Ethnogenesis and surplus food production: communitas and identity building among nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ilchamus, Lake Baringo, Kenya

Abstract

Most archaeological discussions of surplus production tend to focus either on its role in the emergence and maintenance of social complexity (whether among hunter-gatherers, farming communities or incipient states), or on the enabling properties of surplus as a basis for technological advances and aesthetic elaboration. Here, we offer a rather different perspective on surplus as an initiator of communitas and driver of ethnogenesis following a period of intense socio-ecological stress, environmental degradation and localised demographic decline during the nineteenth century. The particular case study concerns the Maa-language speaking Ilchamus community who currently occupy areas around the southern end of Lake Baringo in the Central Rift Valley, Kenya. Drawing on a combination of new archaeological evidence, oral accounts and archival sources, the paper details the processes whereby destitute groups were drawn together into acts of surplus food production, initially of grain via the implementation of a system of irrigated agriculture and subsequently of cattle through the mobilisation of kinship and related ties. In so doing, disparate older identities were abandoned or transformed and a different, unifying ethnicity-Ilchamus-emerged based on a new moral economy of shared prosperity.

Pollen, People and Place: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Ecosystem Change at Amboseli, Kenya

“…Maasai in Amboseli today recount that during the 1800s groups of Maasai, many of them from Tanzania, moved into Amboseli and the pastoralists they encountered were assimilated, migrated elsewhere, or killed. Regional paleoenvironmental reconstructions are now also indicating a drought of acute severity at the turn of the nineteenth century (Verschuren et al, 2000) with a number of social consequences for pastoral communities (Sobania, 1980;Anderson, 2016;Petek and Lane, 2016). It may be no coincidence that the Loikop Wars began toward the end of the 1830s, coinciding with the recovery of lake levels immediately following the intense drought and a corresponding recovery of rangeland (Anderson, 2016).…”

Weathering Climate Change in Archaeology: Conceptual Challenges and an East African Case Study

“…By around the 1830s, the drought was ending and conditions began to ameliorate. It was around that time that small groups from the surrounding hills joined an established community on the southern lowlands, eventually forming the Ilchamus ethnic community (Petek & Lane 2017). Other groups continued to immigrate to Ilchamus throughout the nineteenth century, the majority of whom settled in two villages known as Ilchamus Leabori and Ilchamus Lekeper.…”

Historical Ecologies of Pastoralist Overgrazing in Kenya: Long-Term Perspectives on Cause and Effect

“…Narratives of pastoral overgrazing in Baringo emerged during the severe droughts and locust infestations of the 1920s, when colonial officials began to question why the region, once famous as a granary due to its irrigated field systems, could not sustain its own population (Anderson 2002;Petek and Lane 2017). The notion that Baringo could be restored to a prior fertility was propagated in the following decades during deliberations about the expansion of the native reserve and developments such as the Perkerra Irrigation Scheme (Kramm 2015).…”