Ethnogenesis and surplus food production

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

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3919224
AutoresNik Petek (0000-0003-4552-0125, Uppsala University, autor de correspondencia), Paul Lane (0000-0002-9936-1310, Uppsala University)
Año2017
Volumen49
Número1
Páginas40-60
Fecha de publicación2017-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaWorld Archaeology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0043-8243 • E-ISSN: 1470-1375
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00438243.2016.1259583
OpenAlexW2576005914
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas10
Referencias 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