Ethnogenesis and surplus food production

Communitas and identity building among nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ilchamus, Lake Baringo, Kenya

Dados Bibliográficos

ID3919224
AutoresNik Petek (0000-0003-4552-0125, Uppsala University, autor correspondente), Paul Lane (0000-0002-9936-1310, Uppsala University)
Ano2017
Volume49
Fascículo1
Páginas40-60
Data de publicação2017-01-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoWorld Archaeology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0043-8243 • E-ISSN: 1470-1375
EditoraInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00438243.2016.1259583
OpenAlexW2576005914
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas10
Referências citadas95

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Most archaeological discussions of surplus production tend to focus either on its role in the emergence and maintenance of social complexity (whether among hunter-gatherers, farming communities or incipient states) or on the enabling properties of surplus as a basis for technological advances and aesthetic elaboration. Here, we offer a rather different perspective on surplus as an initiator of communitas and driver of ethnogenesis following a period of intense socio-ecological stress, environmental degradation and localized demographic decline during the nineteenth century. The particular case study concerns the Maa-language-speaking Ilchamus community who currently occupy areas around the southern end of Lake Baringo in the Central Rift Valley, Kenya. Drawing on a combination of new archaeological evidence, oral accounts and archival sources, the paper details the processes whereby destitute groups were drawn together into acts of surplus food production, initially of grain via the implementation of a system of irrigated agriculture and subsequently of cattle through the mobilization of kinship and related ties. In so doing, disparate older identities were abandoned or transformed and a different, unifying ethnicity–Ilchamus–emerged based on a new moral economy of shared prosperity

Agriculture · Archaeology · Clan · Communitas · Economics · Economy · Ethnic group · Ethnogenesis · Ethnology · Geography · Identity (music · Kinship · Liminality · Political science · Prosperity · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology