Suchergebnisse

Being there, being friends, being uncertain -- A case of testicles : manufacturing consent of an ethnography of lies? -- Green stomachs, Mau Mau and the government of women -- Killing the sheik -- Bad friends and good enemies -- Views on a massacre -- War stories

Male‐centred aspects of political behaviour have generally remained the explanatory and interpretive focuses in analyses of the social organization of African pastoralists. While recent work on African pastoralists has shed increasing light on the lives of women, I argue that key assumptions underlying anthropological models of male dominance in these societies have been insufficiently challenged. Drawing on recent approaches in gender and social organization that highlight the mutual constitution of domestic and political domains, I examine comparative material from two well‐known pastoralist societies: the Samburu of northern Kenya and the Nuer of southern Sudan. In doing so, I suggest strong linkages between male‐dominated 'political spheres' and areas of domestic life in which the role of women is more significant – particularly processes of domestic food distribution. In re‐examining central facets of Samburu politics – which are best known through Paul Spencer's seminal analysis of the gerontocratic aspects of Samburu political life – I suggest that the status and identities of Samburu men are in fundamental ways defined through their relationship to women as providers of food within Samburu households. Comparative material from the Nuer suggests, additionally, the strategic use of food by women in influencing male 'political spheres'. In comparing these cases, I suggest a more general model through which domestic processes of food allocation as realms of female‐centred social action may be seen to play a central role in the forms and processes of pastoral 'political' life.

In recent years, many Samburu women have begun to brew beer and liquor for sale to elders—including their own husbands. Drawing on "cooperative conflict" approaches to domestic processes, the essay examines brewing in reference to the economic and cultural position of men and women within Samburu households and society at large. Focusing in particular on the issues posed to each gender by the differential control of key resources by the other—food by women and cash by men—the essay views brewing as a negotiated structure through which men and women address the particular gender‐based problems they encounter in daily life. [gender, family, brewing, Africa]

Much of the burgeoning literature on food in anthropology and related fields implicitly engages with issues of memory. Although only a relatively small but growing number of food-centered studies frame themselves as directly concerned with memory—for instance, in regard to embodied forms of memory—many more engage with its varying forms and manifestations, such as in a diverse range of studies in which food becomes a significant site implicated in social change, the now-voluminous body relating food to ethnic or other forms of identity, and invented food traditions in nationalism and consumer capitalism. Such studies are of interest not only because of what they may tell us about food, but moreover because particular facets of food and food-centered memory offer more general insights into the phenomenon of memory and approaches to its study in anthropology and related fields.