Bilinda Straight

“Dust people”: Samburu perspectives on disaster, identity, and landscape

ABSTRACT This paper discusses a Samburu pastoralist landscape idiom, ntoror, that encapsulates ideas about agentive pastoralist landscapes that inherently attract conflict; and passionate, place-based identities forged out of environmental and human-wrought disaster. The paper grows out of a project that experimentally integrated ethnographic self-scrutiny with a bio-archaeological excavation involving human remains, with the aim of encouraging reciprocal knowledge production. The inspiration for exploring ntoror and expanding its metaphorical reach came from our Samburu co-author, Musa Letua, who responded to the challenges the excavation posed by drawing upon the idiom of ntoror, which made sense to him. The overlapping stories of ntoror we narrate follow closely the ways in which Letua explored them in interviews associated with the excavation, and in other interview settings in earlier years. As such, this paper represents the fruits of cross-cultural collaboration and shared knowledge production.

‘It was maendeleo that removed them’: disturbing burials and reciprocal knowledge production in a context of collaborative archaeology

Recent decades have witnessed a growth in approaches to research and writing across anthropologys four fields that emphasize the need to respect alternative narratives and constructions of history, and to engage with anthropologys ‘publics’. These developments have generated more ethically responsible research and more inclusive writing practices. Nevertheless, the actual doing of cross-cultural collaboration and knowledge production remains a challenge. In this three-field (cultural, biological, and archaeological anthropology) study, we aim to capture, in writing, a process of collaborative fieldwork with Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya that experimentally integrated ethnographic self-scrutiny with a bio-archaeological excavation involving human remains. In the process, we highlight the reciprocal knowledge production that this cross-subdisciplinary, transcultural fieldwork produced. « C’est le maendeleo qui les a enleves » : derangements funeraires et production de connaissances reciproque dans un contexte d’archeologie collaborative Resume Depuis quelques decennies, les approches de la recherche et de l’ecriture dans les quatre domaines de l’anthropologie qui soulignent la necessite de respecter d’autres modes de narration et de construction de l’histoire et d’interagir avec les « publics » se sont multiplies. Cette evolution a donne naissance a une recherche plus responsable du point de vue ethique et a des pratiques d’ecriture plus inclusives. Il n’en reste pas moins que la mise en place meme d’une collaboration interculturelle et la production de connaissances y afferentes reste difficile. Dans cette etude menee dans trois domaines (anthropologie culturelle, biologique et archeologique), nous voulons restituer, par l’ecriture, un processus de travail de terrain collaboratif avec des pasteurs Samburu dans le nord du Kenya, qui integrait a titre experimental un auto-examen ethnographique et des fouilles bio-archeologiques impliquant des restes humains. Dans ce contexte, nous mettons en lumiere la production reciproque de savoir que ce travail de terrain inter-subdisciplinaire et interculturel a suscitee.

Suicide in Three East African Pastoralist Communities and the Role of Researcher Outsiders for Positive Transformation: A Case Study

We examine cultural understandings and practices surrounding suicide in Pokot, Samburu, and Turkana pastoralists in north-central Kenya—three geographically overlapping and mutually interacting pastoralist communities. We collected our data in the context of a study of poverty, violence, and distress. In all three communities, stigma associated with suicide circumscribed individual responses to the World Health Organization’s Self-Report Questionnaire, which led to an ethnographic sub-study of suicide building upon our long-standing research in East Africa on distress, violence, and death. As is true for most of sub-Saharan Africa, reliable statistical data are non-existent for these communities. Thus, we deliberately avoid making assertions about generalizable statistical trends. Rather, we take the position that ethnographically nuanced studies like the one we offer here provide a necessary basis for the respectful collection of accurate quantitative data on this important and troubling practice. Moreover, our central point in this paper is that positive transformational work relating to suicide is most likely when researcher outsiders practice ‘deep engagement’ while respectfully restricting their role to (1) iterative, community-driven approaches that contextualize suicide; and (2) sharing contextualized analyses with other practitioners. We contend that situating suicide within a broader cultural framework that includes attitudes and practices surrounding other forms of death is essential to both aspects of anthropological-outsiders’ role.

Comparative nutritional indicators as markers for resilience: the impacts of low-intensity violence among three pastoralist communities of northern Kenya

ABSTRACT We present results from a collaborative project on the consequences of endemic violence in the pastoralist zone of Northern Kenya. Drawing on our ethnographically driven epidemiological approach, we examine the differential cost of violence by examining household nutrition. The case/control approach we employ draws data from six sites that are culturally similar but differ in the degree of exposure to, or relative insulation from, violence. As one of many lenses through which to examine the consequences of endemic violence, nutritional status offers a different story than assessing livestock holdings or access to land. Our data suggest that despite the different strategies that the pastoralist communities employ to contend with the violence, each one comes with nutritional consequences. Measuring the direct and indirect effects of violence in communities already compromised by poverty and episodic drought challenges researchers, policy-makers, and humanitarian organizations. Our goal is to offer insights into reasonable pathways for understanding these intersections of insecurity for policy and humanitarian organizations.

Death, Grief, and Cross-World Longing

Death has enduringly offered anthropologists a unique theoretical conundrum in that it concerns humans and human personhood, and yet unlike most aspects of social life, it involves an absent interlocutor. A terrifying rupture into mundane existence, death demands a response on the part of individuals and communities. The four books I review here offer varied contributions to this rich anthropological tradition but are united by a concern with grief and the ways in which death both erupts into and transcends social life.

House, fire, gender

ABSTRACT In this article I examine the Samburu house (pastoralists, northern Kenya) and its fire as the sacred locus of right moral practices—as feminine objects consecrated through proper use. I begin by way of counter-example, however, describing the moral entailments of a particular event, a womans house that caught fire in contentious circumstances. Following this elucidation of houses made sacred or desecrated through use, I will conclude with a discussion of the Samburu house in relation to Samburu understandings of “modernity.” Here, I will point out the re-gendering of the Samburu house in the wake of an intriguing trend—the accelerating proliferation of the “modern” house that has frequently become a mans house in a society for which the house has long been a quintessentially feminine space.