In Search of the Good Life: Life‐History of a Kenyan Indian Settler. A Sartrean Approach to Biography and History

This article recounts how a young Shi’a Muslim Indian born in north‐west India migrated to Kenya in the early twentieth century in the context of the evolving trade linking the two continents, and rose to become a successful merchant and respected member of the community. It portrays the struggles that he undertook with fellow Kenyan Indians against British colonial policies of racial discrimination and political marginalization, and shows some of the unintended consequences of these actions for the group in the post‐colonial period. Through the application of Jean‐Paul’s Sartre’s concepts of project, situation, seriality and dialectical totalization, the article attempts to capture some of the historical processes that took place during the period at four interconnected levels: individual; communal; regional; and global.     

Does Diversification Improve Livelihoods? Pastoral Households in Xinjiang,China

Diversification is routinely promoted to improve poor rural peoples’ livelihoods. However, policy recommendations for livelihood diversification based on evidence from crop‐cultivating sedentary rural societies may not work for mobile pastoral communities, where socio‐ecological conditions predetermine livestock herding as the preferred livelihood strategy. Using survey and semi‐structured interview data collected from 159 households in the Altay and Tianshan Mountains of Xinjiang, China, this study applies cluster analysis to identify six distinct groups based on livelihood strategies: pastoralists, agropastoralists, crop farmers, wage labourers, hired herders and mixed smallholders. Although pastoralism is the least diverse of these in terms of sources of income, it is significantly more diverse in ecological dimensions such as spatial movement, land use pattern and livestock portfolio. Patterns of livelihood diversification and their relationship with household incomes indicate that pastoralism, although preferred, is unattainable for 55 per cent of households given their meagre asset endowments and the pressure of government policies toward sedentarization. The results strongly suggest that livelihood diversification does not improve welfare for pastoral households. Future development interventions should promote policies that enable households to regain flexible access to pastures and should aim to correct the imbalance of opportunities that exists in northern Xinjiang.