B Straight
Biographic Data
| ID | 13315 |
|---|---|
| NAME | B Straight |
| GIVEN NAMES | B |
| FAMILY NAME | Straight |
| SIGNATURE | STRAIGHT B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Western Michigan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1387-5514 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 118 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Dual Behavioral–Physiological Buffering of Mothers' Milk Facilitates Drought Adaptability of Pastoralists and Agropastoralists in Northern Kenya
BACKGROUND: Mothers physiologically buffer key milk nutrient content against nutritional stress. How this is nested in upstream behavioral buffering is not well understood. OBJECTIVES: The study explored whether pastoralists and agropastoralists' economic or other behavioral coping strategies against droughts, such as livestock sales and child fosterage, influence maternal risk for malnutrition or milk nutrient content. METHODS: Using data from 2…
Biological Mechanisms for Allen's Rule: DNA Methylation as Mediator of the Association Between In Utero Exposure to Environmental Heat and Tibial Growth in Childhood
OBJECTIVES: Understanding human phenotypic plasticity in response to social, ecosystem, and climate interactions can be an important tool for designing social and public health strategies that increase climate change resilience. Sensitivity of the tibia to environmental perturbations is well established; moreover, Allen's rule predicts relatively longer tibial length in hotter climates. In this study, we hypothesized DNA methylation (DNAm) change…
Drought-compounded stress and immune function in Kenyan pastoralist boys and girls occupying contrasting climate zones
In spite of important differences between climate subregions, the common elements throughout the Samburu pastoralist leanscape include food and water insecurity and overall precarity exacerbated by drought and climate change. Community-driven interventions are needed to reduce precarity for young people pursuing pastoralist livelihoods
Carolyn Kornfeld Lesorogol (1965–2023) – In Memoriam
This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Dynamics of Identification and Conflict: Anthropological Encounters
Dealing with the dynamics of identification and conflict, this book uses theoretical orientations ranging from political ecology to rational choice theory, interpretive approaches, Marxism and multiscalar analysis. Case studies set in Africa, Europe and Central Asia are grouped in three sections devoted to pastoralism, identity and migration. What connects all of these anthropological explorations is a close focus on processes of identification a…
Lifetime stress and war exposure timing may predict methylation changes at NR3C1 based on a pilot study in a warrior cohort in a small‐scale society in Kenya
OBJECTIVES: Candidate gene methylation studies of NR3C1 have identified associations with psychosocial adversity, including war trauma. This pilot study (sample sizes from 22 to 45 for primary analyses) examined NR3C1 methylation in a group of Kenyan pastoralist young men in relation to culturally relevant traumatic experiences, including participation in coalitional lethal gun violence. METHODS: Adolescent and young adult Samburu men ("warriors"…
Family socioeconomic status and child telomere length among the Samburu of Kenya
Cutting Time: Beads, Sex and Songs in the Making of Samburu Memory
Maasai associate cuts in an ornament with natural and cultural phenomena like slashes in a piece of roasting meat, breaks in a line of cattle or people, or the short interruption when a Maasai woman fills a cup by pouring a little milk, stopping, and then pouring again to fill it up. A general cultural attitude unites these different ‘cuts’: nothing should be continuous and unbroken. The Samburu inhabit northern Kenya’s semi-arid lands, raising c…
Land conflict, murder, and the rise of “timeless culture” and girl blaming (Samburu, Kenya)
The paper examines youthful practices in the Samburu pastoralist age set system as they evolved into tropes of warrior girlfriends inciting masculine violence. Through a close examination of a well-publicized Kenyan court case surrounding the suspicious death in 1931 of Theodore Powys, a British settler, this paper documents the shaping of a discourse about feminine agency and masculine bravado among the youth that eventuated in harsh state-spons…
Prosocial Emotion, Adolescence, and Warfare: DNA Methylation Associates with Culturally Salient Combat Variables
Uniquely Human: Cultural Norms and Private Acts of Mercy in the War Zone
War-zone mercy-sparing of one's culturally constructed enemies in the midst of organized group violence-is a political act but also a potentially empathically motivated one that has contributed to shared expressive gestures across cultural boundaries and to international laws of war. This article elucidates historical and cross-cultural norms for war-zone mercy in order to provide a theoretical framework for scholarly research examining this beha…
