Cattle Bring Us to Our Enemies: Turkana Ecology, Politics, and Raiding in a Disequilibrium System

1. Introduction

chapter 1 Introduction 7 It seems to be taken for granted these days that a pastoral way of life is disappearing throughout the world. From the steppes of China to the savannas of Africa, the popular press portrays pastoral peoples as the last vestiges of a bygone age that will not survive the next one or two generations. Certainly pastoralists and pastoral livelihoods are changing; some people are becoming more sedentary, and livestockbased livelihoods are diversifying. But many of the stories that appear in the popular press are simplified and exaggerated, and not all pastoralists are settling down and diversifying their economies. The Turkana people of northwest Kenya are among the latter. They live in an ecological environment where the agricultural potential is extremely limited. They also live in a political environment that is very unstable where raiding and violence may erupt at any time. There are other people like the Turkana, in Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia, to name a few places. How Turkana people cope with environmental and political instability articulates well with current discussions of climate change, arid lands as nonequilibrium-based ecosystems, and the proliferation of violence and war. They have much to teach us about coping with these stresses, about survival and resilience. How pastoral peoples use the land and its natural resources, manage their livestock, and make decisions about where and when to move has been the subject of discussion for much of the twentieth century , and the debate continues today. The image of pastoral peoples, 3 especially African pastoralists, as people engaged in a primitive and outdated livelihood wandering around in a bleak landscape and irrationally keeping large numbers of livestock primarily for prestige is long gone, although one can still see elements of this image in public pronouncements of some African politicians and embedded within development initiatives. Pastoral people are now viewed by many as keen decision makers, trying to cope with a difficult environment and a shrinking resource base. Among those who study pastoral peoples, mobility is seen as the major adaptive strategy that not only preserves the resource base, but allows for larger livestock holdings than would be possible were movements restricted or curtailed. Just as our understanding of pastoral peoples has changed, so has our understanding of the relationship of people to the environments within which they live. Gone is the idea that environments determine how people will make a living or organize their social relationships. Most of those who study human-environment relationships accept the notion that all people live within ecosystems, but how ecosystems are structured and function is open to debate, as is the role of human populations within a given ecosystem. Ecosystems and the “New Ecological Thinking” The use of an ecosystem as a conceptual tool to help examine and explain human behavior, often often referred to as an “ecosystem approach,” has helped advance our understanding of human-environmental relationships significantly (see chap. 2). However, it has also been subject to a number of criticisms, especially within the social sciences. One critique has focused on the nature of an ecosystem as a self-regulating entity where ecological relationships function to maintain equilibrium. Other critiques have targeted the lack of attention paid to economics, politics, and history as well as an underemphasis on the analysis of decision making at the individual and household level. Indeed, what is now referred to as the “new ecological thinking” has become the study of “disturbance, disharmony, and chaos” (Worster 1990:3). According to geographer Karl Zimmerer the “new ecology” “accents disequilibria, instability, and even chaotic fluctua4 cattle bring us to our enemies tions in biophysical environments, both “natural” and “human impacted” (1994:108). Many natural and social scientists see the concepts of equilibrium and ecosystems as inexorably tied to one another. Worster, among others, sees the questioning of equilibrium-based models of the environment as a direct challenge to the ecosystem concept itself. Some of these critiques may be muted by a new understanding of how ecosystems (at least some ecosystems) are structured and function , which began to emerge in the 1970s. The idea that highly variable ecosystems, such as arid-land ecosystems, were based on functional relationships that maintain equilibrium was questioned. The concept of persistent, but nonequilibrium-based ecosystems gained support over the last twenty-five years and has, to a large extent, replaced the equilibrium-based model for arid lands among natural scientists. The ecologists...