Theoretical advances in social and cultural anthropology have lent considerable sophistication in our understanding of how identities are constituted and enacted in context. But some anthropologists have confused their own reflexivity with reality, claiming that because ethnicity and other forms of identity are culturally created they do not “exist”, ignoring that it is precisely to act on and through society that we build worlds around us that both constitute and represent reality. Barth’s “reality effect” is not an obfuscation; it is the way social reality becomes. By academically denying forms of identity the coherence and salience we take for granted in our own lives, anthropologists lose one of the greatest strengths of the discipline, its affinity with lives-as-lived and lives-as-perceived of their collaborators, and replace this with lives-as-explained, yet another form of western imperiousness.
This paper addresses the historical shifting of pastoral identities, over different times and over different contexts. Among Maasai, the notion once was used by a set of political sections to define themselves against another set of political sections, the Iloikop, which evidence suggests was previously a more encompassing name. During the colonial period, collective names evolved or became customary for political sections at the Maasai periphery, for Samburu, Ariaal, Chamus, Arusha, and Parakuyo. But in the post-colonial period, when ethnic groupings assumed higher profile in the machinations concerning power within or regarding the state, establishing more encompassing identities –such as did the Kalenjiin—became an important project. So along with particular sectional names, other Maa-speakers chose to identify themselves as Maasai, with which for reasons of increased leverage and power the central Maasai concurred.
From another perspective, like all of Africa’s people, Maasai established intimate relations with their neighbors, including intermarriage and shared lands, which generated complex identities of often multi-lingual communities. This mixing established more complex forms of identity, with those who could share in the social life of several groups, but not the sort of confusion that some theorists have attributed to such processes of cultural creolization. The case of Kikuyu-Maasai relations will be examined, with regard to the changing interactions of power and identity that have surrounded their mutual gaze, leading to current estrangement and conflict in the setting of land disputes. The question of how different sorts of nationalisms interact and conflict in East Africa will be raised, since the creation of the more encompassing registers of Maasai identity is directly related to positioning within the post-colonial state.
By examining these question in terms of historical transformation and shifting social context, the paper emphasizes how a shifting of registers creates an impression that the field of identity involves little more than strategic manipulation of diverse features to serve individual aims and interests. It is this inventive process, however, that gives rise to a reality effect of complex identities, which can provide a point of commonality between anthropological insights and the realities of collective action that so dominate the social terrain in pastoral Africa today.