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Pastoral Social Dynamics
In pastoral communities there is almost always strong inter-dependence and co-operation between households. One of the reasons for this is that pastoralism is labor intensive. Each type of animal has different requirements in terms of fodder and water. The requirements of keeping the herd together, managing regular movements between grazing and water as well as twice daily milking means that keeping animals requires a pooling of labor resources among households to manage the different types of stock effectively.
Inter-household assistance is important in terms of each household’s survival in an uncertain and risky environment. Households that have lost many animals in a drought usually depend heavily upon assistance from within the group to help them survive and recover. And better-off households are encouraged to provide this help as an insurance strategy in case they themselves need assistance at some point in the future. This spirit of mutual cooperation and assistance operates in both bad and ‘normal’ years. It is very common, for example, for poorer households to ‘oversell’ (i.e. to sell more animals than their herd size can sustain) even in ‘normal’ years, and for the difference to be made up through gifts from better-off relatives. Loan arrangements are also common. For example, a breeding female may be loaned to a poor household that then benefits from the milk and may perhaps keep any offspring. Or an immature male may be loaned, in which case the poorer household may receive a share of the increase in value of the animal once it is sold. This helps spread the risk and the workload and provides poorer households with an additional source of food and/or cash income.
With the trend towards settlement and urbanization, links to relatives in towns may also be increasingly important, both as a source of remittance income in most years, and as a source of additional gifts and loans in a bad year.
