Household dynamics and rural political economy among Embu farmers in the Kenya Highlands

Abstract

While Embu's land is fertile and rainfall high, the principal "avenues to wealth accumulation lie outside of farming. Education, salaries, and businesses are the means of accumulating wealth in land, cash, and material possessions. Wage employment is tied to cycles of both

impoverishment and enrichment, and is both primary agent and product of rural differentiation. Wealth differences owe less to domestic unit developmental cycles than to secular influences affecting households' links with the wider economy and polity. Among all economic strata, relations defining access to land, labor, and livestock are embedded in both monetary and nonmonetary economic spheres. The few households who consistently produce food surpluses are an elite with superior access to cooperative as well as hired labor.

Individual competition and accumulation drive the rural economy, but the growth of a rural proletariat is slowed by the persistence of reciprocal and redistributive exchange grounded in relations of kinship, friendship, and clientage, and by the disinclination of the wealthy to invest in agricultural expansion and modernization.

This study focuses on processes of rural economic differentiation in the Kenya highlands. It considers both secular change and the cyclical differentiation posited by A.V. Chayanov, and relates economic processes to ecological variation, to the history of local social and political organization, and to extra-local influences. The Embu case is used to demonstrate important complementarities among divergent theoretical approaches, particularly the individual actor, institutional, and processual emphases that characterize formalist, substantivist, and Marxist schools

of economic anthropology. It also addresses the limitations of the familiar unitary conception of the household, and explores intra- and inter-household conflict, cooperation, and competition. The study is based on two and one-half years of field

research in Embu District. Research techniques include participant-observation, structured and unstructured interviews, and use of archival data. Quantitative data were collected during four cropping seasons through both repeated visit and one-shot questionnaire surv~ys among a random sample of 82 farm households in two ecological zones.