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 forunderstanding the changing politics of everyday life for Samburupastoralists in northern Kenya. The analysis engages with longstandingdebates concerning the historical models applied by western analysts tonon-western peoples, as well as contemporary issues concerning thecontours of ethnography within the context of global processes. Untilrecent times Samburu were wealthy livestock keepers, with a centralcultural emphasis on a pastoral diet of milk, meat and blood. Patternsof provisioning, eating and food sharing constituted a domain denselypacked with core cultural values, and thickly entangled webs of socialrelations. Over the past several decades, however, there has been asignificant decline in the Samburu livestock economy. A diet centrallyconstituted of livestock products is now impossible for most Samburu,while problematizing those wide-ranging social and cultural domainsclosely entwined with food and eating. Thus, food and eating practiceshave become a crucial site where Samburu both experience and shapeaspects of change, as well as an important indigenous historical idiomthrough which they understand their own social transformations. I arguethat a model of Samburu history centred upon food effectively situatesSamburu within broader political-economic forces without subjugating theagency and the meanings of Samburu actors to those concerns mostcentrally raised by attention to western notions of modernity and globalprocesses. An approach centred upon the mundane realities of everydaylife has a value in forging a unique and meaningful alternative towestern models of change.