Comparative nutritional indicators as markers for resilience: The impacts of low-intensity violence among three pastoralist communities of northern Kenya
We present results from a collaborative project on the consequences of endemic violence in the pastoralist zone of Northern Kenya. Drawing on our ethnographically driven epidemiological approach, we examine the differential cost of violence by examining household nutrition. The case/control approach we employ draws data from six sites that are culturally similar but differ in the degree of exposure to, or relative insulation from, violence. As on…
Dust people: Samburu perspectives on disaster, identity, and landscape
This paper discusses a Samburu pastoralist landscape idiom, ntoror, that encapsulates ideas about agentive pastoralist landscapes that inherently attract conflict; and passionate, place-based identities forged out of environmental and human-wrought disaster. The paper grows out of a project that experimentally integrated ethnographic self-scrutiny with a bio-archaeological excavation involving human remains, with the aim of encouraging reciprocal…
Suicide in Three East African Pastoralist Communities and the Role of Researcher Outsiders for Positive Transformation: A Case Study
It was maendeleo that removed them: Disturbing Burials and Reciprocal Knowledge Production in a Context of Collaborative Archaeology
Recent decades have witnessed a growth in approaches to research and writing across anthropology's four fields that emphasize the need to respect alternative narratives and constructions of history, and to engage with anthropology's 'publics'. These developments have generated more ethically responsible research and more inclusive writing practices. Nevertheless, the actual doing of cross-cultural collaboration and knowledge production remains a …
Miracles and Extraordinary Experience in Northern Kenya
The miraculous blends with the mundane in this book as the Samburu continue their day-to-day twenty-first-century existence. Straight describes miracles inside the cultural logic that makes them possible, questioning how anthropology can best engage with the improbable
Umoja: No Men Allowed by Elizabeth Tadic
How Enemies Are Made: Towards a Theory of Ethnic and Religious Conflicts by Günter Schlee
Death, Grief, and Cross-World Longing
Death has enduringly offered anthropologists a unique theoretical conundrum in that it concerns humans and human personhood, and yet unlike most aspects of social life, it involves an absent interlocutor. A terrifying rupture into mundane existence, death demands a response on the part of individuals and communities. The four books I review here offer varied contributions to this rich anthropological tradition but are united by a concern with gri…
Documenting the health consequences of endemic warfare in three pastoralist communities of northern Kenya: A conceptual framework
Making Sense of Violence in the “Badlands” of Kenya
In this article, I situate violent conflict affecting pastoralists in northern Kenya in the context of media representations of violent incidents and the relationship that many Kenyans perceive between such incidents and election politics. I argue that media representations are implicated in cycles of violent conflict through erasure and misrecognition. Most crucially, media representations tend to focus on cultural stereotypes that tacitly legit…
Killing God: Exceptional Moments in the Colonial Missionary Encounter
This paper pivots around an exceptional moment of colonial missionary encounter-the attempted "murder" in the 1930s of an incarnation of Samburu Divinity (pastoralists, northern Kenya). Examining this event through a comparative focus on other strange cases of "divinicide," I elucidate certain key moments of intense metaphysical struggle that typically become effaced, forgotten, or flattened in the process of colonial witness. Focus on the ontolo…
House, fire, gender
In this article I examine the Samburu house (pastoralists, northern Kenya) and its fire as the sacred locus of right moral practices—as feminine objects consecrated through proper use. I begin by way of counter-example, however, describing the moral entailments of a particular event, a woman's house that caught fire in contentious circumstances. Following this elucidation of houses made sacred or desecrated through use, I will conclude with a dis…
Becoming Dead: The Entangled Agencies of the Dearly Departed
This article introduces the themes of the essays in this special issue in juxtaposition with illustrative comparative examples, including one from my work with Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya. As the title suggests, at the core of the 2003 AAA session of which these articles represent a subset, was a concern with personhood and the entanglement of agencies that occurs in the practices surrounding death. Examining death directly and as its …
Museums and Urban Culture in West Africa
Museums and Urban Culture in West Africa. ALEXIS B. A. ADANDE AND EMMANUEL ARINZE, eds. Oxford, UK: James Currey, 2002. 168 pp
