Land Privatization and Pastoralist Well‐being in Kenya

East African pastoralists have well‐developed systems of communal land management that have been challenged by recent demands from some pastoralists for land privatization. This article analyses the impact on household well‐being of privatizing land among a community of Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya. Using longitudinal data from household surveys conducted in 2000 and 2005, trends in wealth, income, stratification and livelihood strategies are analysed comparing the privatized community and a community where land remains communally managed. Results indicate few significant differences in wealth and income between the privatized and communal areas, although cultivation has become an important additional strategy in the privatized community. Significant levels of wealth stratification are present in both communities but are mitigated to some extent by mobility across wealth quintiles over time. Wealthy and poor groups exhibit different livelihood strategies with wealthier groups relying more on livestock trade and home consumption while poorer groups depend on wage labour and trade for their income. Policy implications of this analysis include the need for development strategies specific to different wealth groups, greater investment in education and infrastructure, and more attention to employment creation in pastoral areas.     

Evidence for Interaction from Recent Hunter-Gatherer Sites in the Caledon Valley

Evidence for contact between hunter-gatherers and agropastoralists from excavated sites in a well-documented frontier zone in the eastern Free State, South Africa, reveals varied intensities of interaction. These interactions range from clientship to relative autonomy. Comparison between recent (eighteenth- to early twentieth-century) hunter-gatherer occupations of rock shelters in the Caledon Valley also suggests that a variety of social relationships between hunter-gatherers and farmers, known ethnographically, occurred simultaneously.     

Notes on Contributors

By the end of the century, and under pressure from new scientific theories of minds and emotions, the languages in which the Victorians understood the relationship between inner feeling and moral action came under great pressure. At the same time, the established association between aesthetic and moral value was being challenged by aestheticism's espousal of ‘art for art's sake’. This essay examines one very distinctive response to these issues: Vernon Lee's development of the concept of ‘empathy’. Lee offers empathy as a scientifically verifiable process which explains why beauty matters to us. She also seeks to use it to mediate a new position capable of acknowledging the power of aestheticism's critique of Victorian moralism, while re-establishing moral action as central to aesthetic experience.     

Carrying the Cross,Caring for Kin: The Everyday Life of Charismatic Christianity in Remote Aboriginal Australia

ABSTRACT In this paper, I address the important yet under‐examined role of charismatic Protestant Christianity in the reconfiguring of personhood and social relations in the remote Yolngu settlement of Galiwin'ku. I focus in particular on the ways in which this form of Christianity, locally articulated, brings together indigenous concepts of personhood with those introduced by the market, the state, and evangelism to produce what I refer to as Christian individuality and Christian relatedness. These dialectical tendencies in postcolonial settlement life call attention to the ways Yolngu converts use their Christian practices both to continue kin‐based moralities in the present and to engage (if selectively) modern individualism. This paper addresses post‐colonial conditions where demands of state institutions and modern governance interact with changing ideas of personhood and sociality. It contributes to the growing anthropological literature on Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity.