Ivory

Pastoralist populations in East Africa appear in the archaeological record 4,000–4,500 years ago, and specialized pastoralism has occurred and disappeared at different times and places over the last two or three millennia (Gifford-Gonzales 1998). While these geographically widespread pastoral societies have received much scholarly attention from a variety of disciplines, the prevailing interpretation of the long history of this socio-ecological specialization focuses on local and/or regional economic and ecological conditions. Yet, the emergence, maintenance, and spread of this form of livelihood as a productive specialization must be explained and not taken for granted. In the literature on East Africa, authors often view pastoralism as an unproblematic consequence of favorable environmental conditions and herd growth (e.g., Spencer 1998: 2–3; Marshall 1990; Schneider 1979). I argue here, like Henrichsen (2000), that pastoralism must be analyzed not as a given natural condition but as a result of wealth accumulation, which is historically constructed in contexts of social and economic world-system linkages. Furthermore, I argue that while instances of pastoralism may have occurred as local developments in time and space, the periods of widespread geographical and demographic expansions and contractions of pastoralist societies during the last millennium are linked to the global trade in ivory, and thus to the world-system. ¹