Introduction to From Mukogodo to Masai

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Introduction to From Mukogodo to Masai
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Some Basic Facts about Kenya

• Independence in 1963 from Britain
• About twice the size of Nevada
• 37 million people
• Major exports tea, horticultural products
  (flowers shipped to Europe), coffee
• Democracy although last presidential and
  parliamentary election (2007) marred by fraud and
  riots
• Provides shelter to almost a million refugees
  from Somalia and Uganda

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The Laikipia Plateau
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Lee Cronk

• Anthropology Department, Rutgers University (NB)
• Lived among the Mukogodo, 1986-87, 1992, 1993
• His interest human behavioral ecology

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Oil Consumption per person, 2006
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What did it mean for the Mukogodo to be hunters
and gatherers?
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The Original Affluent Society
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Some anthropological terms

• Exogamy marrying outside your group
• Endogamy marrying inside your group
• Lineage exogamy marrying outside your lineage
• Patrilocal answers the question of where the
  married couple live they live with the husbands
  family or where the husband grew up after marriage

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Aidan Southalls Definition of Tribe

• A whole society
• with a high degree of self-sufficiency
• at a near subsistence level
• based on a relatively simple technology
• without writing or literature,
• politically autonomous
• and with its own distinctive language, culture,
  and sense of identity.
• Would you add anything to this definition?
• Do you see anything wrong with this definition
  given the reading so far?

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Tribe vs. ethnicity
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Ethnicity in Africa and European Colonialism

• Europeans grouped people together they spoke
  similar languages but didnt think of themselves
  as a single tribe
• Europeans grouped them into tribes and created
  chiefs on the basis of physical features to
  control them through indirect rule
• This allowed elders to have more control in
  determining tradition to control the younger
  men and women.
• European missionaries and African intellectuals
  involved in language translation
• Migrant men were more prone to tradition to
  control women in the rural areas---through
  hometown associations

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• It was not that people were an undifferentiated
  mass, but that they were differentiated in many
  subtle and complex ways for different purposes
  (Southall, p. 43)
• Most Africans moved in and out of multiple
  identities, defining themselves at one moment as
  subject to this chief, at another moment as part
  of this cult, at another moment as part of this
  clan, and at yet another moment as an initiate in
  that professional guild (Ranger, p. 603).