Siaya: the historical anthropology of an African landscape

Cohen, David William; Atiendo Odhiambo, E. S.

Book

Siaya: the historical anthropology of an African landscape

Heinemann Kenya • Nairobi • Published In 1989 • Pages:

By: Cohen, David William, Atiendo Odhiambo, E. S..

Abstract
This book is concerned with the social history of the Luo of Western Kenya. Focusing on the lived experiences of men and women in Siaya, a district bordering Uganda, the book provides Luo debates and Luo ideas about their own past and present. The book also contrast the visions of these Luo men and women with the findings, arguments and questions produced about the Luo by professional anthropologists and historians writing not for the Luo but for their own disciplines. For this contrast, the authors focus on a sequence of selected issues including the physical landscape and the reworking of the landscape over several centuries, the social impulses and intellectual processes producing broad collective identities, the multiple and overlapping settings of cultural activity, the sources and effects of food scarcity and the images and ideas to which it gives rise, the powers of women, and the ambiguities of education. The book shows that debates about these issues among ordinary Luo men and women are older than the twentieth century. It argues that these debates have to do more with longstanding and heavily fought local questions relating to of history and cultural meanings than recent responses to modern schooling and contacts with the outside world.

Community structure

Travel

Cities

Cultural identity and pride

Inter-ethnic relations

Labor supply and employment

Urban and rural life

Social relationships and groups