Staging Social Structures: Ritual and Social Organisation in an Egalitarian Society. The Pastoral Pokot of Northern Kenya

Abstract

The pastoral Pokot of northern Kenya represent their society as highly structured by descent and age grading. Descent groups (clans, lineages) and age grades (age sets, generation sets) are depicted as bounded but related units within a complex hierarchical and coherent system, the essence of Pokot society which is staged and visualised in major rituals. This study shows that they are not important in Pokot economic exchange. The formal analysis of livestock exchange networks centred upon individuals shows that emic representations do not match actual exchange behaviour. Complementing the well-established structuralist representation of pastoral social systems, this paper investigates the agency aspect, which has been largely unexplored. It furthermore documents how social exchange is contained in the various institutions of descent and age grading. Contextualising the case historically it is shown that the pastoral Pokot developed from a fragmented clan-based agro-pastoral society in which descent was the main ordering principle for land tenure and conflict management into a more comprehensive social entity with clearly definable borders to the outside, dense internal exchange networks and strong representations of the corporateness of subgroups. The rapid adoption of mobile livestock husbandry was accompanied by the rise of widespread exchange networks and social interaction with a much wider group of unrelated actors marking the foundations of a pastoral society.