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.