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Paul Spencer Youth and Experiences of Ageing Among Maa Models of Society Evoked by the Maasai, Samburu, and Chamus of Kenya

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Paul Spencer Youth and Experiences of Ageing Among Maa Models of Society Evoked by the Maasai, Samburu, and Chamus of Kenya Paul Spencer Youth and Experiences of Ageing among Maa Models of Society Evoked by the Maasai, Samburu, and Chamus of Kenya Paul Spencer Youth and Experiences of Ageing among Maa Models of Society Evoked by the Maasai, Samburu, and Chamus of Kenya Managing Editor: Kathryn Lichti-Harriman Language Editor: Steve Moog Published by De Gruyter Open Ltd, Warsaw/Berlin This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license, which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. Copyright © 2014 Paul Spencer ISBN: 978-3-11-037232-8 e-ISBN: 978-3-11-037233-5 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. Managing Editor: Kathryn Lichti-Harriman Language Editor: Steve Moog www.degruyteropen.com Cover illustration: © Paul Spencer Contents Introduction 1 Outline of Chapters 5 1 Reminiscence and the Manipulation of Experience 8 1.1 The Maasai Who Would Not Grow Old 8 1.2 The Apparition in the Bush 11 1.3 Adolescence and the Bottomless Pit 14 1.4 Conclusion: The Confusion of Historical Time and the Experience of Ageing 18 Part I: The Maasai Age System (1976-77) 2 The Natural Substructure of Age-set Systems and the Social Construction of Ageing among Maasai 22 2.1 Primate Behaviour and the Male Arena 22 2.2 Maasai Polygyny and the Social Construction of Adolescence 25 2.3 The Arena of Elderhood and the Social Construction of Old Age 31 2.4 The Maasai, the Samburu, and the Primate Model 33 2.5 The Life-course of Women and the Quasi-matrifocal Network 37 2.6 Conclusion: The Nature and Culture of Ageing 41 3 Stratification and Social Mobility: Patterns of Inequality among Maasai and Hindus 43 3.1 Comparing Incomparables 44 3.2 Maasai Concepts of Purity 46 3.3 The Two Arenas as Alternative Modes of Production 48 3.4 Rivalries between Adjacent Age-sets 50 3.5 Status, Power, and the Premise of Respect 53 3.6 Conclusion: Fundamental Structures and the Premise of Holism 55 4 Anger, Comradeship and Age-set Exogamy among Maasai: an Elaboration of Alliance Theory 57 4.1 Comradeship and Anger among Women 57 4.2 Seasonal Influences on Interaction 59 4.3 Group Indulgence and the Restrictions of the Age-set System among Men 61 4.4 Marriage Bonds and the Fundamental Premise of the Maasai Age-set System 64 4.5 Conclusion: Elders as Controllers and Women as Custodians of the Age- set System 68 Part II: Samburu Ritual and Cosmology (1957-60, 1962) 5 Arenas of Dance among Samburu 72 5.1 The Initiation Dance 73 5.2 Wedding Dances 78 5.3 Dancing and Elderhood 89 5.4 Conclusion: The Abuse of Power and the Inviolability of Play 90 6 Anxiety and the Interpretation of Ritual among Samburu 92 6.1 Perpetuating Gerontocracy 93 6.2 Interpretations of Shivering and Shaking 100 6.3 Conditioning and Reconditioning through Ritual 102 6.4 Conformity, Suggestibility, and the Assembly of Clan Elders 108 6.5 Conclusion: Ritual, Anxiety, and Evolving Roles 109 7 The Transfiguration of Samburu Religion 111 7.1 Misfortune and the Curse 111 7.1.1 Explanations of Misfortune among the Samburu in 1960 111 7.1.2 The Anatomy of Fortune and Misfortune among the Samburu in 2002 114 7.1.3 The Transformation of the Curse from 1960 to 2002? 117 7.2 God and Afterlife 122 7.2.1 Perceptions of an Unknowable God among the Samburu in 1960 122 7.2.2 Samburu Perceptions of God and Afterlife in 2002 127 7.3 Conclusion: The Extraordinary Transformation of Samburu Beliefs 132 Part III: Indigenous Democracy and Change Among the Chamus (1959, 1977) 8 The Evolution of Indigenous Knowledge among Chamus – or Global Diffusion? 142 8.1 The Dorobo 142 8.2 Chamus as a Quasi-oasis Society 143 8.3 The Transition to Agro-pastoralism 148 8.4 The Transition to Individualism 151 8.5 The Growth of Knowledge 153 8.6 Conclusion: Keeping Tradition in Good Repair 157 9 Maa Democracy, Development and Alternative Realities: an Open Letter 162 9.1 Public Consensus and Private Anxieties 162 9.2 The Institutional Context of Decision-making 164 9.3 Institutionalised Adaptability 166 9.4 The Problem of Subversion 168 9.5 Conclusion: The Clash of Fundamentals and the Pragmatics of Compromise 170 References 172 List of Maps 176 List of Figures 177 List of Tables 178 List of Charts 179 List of Plates 180 Subject Index 181 Name Index 186 Introduction The Maa peoples of East Africa share the same language and are predominately nomadic pastoralists. The Maasai have a dominant position at the centre of this area, with 60% of the Maa population dispersed among 16 independent tribal sections. This volume stems primarily from anthropological fieldwork