Changing Identifications and Alliances in East Africa

According to Günther Schlee, whose intellectual project of understanding integration and conflict lies behind these three works, the central question behind processes of identification is “who belongs to whom and why?” Along with many anthropologists and historians, he does not think ethnicity as such provides much of an answer, nor does the matter of resources shared or competed for, since what we call “ethnicity” itself cries out for explanation, and who shares or comes into conflict over “resources” cannot be determined by the resources themselves. In volume 1 of the Integration and Conflict series (Changing Identifications and Alliances in North-East Africa: How Enemies Are Made, 2008; not reviewed here) Schlee puts forward a theory of ethnic and religious conflict that also informs his collaborative study (with Abdullahi Schongolo) titled Pastoralism and Politics in Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia. While anthropologists have a predilection for examining particular micro-societies in great depth, Schlee has consistently examined regional systems of societies in historical perspective. The cases presented in the two regional volumes, which focus on the borderlands of southern Ethiopia, northern Kenya, eastern Uganda, and southern (now South) Sudan, all concern how identities emerge out of interactions between societies and with states.

The approach to identification that informs these studies emphasizes the coexistence of multiple criteria that potentially serve as the basis for identity claims on the part of individuals or groups. Identities, therefore, are “acts” rather than “states,” “claims” rather than “realities,” and thus they “shift” with different contexts and over time. In historical perspective, attributes or capabilities can evolve, and along with them a group’s self-identification; this is demonstrated, for example, by Schlee’s description of the long-term shift of the Gabra, the Sakuye, the Garre, and the Ajuran—who arguably derived from “Proto-Rendille-Somali” (PRS) speakers—to incorporation into the “Worr Liban,” an interethnic coalition dominated by the Boran whose Eastern Cushitic language was largely adopted by these “Somaloid” groups which nonetheless retained camel-keeping livelihoods, interethnic clan affinities, and many other Somali-like cultural elements. But while describing the shifting character of identities and the mutability of social characteristics and practices, Schlee criticizes those who maintain that current ethnic groups have very shallow historical origins or evolve at such a rate that identities are utterly fluid. Rather, in accordance with the sense that various groups have of their own histories, he characterizes their ethnic identities as conditions of “relative stability,” bolstered by the hardiness of elements that are often thought to constitute “ethnicity”: language, descent, intergroup kin and clan links, livelihood patterns, cultural values, and religion. Both the primordialist and instrumentalist perspectives on ethnicity seem inadequate to the task of explaining the relative stability of identities held by those who enjoy a complex range of qualities, attributes, and competencies that can be differently evoked in contexts of shifting identifications.

From this theoretical vantage point, the research agenda calls for careful examination of how people as individuals and groups actually position themselves strategically in complex social fields by differentially evoking attributes that link them with some and distinguish them from others. But lest evocation of “attributes” seem overly static, the focus in these works is invariably on contemporary points of political friction and alliance between groups, often in the context of the overbearing states of the region which themselves are often in fierce competition with the communities and their resources. The works illustrate some often-startling illustrations of emergent forms of identification in diverse...