Time, Space and the Unknown: Maasai Configurations of Power and Providence (review)

This is the final volume in Spencer's corpus of work on East African pastoralism and the Maa-speakers in particular, which began with an ethnography of the Samburu in 1965. It provides a summation of his earlier work on the dynamics of Maasai age organization and an extended consideration of the principles that guide Maasai as they grapple both with providence, whose operation they cannot foresee, and with the more predictable progression of time. For those who have read Spencer's previous work, some of the themes pursued here will be familiar, but they are presented within a much fuller comparative context; for those who have not, the first three chapters especially provide an excellent introduction.

The book is rich in detail and (in places) densely argued, for while it offers an overview of Maasai society, it also breaks new ground. The first part of the book considers the limits of knowledge and the notion of providence, linking the ambivalence of the power of elders (benevolent as a collectivity, but less so as individuals with absolute authority over their households) with the uncertainty of life as Maasai experience it. Ultimately, providence seems to guarantee an overarching moral order that is more immediately maintained by careful adherence to ritual and by the endless spiral of age and maturation. A discussion of numerology helps us see how the balance between the propitious and unpropitious reflects and mediates other binary oppositions of age, gender, identity, and space. But the moral order can be threatened both by natural disaster and by the actions of sorcerers, who appear here as both the willful, if inscrutable, bringers of misfortune and a frightening mirror image of the unpredictable power of elders.

To deal with sorcery and uncertainty, Maasai can consult diviners, who are themselves almost the epitome of ambivalence: marginal Maasai, in but not of the community, who can see further into the unknown than ordinary men, but who do not control it. The power they have is ostensibly protective, but it verges on sorcery and should be kept at arm's length. Their households are well ordered, but they have a reputation for fratricidal jealousy. The chapter on the Loonkidongi laibons gives a picture of diviners and their place in the world, and makes the marginality of Loonkidongi central to the argument about Maasai.

The second part of the book widens the argument by considering variations among different Maasai sections along a north–south continuum, including other Maa-speaking communities such as Samburu and Arusha. Since each section is autonomous though part of a greater whole, this offers an opportunity to consider common themes from different vantage points, much as the first part of the book offers different perspectives of age and gender. Spencer suggests that there are two "models." One (exemplified here by Purko) emphasizes the sharp distinction between elders and young men, between those who can marry and rule households and those who cannot. The other (exemplified by Loitokitok Kisongo) emphasizes relations between age sets, with one "stream" of young men and their patrons in opposition to another. In the north, power builds and then drains as men get older; in the south it shifts regularly from one stream to the other as sets move up the age-grade ladder. Despite the differences between them, however, the two models address the same issues; and the underlying continuities within Maasai and the complementarity of the models are underscored in space and time by the ceremonial cycle that moves each age-set up the spiral of maturity. In the north, the initiation of boys into an age set and their separation from the domain of the household begin with a ceremony; in the south, the completion of the same set and its full emergence as elders and household heads is celebrated first.

The question of how and why these...