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Multiple ethnicities
Q. What happens when two groups of people live in the same area but pursue quite different patterns of livelihood, e.g. for cultural reasons or because of differences in ethnicity?
A. By and large, where you live defines your livelihood options, but not everybody can or chooses to exploit these options in exactly the same way. The most common reason for pursuing different patterns of livelihood within a single zone is a difference in wealth. In an agricultural area, for example, most of the farmland may be owned by a relatively small number of better-off households, with the majority of the poor making a living as farm laborers. In this case, both groups are making use of the same basic livelihood options, but in different ways because of their different levels of wealth. Occasionally, however, other cultural or ethnic factors may result in quite different patterns of livelihood being pursued within the same geographical area. Consider, for example, a lakeshore zone within which there are two groups: cattle keepers that do not fish and fisher folk that keep a few cattle. The first thing to check is that these apparent differences in livelihood are not just reflections of differences in wealth. The test of this is that within each livelihood there should be people living at quite different levels of wealth (e.g. fisher folk with boats and more cattle versus fisher folk without boats and with few cattle). If this is the case, then two patterns of livelihood need to be defined. The fact that the groups pursuing these patterns of livelihood live in exactly the same geographical area poses little problem for most aspects of the analysis – the two groups are simply considered as separate livelihoods. The problem is how best to represent this situation on the map. The simplest solution is to consider the base from which each group operates. Even though both groups graze their cattle within the same area, perhaps the home villages of the fishing group are along the lake shore, while the cattle-only villages tend to be inland? If so, two zones can be defined on the basis of each group’s home base. If this is not the case, i.e. the fishing villages are genuinely intermixed with the cattle-only villages, then another means of mapping the two zones has to be found. One solution might be to color in the zone with stripes of two colors, one color representing each pattern of livelihood
