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2 w Social Landscapes Forging Food Security Networks (Hamate), ca. 1000 CE to Present The next historical way of seeing the Serengeti landscape appears in clan traditions that name particular settlement areas and natural resources by their association with purported descent groups, linking diverse people together in extensive regional networks necessary for survival. When I traveled with the Ikoma elders in the game reserves, they identified each group of hills across the horizon and each abandoned settlement site that we visited according to the kinship group that had lived there. While the core spatial images embedded in the emergence stories depict an interdependent ecological landscape of farmers , hunters, and herders interacting from particular ecological niches, this is a social view of the landscape, creating networks through the core spatial images of diversification, inclusion, and distribution embedded in the generative principles of kinship association. Although more ideological than biological, descent was the mechanism through which people identified themselves, made connections to others, and gained access to resources. This diversified social landscape of kinship networks evident in the core spatial images of clan migration histories is also reflected in the ways that people talk about how they farm or herd, organize their homesteads, or find security in times of famine. These practices grow out of the generative principles that establish basic understandings of reciprocity in moral behavior. They are also congruent with evidence from the early frontier period when western Serengeti peoples settled in this challenging environment of periodic drought. Seeing the landscape in this way enabled them to maintain productive communities through social networks representing a moral economy that provided basic security and subsistence for everyone.1 The core spatial images of clan traditions are both those of diversification and inclusion, uniting diverse peoples from diverse places across the landscape as 63 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. children of the original couple, first man and first woman. From those children, as representatives of the clans, all the descent groups were born and remain linked to each other as they spread out over the land. This version of the Nata asimoka story told by Megasa Mokiri ends with the creation of the four Nata clans, or hamate, by the children of Nyamunywa and Nyasigonko: The woman became pregnant and gave birth to a son. Then she gave birth to a daughter, and in total four boys and four girls. When they were grown, they were married to each other. This is the reason that Nata inherit through the woman’s side. The children made the clans of Nata. The place where they lived is called Bwanda. When they got to be too many, they divided into the saiga [age-set cycles].2 In this version the boundaries of group inclusion are entirely self-sufficient, as its sons marry its daughters. Similarly, Ikoma elders said that the sons of Mwikoma founded the eight Ikoma clans.3 Inclusion brings with it access to the resources of the group. Ethnic origin stories often mention the clans of first man and first woman, giving those clans’ members a particular role in the community; the clan of the first child might have the highest political status, while another clan might serve a particular ritual function.4 Not coincidentally, Megasa Mokiri includes the issue of inheritance in his narrative. Wealth, particularly cattle and moveable property, was inherited through descent, either on the mother’s (matrilineal ) or the father’s (patrilineal) side. Clans controlled land by parceling out crop fields and maintaining common pasture and wilderness resource land. Yet within this image of the autonomous group, the generative principle of diversification is evident. Since each clan controls a particular territory, this way of seeing the landscape maps connections to a variety of resources and communities. Other clan stories exist outside an ethnic narrative as the migration history of that clan alone and more clearly illustrate the core spatial image of distribution as the way that this view of the landscape promoted the formation of social networks. An excerpt from a Hemba clan history by Samweli Kirimanzera, which will be analyzed later, gives a strong sense of the spatial elements of these clan histories: Of the clans that were left, others divided and came to Ikizu. [Pause.]When they got to Ikizu others dispersed, small groups went to Sizaki...

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