Documenting the health consequences of endemic warfare in three pastoralist communities of northern Kenya: A conceptual framework
Dust people: Samburu perspectives on disaster, identity, and landscape
This paper discusses a Samburu pastoralist landscape idiom, ntoror, that encapsulates ideas about agentive pastoralist landscapes that inherently attract conflict; and passionate, place-based identities forged out of environmental and human-wrought disaster. The paper grows out of a project that experimentally integrated ethnographic self-scrutiny with a bio-archaeological excavation involving human remains, with the aim of encouraging reciprocal…
In the Belly of History: Memory, Forgetting, and the Hazards of Reproduction
This paper examines the intertwined issues of memory and forgetting, focusing particularly on the question of precisely how, and by what social mechanisms, forgetting is accomplished. I discuss how collective and individual forms of forgetting are central to Bourdieu's notion of the habitus, commenting that the habitus is a living paradox, foreclosing (unimagined perhaps because unimaginable) possibilities and opening others only when moments of …
From Samburu Heirloom to New Age Artifact: The Cross-Cultural Consumption ofMporoMarriage Beads
Antique Venetian trade beads used in Samburu women's marriage necklaces (mporo) have recently undergone intense recommodif ication in the transnational trade bead market concurrent with their appropriation by Euro-American women in both religious and secular domains. The article offers duai ethnographies of this mporo bead in order to advance anthropological understandings of precious objects in the context of globalization. Samburu and Euro-Amer…
It was maendeleo that removed them: Disturbing Burials and Reciprocal Knowledge Production in a Context of Collaborative Archaeology
Recent decades have witnessed a growth in approaches to research and writing across anthropology's four fields that emphasize the need to respect alternative narratives and constructions of history, and to engage with anthropology's 'publics'. These developments have generated more ethically responsible research and more inclusive writing practices. Nevertheless, the actual doing of cross-cultural collaboration and knowledge production remains a …
Comparative nutritional indicators as markers for resilience: The impacts of low-intensity violence among three pastoralist communities of northern Kenya
We present results from a collaborative project on the consequences of endemic violence in the pastoralist zone of Northern Kenya. Drawing on our ethnographically driven epidemiological approach, we examine the differential cost of violence by examining household nutrition. The case/control approach we employ draws data from six sites that are culturally similar but differ in the degree of exposure to, or relative insulation from, violence. As on…
Killing God: Exceptional Moments in the Colonial Missionary Encounter
This paper pivots around an exceptional moment of colonial missionary encounter-the attempted "murder" in the 1930s of an incarnation of Samburu Divinity (pastoralists, northern Kenya). Examining this event through a comparative focus on other strange cases of "divinicide," I elucidate certain key moments of intense metaphysical struggle that typically become effaced, forgotten, or flattened in the process of colonial witness. Focus on the ontolo…
Drought-compounded stress and immune function in Kenyan pastoralist boys and girls occupying contrasting climate zones
In spite of important differences between climate subregions, the common elements throughout the Samburu pastoralist leanscape include food and water insecurity and overall precarity exacerbated by drought and climate change. Community-driven interventions are needed to reduce precarity for young people pursuing pastoralist livelihoods
Uniquely Human: Cultural Norms and Private Acts of Mercy in the War Zone
War-zone mercy-sparing of one's culturally constructed enemies in the midst of organized group violence-is a political act but also a potentially empathically motivated one that has contributed to shared expressive gestures across cultural boundaries and to international laws of war. This article elucidates historical and cross-cultural norms for war-zone mercy in order to provide a theoretical framework for scholarly research examining this beha…
Prosocial Emotion, Adolescence, and Warfare: DNA Methylation Associates with Culturally Salient Combat Variables
Death, Grief, and Cross-World Longing
Death has enduringly offered anthropologists a unique theoretical conundrum in that it concerns humans and human personhood, and yet unlike most aspects of social life, it involves an absent interlocutor. A terrifying rupture into mundane existence, death demands a response on the part of individuals and communities. The four books I review here offer varied contributions to this rich anthropological tradition but are united by a concern with gri…
