As Pastoralists Settle: Social, Health, and Economic Consequences of the Pastoral Sedentarization in Marsabit District, Kenya (review)

As Pastoralists Settle launches a new series by Kluwer dedicated to studies of human-environmental dynamics and modeled after the journal Human Ecology. Elliot Fratkin, a cultural anthropologist, and Eric Abella Roth, a demographic anthropologist, lead this collaborative effort as the book's editors and chief contributors. Together with Martha A. Nathan, they have conducted longitudinal research on "bio-social concomitants of sedentism" (3) among Rendille and Ariaal pastoralists in Marsabit District, Kenya. Thirteen chapters describe this research, along with that conducted by other contributors with expertise in northern Kenyan pastoral studies: Bettina Shell-Duncan and Masako Fujita (biological anthropology); John Galaty, Peter Little, and Kevin Smith (social anthropology); H. Jürgen Schwartz (veterinary biology); John McPeak (economics); Wario Adano and Karen Witsenburg (geography); Leunita Auko Muruli, Elizabeth Ngugi, and Walter Obungu Obiero (public health); David Wiseman (medicine); and Joan Harris (nursing). Although the book focuses on five Rendille and Ariaal communities, some chapters include other pastoral and/or neighboring groups.

The opening three chapters provide a general context for the historical fact that pastoralists throughout East Africa and elsewhere have become increasingly sedentary. They include summaries of the expected: population growth, drought and famine (as well as external aid responses to such conditions), loss of common property resources, commoditization, urban migration, "ethnic clashes," political turmoil, civil war, and state intervention. McPeak and Little note that processes of sedentarization have been ongoing for the past two millennia in semi-arid and arid regions (87), while Galaty paraphrases Ibn Khaldun's six-hundred-year-old lamentation about the decline of nomadic life and the "morality, fortitude, and social cohesiveness undermined by the inexorable change... to sedentary life" (53). In sum, sedentarization of pastoralists is by no means a new phenomenon or necessarily a desired moral evolution. But, as the authors rightfully claim, moving into town is not necessarily a lasting commitment or an antipastoral one, either.

This latter point complements the book's major theme: people living in households engaged to some degree in nomadic livestock herding realize greater nutritional and health benefits, on average, than those in the study's settled communities. It should be noted, however, that many of the study's town dwellers ended up settled near mission and NGO-founded centers because of livestock loss due to drought, disease, and/or raiding. Thus, many of the informants were poor when they settled and were, in effect, partially subsidized by those missions and NGOs. Still, the authors demonstrate, living in towns can lead to increased opportunities in school-based education, wage employment, crop-based food security, and possibly gender equity. Some of these opportunities and changes are considered "good" by a significant portion of informants and researchers. For example, the penultimate chapter focuses on female genital cutting (FGC) and describes shifts in methods (increasing medicalization) and timing (allowing girls to attend secondary schools and thus marry at later ages than previous generations) within one Rendille community. The final chapter charts the decision-making process undertaken by parents in a sedentary Ariaal community as they decide which children to send to school, and some of the consequences education may have, especially for improving females' health and socioeconomic status.

Although acquiring livestock may still remain a goal for town dwellers, this becomes increasingly difficult because of inadequate access to land or, if the livestock is herded at some distance from town, access to the nutritive benefits of the livestock's milk and meat. Chapters 4 through 11 focus largely on such ecological and health/nutrition consequences of sedentarization. Trying to quantify health, economic, and social differences over time and between sedentary and nomadic communities, the authors have employed a variety of measures, from rates of milk production among livestock and milk consumption among community members to anthropometric indices and illness days among the focal populations. Most of the...