The Effects of Violence and Impoverishment on Psychosocial Health Among Pastoralist Communities in Northern Kenya

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The proposed study promises to make a significant and important contribution to the anthropology of violence, health, and inequality by combining social epidemiology with ethnography. Applying a comparative regional approach to intercommunity violence, po verty, and health in three ethnic communities in Kenya that are often in conflict - Pokot, Samburu, and Turkana - an international team of highly qualified researchers will investigate the social and health-related dimensions of violence through quantitat ive and qualitative methods that elucidate the consequences and the lived experiences of endemic warfare. Specifically, the project closely measures and examines the ways in which chronic, low-intensity violence creates a special class of vulnerable and i mpoverished persons, making violence-created inequality distinct in analytically and practically significant ways from other forms of poverty and inequality. The study's regional scope places the current circumstances of violence into a larger context of marginalization historically shaped by adverse colonial polices that have continued into the postcolonial period. The continuing pauperization of pastoralists communities is shaped by a myriad of intersecting causes: the extensive loss of grazing grounds to national parks and expanding private wildlife conservancies; environmental degradation as a consequence of crowding and climate change; and state policies hostile to pastoral livelihoods. Our combination of large-scale contextual frames with an intima te, biographical frame that focuses on embodiment, allows for a more nuanced analysis of the social, economical, political and personal factors differentially shaping the experiences of intercommunity violence, which in this case, is a driving force behin d the production of poverty, misfortune and insecurity across the feuding communities.