From Mukogodu to Maasai: Ethnicity and Cultural Change in Kenya
Lee Cronk
Book of the month – December 2010
Anthropologist Lee Cronk looks into the question of whether one or an entire group can change one´s ethnicity. He is exploring these issues by repeatedly staying and doing research with the Mukogodu of Kenya. Until the 1920s and 1930s, the Mukogodo were Cushitic-speaking foragers (hunters, gatherers, and beekeepers). However, changes brought on by British colonial policies led them to move away from life as independent foragers and into the orbit of the high-status Maasai, whom they began to emulate. Although Lee Cronk focuses on this particular ethnic group, his observations are worth knowing about since they reflect processes that work within various communities and many times, even against our expectations, and trigger all kinds of unexpected consequences.
Having explored that, Mr. Cronk concludes in his book: “that it is not our place to preserve cultures under institutionalized bell jars, which can be done only by preventing people from making their own choices about their lives. Nor do we have a right to criticize people who choose to abandon cultural traits that we may find charming but that the people themselves no longer find useful. ... The past should have a place in our hearts, in our minds, and in books like this one, but neither we nor Mukogodo must live in it. That´s what the future is for.” Whether one agrees with this and other views that Mr. Cronk presents in his book, From Mukogodu to Maasai is an informative book that anyone, not only anthropogists or student of anthropology, might find worth reading.
