As Pastoralists Settle

by Fratkin, Elliot M.; Roth, Eric Abella

• ISBN13: 9780306485947
• ISBN10: 030648594X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-02-01
• Publisher: Plenum Pub Corp

Summary

Throughout the world's arid regions, and particularly in northern and eastern Africa, formerly nomadic pastoralists are undergoing a transition to settled life. Pastoral sedentarization represents a response to multiple factors, including loss of livestock due to drought and famine, increased competition for range land due to growing populations, land privatization or appropriation for commercial farms, ranches, and tourist game parks, and to fear of increasing violence, ethnic conflict, and civil war. Although pastoral settlement is often encouraged by international development agencies and national governments as solutions to food insecurity, poor health care and problems of governance, the social, economic and health concomitants of sedentism are not inevitably beneficial. Biosocial studies presented in this volume, for example, point to greater nutritional and health benefits among nomadic livestock keepers, but increased opportunities in education, employment, and food security in towns. This book examines from an interdisciplinary perspective pastoral sedentarization in one region of Africa - Marsabit District in northern Kenya - an isolated and arid region bordering Ethiopia and which contains multiple pastoral groups including Rendille, Samburu, Ariaal, Borana and Gabra peoples. Within this locale, we present recent studies conducted by cultural and biological anthropologists, veterinary biologists, economists, geographers and medical and community health personnel, linked by the common goal of delineating the consequences, both positive and negative, of settlement for formerly nomadic pastoral populations. For many of these former pastoralists, settled life does not necessarily constitute a break with their pastoral kin and neighbors, but represents one more opportunity with which to survive in a difficult physical and social environment. This edited work is a collection of international contributors from North America, Africa and Europe and focuses on a dilemma that affects many parts of the indigenous world. This book will be essential reading for professionals and students of social change in the developing world particularly in applied anthropology, development economics, rural sociology, environment and ecology, and medicine and public health

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction: The Social, Health, and Economic Consequences of Pastoral Sedentarization in Marsabit District, Northern Kenya	1	(28)
Eric Abella Roth and Elliot Fratkin
Chapter 2 The Setting: Pastoral Sedentarization in Marsabit District, Northern Kenya	29	(24)
Elliot Fratkin and Eric Abella Roth
Chapter 3 Time, Terror, and Pastoral Inertia: Sedentarization and Conflict in Northern Kenya	53	(16)
John G. Galan.
Chapter 4 Ecological and Economic Consequences of Reduced Mobility in Pastoral Livestock Production Systems	69	(18)
H. Jürgen Schwartz
Chapter 5 Cursed If You Do, Cursed If You Don't: The Contradictory Processes of Pastoral Sedentarization in Northern Kenya	87	(18)
John McPeak and Peter D. Little
Chapter 6 Once Nomads Settle: Assessing the Process, Motives, and Welfare Changes of Settlements on Mount Marsabit	105	(32)
Wario R. Adano and Karen Witsenburg
Chapter 7 From Milk to Maize: The Transition to Agriculture for Rendille and AriaalPastoralists	137	(18)
Kevin Smith
Chapter 8 Women's Changing Economic Roles with Pastoral Sedentarization: Varying Strategies in Alternate Rendille Communities	155	(18)
Elliot Fratkin and Kevin. Smith
Chapter 9 The Effects of Pastoral Sedentarization on Children's Growth and Nutrition among Ariaal and Rendille in Northern Kenya	173	(20)
Eric Abella Roth, Martha A. Nathan, M.D. and Elliot Fratkin
Chapter 10 Health and Morbidity among Rendille Pastoralist Children: Effects of Sedentarization	193	(16)
Martha A. Nathan, M.D., Eric Abella Roth, Elliot Fratkin, David Wiseman, M.D., and Joan Harris, R.N.
Chapter 11 Sedentarization and Seasonality: Maternal Dietary and Health Consequences in Ariaal and Rendille Communities in Northern Kenya	209	(26)
Masako Fujita, Eric Abella Roth, Martha A. Nathan, M.D., and Elliot Fratkin.
Chapter 12 Development, Modernization, and Medicalization: Influences on the Changing Nature of Female "Circumcision" in Rendille Society	235	(20)
Bettina Shell-Duncan, Walter Obungu Obiero, and Geunita Auko Muruli
Chapter 13 Female Education in a Sedentary Ariaal Rendille Community: Paternal Decision-Making and Biosociai Pathways	255	(16)
Eric Abella Roth and Elizabeth N. Ngugi
Index	271