Individuality, Freedom of Choice, and Cultural Flexibility of the Kamba

Abstract

THE Bantu-speaking Kamba of Kenya constitute a large and diversified tribe. They number some 800,000 people at the present time and effective political organization, apart from the British-imposed administrative structure, is primarily limited to the local community level. The Kamba have no supreme chief-indeed, they have no indigenous chiefs at all-and no tribal council. Each local community, known as an utui, is in theory autonomous and, in fact, there are few occasions in Kamba life which require the joint effort of persons from more than one utui. When this does happen, as, for example, in some of the circumcision ceremonies, the co-operative activity usually involves persons from only a few contiguous motui. The absence of a central political structure and the emphasis on self-governing local communities, together with the size and distribution of the tribe and the fact that the Kamba are only now beginning to fill up the territory they have occupied for less than 300 years, serve to make of the Kamba a test case for problems of variation and adaptability. A consideration of the factors of cultural adaptability and variation leads logically, if not inevitably, to a consideration of the nature of culture itself. However limited the sample, we cannot speak meaningfully of variationswithin communities, between communities, from tribe to tribe, from one ecological base to another-without concerning ourselves with the larger question of precisely what it is that is varying. There has been some tendency in anthropology, usually implicit rather than overt, to think of cultures in terms of fixed designs for living, stable blueprints for behavior, and relatively rigid guidelines for conduct. This tendency has been more apparent in the unstated assumptions which underlie a great deal of anthropological research than in formal theoretical statements about culture, but it nevertheless exists. Many of us have further assumed that a strong commitment to the specific rules of a particular culture is a virtually universal human characteristic. Even though we know that all cultures are in a process of constant change, our interpretations of cultural transmission are sometimes phrased as though this were a simple matter of passing on an intact model from generation to generation, rather as if we were referring to insect societies with cultural learning substituted for genetic inheritance. This seems to be particularly true in many acculturation studies, though by no means in all of them, with the pictures they provide of peoples clinging grimly to the culture of the good old days in opposition to the presumed cultural breakdown of the present. It may be suggested that this picture is most applicable to situations in which a culture is prevented from changing in certain specified