Paul Spencer, 1932–2015

Paul Spencer’s death on 21 July 2015 at the age of 83 ended a distinguished and long career as a foremost and globally celebrated Africanist and social anthropologist. Although his ethnographic focus was on East Africa and on pastoralism and age organization in the region, he increasingly applied his extensive and accumulated knowledge to a range of other problems not confined to this part of the world. His was a classic case of a scholar first developing a formidable empirical grounding and expertise and then using it to address increasingly theoretical issues, including those to do with social and economic development. His work can indeed be regarded as making up a triangle of interlinked ethnographic, theoretical and applied approaches and contributions of great sophistication.

His many volumes on Maa-speaking peoples began with his work on the Samburu, which provided a kind of comparative template for much of his subsequent analyses. As well as drawing attention to similarities, he documented detailed differences between the ways in which Samburu and Matapato Maasai articulated their age organizations to create contrasting modes of authority, especially in relation to cattle-keeping and ownership. The status and role of elders and of the so-called young warriors, or moran, were always central issues in his work. Although he did not quite use the terminology, he can be regarded as having provided a model of the various transformations that age organization can take in its adaptation to varying ecologies, wider conditions of change and the need sometimes to shift from a primarily pastoralist to semi-farming and even hunting-gathering mode of subsistence. Unlike many such models, however, his was built on remarkably solid evidence of a kind rarely seen in modern anthropology. While the various forms of Maa social organization existing today have altered greatly since Spencer’s ethnographic research, he has left a legacy that will invite analytical reflection and comparison for generations to come. For, while age organization of the Maa kind is exclusive to East Africa, its implications for understanding the wider potentialities of human growth and self-perpetuation are immense and can be regarded as central to questions of socio-cultural evolution.

Spencer’s work shows that age organization, with its often critical distinction between age and generation sets, provides opportunities for the emergence of polities ranging from firm to more flexible gerontocracy and even to greater egalitarianism. Moreover, it indicates that pastoralism is also subject to alteration, sometimes adversely. One of Spencer’s most compelling analyses was to demonstrate that the Maasai ‘commitment to growth’ of their cattle (and, by extension, of children through polygyny) conflicted with the expectations of modern economic growth. Thus, under conditions of drought, as pastureland became more restricted, overexploited and scarce, they did not sell cattle to match available feeding resources, preferring instead to try to keep their herds large regardless. This resulted in some herders having to become wage earners and others monopolizing diminishing herds. This relationship between demographic, environmental and economic change was investigated in a number of papers and was always based on his prior ethnographic study and publications.

It has to be emphasized that, right from the beginning, Spencer was interested in diachronic social processes. His data show that, within the so-called cyclical process of age organization, mutation could occur and was part of its flexibility. Similarly, pastoralism could not be labelled as a static, single mode of subsistence but was related to other modes as people moved through them. Phillip Gulliver’s pioneering work had shown how the Maasai called Arusha had become agriculturalists and Spencer extended this flexibility to people such as the Rendille, who shifted between cattle and camel herding, and the Dorobo, who also depended heavily on hunting and gathering.

Curiously, one or two earlier commentators of his work characterized his ethnographies as ‘functionalist’, apparently in the sense that they were allegedly non-historical and probably because Spencer wrote in the ethnographic present. Yet this could not be further from the truth, for it was precisely his focus on social process that indicated that he was interested in depicting movement and the potential for new directions...