House, fire, gender
In this article I examine the Samburu house (pastoralists, northern Kenya) and its fire as the sacred locus of right moral practices—as feminine objects consecrated through proper use. I begin by way of counter-example, however, describing the moral entailments of a particular event, a woman's house that caught fire in contentious circumstances. Following this elucidation of houses made sacred or desecrated through use, I will conclude with a dis…
Family socioeconomic status and child telomere length among the Samburu of Kenya
Introduction: Conflict at the Center of Ethnography
Introduction: Conflict at the Center of Ethnography
“Between Mamas”: The Anthropology of a Dispute, or—The Perils of Having Sons in the Field
This article both narrates and analyzes a conflict that my son and I were the center of in 1994 while I was conducting fieldwork with Samburu pastoralists in Northern Kenya. I draw upon a classic anthropological literature on conflict, most notably Gulliver's notion of “prehistory” to enframe a discussion of the participants' motivations, including my own. In discussing the moot held to settle the conflict and its dramatic consequences, I address…
Between Mamas: The Anthropology of a Dispute, orThe Perils of Having Sons in the Field
From Samburu Heirloom to New Age Artifact: The Cross-Cultural Consumption ofMporoMarriage Beads
Antique Venetian trade beads used in Samburu women's marriage necklaces (mporo) have recently undergone intense recommodif ication in the transnational trade bead market concurrent with their appropriation by Euro-American women in both religious and secular domains. The article offers duai ethnographies of this mporo bead in order to advance anthropological understandings of precious objects in the context of globalization. Samburu and Euro-Amer…
In the Belly of History: Memory, Forgetting, and the Hazards of Reproduction
This paper examines the intertwined issues of memory and forgetting, focusing particularly on the question of precisely how, and by what social mechanisms, forgetting is accomplished. I discuss how collective and individual forms of forgetting are central to Bourdieu's notion of the habitus, commenting that the habitus is a living paradox, foreclosing (unimagined perhaps because unimaginable) possibilities and opening others only when moments of …
Becoming Dead: The Entangled Agencies of the Dearly Departed
This article introduces the themes of the essays in this special issue in juxtaposition with illustrative comparative examples, including one from my work with Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya. As the title suggests, at the core of the 2003 AAA session of which these articles represent a subset, was a concern with personhood and the entanglement of agencies that occurs in the practices surrounding death. Examining death directly and as its …
Museums and Urban Culture in West Africa
Museums and Urban Culture in West Africa. ALEXIS B. A. ADANDE AND EMMANUEL ARINZE, eds. Oxford, UK: James Currey, 2002. 168 pp
House, fire, gender
In this article I examine the Samburu house (pastoralists, northern Kenya) and its fire as the sacred locus of right moral practices—as feminine objects consecrated through proper use. I begin by way of counter-example, however, describing the moral entailments of a particular event, a woman's house that caught fire in contentious circumstances. Following this elucidation of houses made sacred or desecrated through use, I will conclude with a dis…
Killing God: Exceptional Moments in the Colonial Missionary Encounter
This paper pivots around an exceptional moment of colonial missionary encounter-the attempted "murder" in the 1930s of an incarnation of Samburu Divinity (pastoralists, northern Kenya). Examining this event through a comparative focus on other strange cases of "divinicide," I elucidate certain key moments of intense metaphysical struggle that typically become effaced, forgotten, or flattened in the process of colonial witness. Focus on the ontolo…
Making Sense of Violence in the “Badlands” of Kenya
In this article, I situate violent conflict affecting pastoralists in northern Kenya in the context of media representations of violent incidents and the relationship that many Kenyans perceive between such incidents and election politics. I argue that media representations are implicated in cycles of violent conflict through erasure and misrecognition. Most crucially, media representations tend to focus on cultural stereotypes that tacitly legit…
Death, Grief, and Cross-World Longing
Death has enduringly offered anthropologists a unique theoretical conundrum in that it concerns humans and human personhood, and yet unlike most aspects of social life, it involves an absent interlocutor. A terrifying rupture into mundane existence, death demands a response on the part of individuals and communities. The four books I review here offer varied contributions to this rich anthropological tradition but are united by a concern with gri…
