As such, a food-centered model of Samburu history provides an example of an analysis of broader political economic processes which highlights the local specificity of their form and meaning, rather than relying on the idioms of capitalism itself. The recent trend towards increasingly situating anthropological analyses within global flows of goods, ideas and practices is likely in coming years to only increase in importance. Yet as anthropologists continue to seek the ethnographic correlates of global forces, there is also a danger of losing the agency, and the concerns, of culturally constructed local actors from our analyses. I suggest that while the questions we ask have frequently been pre-figured by our own understandings of global capitalism or modernity, these may bear only indirectly on how our subjects experience, negotiate and understand contexts 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’