| dc.description.abstract | The Dialectics of Change Among the Southern Iteso
The Southern Iteso are an Eastern Nilotic speaking ethnic
group who reside across the border between Kenya and Uganda in
Bubedi District of Uganda and Busia District of Kenya. They
represent the last large-scale tribal movement into Western
Kenya in the precolonial period. Their present population is
probaly over l30,000. The research for this dissertation was
conducted entirely on the Kenya side of the border, where 80,000
Iteso live.
During the immediate precolonial period the Iteso possessed
a political system of the Karimojong type. They were organized
into territorial sections under the authority of an office holder
called the lok'etem. Each section was composed of a number of
sub-sections that were organized around an agnatic core. There
was a system of age groups which men entered after retirement
from active life. These age groups interceded with the high God
for other Iteso.
The first and most important political consequence of colonial
domination was the loss of the precolonial political organization.
The Iteso were pacified by African agents of the British
authorities. At first they were administered externally. Any
noticeable political activity on the part of the Iteso was suppressed
forcibly. The result of this pattern of pacification
was a radical decrease in the scale of political structures.
The section system was not adapted to tne new situation and the
office of lok'etem disappeared. Instead there emerged a type
of local group that I call a neighborhood. At first these
-neighborhoods were oriented to the focal egos that established
them. These men provided capital for their followers to establish
independent households and organized their neighbors for
deic112. during the particularly unsettled period that preceded
the emergence of a stable colonial administration.
The establishment of administrative structures coincided
with the decline in importance of these neighborhood heads.
They were replaced by brokers whose influence derived from
their access to officials in the administrative hierarchy.
With the advent of a stable administration the sources of
political power shifted to the outside of indigenous structures.
The neighborhood still remains the primary locus of faceto-
face interaction and cooperation. Instead of being oriented
to a focal ego it has evolved into a loosely-bounded organization
of persons interacting in terms of an egalitarian ideology.
Since it is not corporate in ar.yway, and informants cannot agree
on the membership of anyone neighborhood, it is best described
in terms of values and ideals concerning neighborly relations.
The most significant changes in recent Iteso social history
have occurred in the territorial field of social relations.
Kinship, which is not connected to territory, has remained relatively
constant. The kinship system consists of a series of
patrilineal descent groups which function largely as kinship
categcries and not as corporate kin groups. Maternal and affinal
kinsmen are very important in the everyday life of Iteso men,
particularly due to the pervasive conflict among closely related
agnates. The kinship terminology circumscribes behavior that is
expected to obtain among kinsmen. The most important terminological
principle is the separation of adjacent generations. Lineali
ty is relatively unimportant in the social categories of the
terminology.
An essentially amorphous form of social organization such
as the neighborhood can be sustained in a society of sedentary
agriculturalists only by a high rate of household mobility. The
high rate of Iteso mobility was maintained by an abundance of
land and pervasive conflicts among the sons of one father over
the family estate. Fathers are required to provide sons with
cattle for a first marriage and to help them establish a household.
However, the Iteso have the house property compiex, and
the cattle of one matrisegment are not alienable by another.
This leads to severe conflicts both among and within matrisegments
over disputed claims to the family estate. The intensity
of conflict and the resulting loss of capital by some
of the potential heirs leads some households to seek capital
and safety elsewhere. The pattern of leader-follower relations
also serves to reinforce this high rate of mobility since the
capital needed for marriage and household formation was exchanged
by aspiring leaders for political allegiance.
Political choices are articulated in terms of the ideology
of kinship. Thus, it can be seen that kinship serves as a link
between processes occurring in the political-jural and processes
.occurring in the domestic or familial domain.
The dissertation has attempted to demonstrate that an
adequate analysis of social change must distinguish between two
aspects of change. These are the factors that influence the
rate of change and the factors that influence the direction of
change. For the Iteso,the first set of factors were external
to the traditional social organization and the second set of
factors were internal to the social system. | en |