Documenting the health consequences of endemic warfare in three pastoralist communities of northern Kenya: A conceptual framework
How Enemies Are Made: Towards a Theory of Ethnic and Religious Conflicts by Günter Schlee
Miracles and Extraordinary Experience in Northern Kenya
The miraculous blends with the mundane in this book as the Samburu continue their day-to-day twenty-first-century existence. Straight describes miracles inside the cultural logic that makes them possible, questioning how anthropology can best engage with the improbable
Umoja: No Men Allowed by Elizabeth Tadic
Suicide in Three East African Pastoralist Communities and the Role of Researcher Outsiders for Positive Transformation: A Case Study
It was maendeleo that removed them: Disturbing Burials and Reciprocal Knowledge Production in a Context of Collaborative Archaeology
Recent decades have witnessed a growth in approaches to research and writing across anthropology's four fields that emphasize the need to respect alternative narratives and constructions of history, and to engage with anthropology's 'publics'. These developments have generated more ethically responsible research and more inclusive writing practices. Nevertheless, the actual doing of cross-cultural collaboration and knowledge production remains a …
Comparative nutritional indicators as markers for resilience: The impacts of low-intensity violence among three pastoralist communities of northern Kenya
We present results from a collaborative project on the consequences of endemic violence in the pastoralist zone of Northern Kenya. Drawing on our ethnographically driven epidemiological approach, we examine the differential cost of violence by examining household nutrition. The case/control approach we employ draws data from six sites that are culturally similar but differ in the degree of exposure to, or relative insulation from, violence. As on…
Dust people: Samburu perspectives on disaster, identity, and landscape
This paper discusses a Samburu pastoralist landscape idiom, ntoror, that encapsulates ideas about agentive pastoralist landscapes that inherently attract conflict; and passionate, place-based identities forged out of environmental and human-wrought disaster. The paper grows out of a project that experimentally integrated ethnographic self-scrutiny with a bio-archaeological excavation involving human remains, with the aim of encouraging reciprocal…
Uniquely Human: Cultural Norms and Private Acts of Mercy in the War Zone
War-zone mercy-sparing of one's culturally constructed enemies in the midst of organized group violence-is a political act but also a potentially empathically motivated one that has contributed to shared expressive gestures across cultural boundaries and to international laws of war. This article elucidates historical and cross-cultural norms for war-zone mercy in order to provide a theoretical framework for scholarly research examining this beha…
Prosocial Emotion, Adolescence, and Warfare: DNA Methylation Associates with Culturally Salient Combat Variables
Cutting Time: Beads, Sex and Songs in the Making of Samburu Memory
Maasai associate cuts in an ornament with natural and cultural phenomena like slashes in a piece of roasting meat, breaks in a line of cattle or people, or the short interruption when a Maasai woman fills a cup by pouring a little milk, stopping, and then pouring again to fill it up. A general cultural attitude unites these different ‘cuts’: nothing should be continuous and unbroken. The Samburu inhabit northern Kenya’s semi-arid lands, raising c…
Land conflict, murder, and the rise of “timeless culture” and girl blaming (Samburu, Kenya)
The paper examines youthful practices in the Samburu pastoralist age set system as they evolved into tropes of warrior girlfriends inciting masculine violence. Through a close examination of a well-publicized Kenyan court case surrounding the suspicious death in 1931 of Theodore Powys, a British settler, this paper documents the shaping of a discourse about feminine agency and masculine bravado among the youth that eventuated in harsh state-spons…
Lifetime stress and war exposure timing may predict methylation changes at NR3C1 based on a pilot study in a warrior cohort in a small‐scale society in Kenya
OBJECTIVES: Candidate gene methylation studies of NR3C1 have identified associations with psychosocial adversity, including war trauma. This pilot study (sample sizes from 22 to 45 for primary analyses) examined NR3C1 methylation in a group of Kenyan pastoralist young men in relation to culturally relevant traumatic experiences, including participation in coalitional lethal gun violence. METHODS: Adolescent and young adult Samburu men ("warriors"…
Sociology (22 works) · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology (14 works) · Political science (13 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (11 works) · Anthropology (11 works) · History (11 works) · Pastoralism (11 works) · Geography (10 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Law (9 works)