Frustration, Marriage Alternatives and Subsistence Risks among the Pokot of East Africa: Impressions of Co-Variance

The Pokot are a farming and herding people of East Africa who sanction kidnapping and elopement during their annual celebration of the summer solstice. Marriages otherwise are arranged, often with relative strangers and much older (and wealthier) partners, following successful negotiations for bride...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Anthropological quarterly 1974-07, Vol.47 (3), p.314-327
Main Author: Conant, Francis P.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Alternative/Alternatives
Elopement
Farming systems
Grains
Herding
Kinship
Livestock
Marriage/Marriages/Marital
Plains
Rituals
Society, The, of
Subsistence farming
Sustainable agriculture
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The Pokot are a farming and herding people of East Africa who sanction kidnapping and elopement during their annual celebration of the summer solstice. Marriages otherwise are arranged, often with relative strangers and much older (and wealthier) partners, following successful negotiations for bride-wealth. Intense psycho-sexual expectations and attachments between Pokot youngsters are thereby threatened, but kidnapping or elopement as alternatives are far more common among farmers than herders. It seems possible to relate this to differing contents of bride-wealth as transacted among farmers and herders as well as to contrasting degrees of risk with which persons in each subsistence system must contend.
ISSN:0003-5491
1534-1518
DOI:10.2307/3316983