among the Maasai of Matapato and among the Maa-speaking Samburu, who live in the northern reaches where conditions are harsher. It is convenient although a matter of speculation to regard the Samburu as close to some proto-Maasai ancestral group before the Maasai expanded southwards against other Maa- speakers, spurred by their legendary Prophet Supeet during the first half of the nineteenth century. Conditions were more arid in the north, families were more nomadic and warfare seems to have consisted of lightly armed skirmishes and mobile tactics. The easier conditions of the south permitted the Maasai to mount more heavily armed and organized companies and the development of more stable territories defended by strategic warrior villages (manyat, s. manyata).1 A third Maa-speaking group are the Chamus, who have had close links with the Samburu, borrowed the idea of manyat from the Maasai at one point, and provide an independent insight into the history of the area. A significant feature of inland pastoralist societies in East Africa is the variety of age-based organizations that group men into cohorts according to age from initiation in youth until the cohort – or age-set – dies out. Historically, this type of society has been described in every continent, displaying a similar range of ramifications. This suggests some basic principles of age-based existence, parallel to those of kinship elsewhere, but raising questions in some quarters of whether this type of society could possibly have worked. East Africa provides the principal surviving cluster of age-based societies, among whom the Maasai are the best known. A likely cause of the demise of age systems generally is the emphasis on equality within each age-set that cuts across family interests, whereas the spread of world trade and hence capitalism has created inequalities that tend to be perpetuated within families. The strong commercial streak in Islamic societies in East Africa, for instance, has led to cumulative inequalities that are inherited down the generations. Differences of wealth between families also occur among age-based pastoralists, compromising their ideals of equality within each age-set. However, these tend to be temporary rather than cumulative: their herds can multiply quite rapidly over a period of years and then be wiped out through drought, epidemic or raiding, giving the impression of a saw- tooth profile of growth and collapse. In these conditions, the ideal of age-set equality applies to long-term prospects and opportunities rather than current wealth. In the short term there is an emphasis on sharing products of the family herd rather than 1 Merker 1904: 90-9. This can be compared with Lamphear (1992: 18-26) whose description of the Turkana raiding tactics gives a useful indication of the ecological constraints on intertribal raiding in the north. © 2014 Paul Spencer This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. 2 Introduction Map: The Maasai and Maa-speaking Peoples in 1977 Introduction 3 sharing the living herds which are treated as a reserve capital. With no trade routes through the area, Islamic and other traders were unable to penetrate the Maasai in their traditional setting, and the Maasai were unable to build up capital in the long-term. In contemporary society, the Maa are an anachronism, but they can provide useful insights into aspects of ageing from childhood onwards that have a more general relevance. The present work arose indirectly from an invitation by Oxford University Press to submit an annotated bibliography on ‘The Maasai and Maa-speaking Peoples of East Africa’ for their Oxford Bibliographies Online programme in African Studies.2 The strict format that they proposed appealed to me and the labour involved stretched my understanding of the Maa-speaking region. This led to the notion of resurrecting some earlier dispersed articles and bringing them together as a collection that complemented my published ethnographies. These articles reflect opportunities to pursue particular models of Maa society, responding to conference themes and seminar series. They lay bare some fundamental aspects of structure that tend to be obscured in comprehensive ethnographic accounts. Two approaches to models of age systems are possible. The first is to strip them of their social context and discern some basic rules that govern the process of ageing and the succession of generations. This provides a series of ideal types – constructs – that pose and resolve some basic problems of how they work. It is this approach that Frank Stewart (1977) has adopted in his outstanding analysis of recorded age systems throughout the world, stripping them down to the bare bones of rules and principles, simplifying them in order to arrive at a basic understanding of complexity.
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