Like Fathers, Like Sons: Age-Staging and Generational Stumbling Blocks, The Boran Gadaa Experience
Article by Andrea Nicolas
in: Times of our lives: Making Sense of Growing up & Growing old, ed. by
Harry Blatterer and Julia Glahn. Ebook: Inter-Disciplinary Press,
pp. 323-334, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-904710-91-2
Website: http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/ebooks/times-of-our-lives
pdf-download: http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/tol2009ever2020310.pdf
(Original Ebook version)
Like Fathers, Like Sons: Age-Staging and Generational Stumbling Blocks, The Boran Gadaa Experience
Article by Andrea Nicolas
in: Growing Up, Growing Old: Trajectories of Times and Lives, ed. by Andrea Nicolas and Ian Flaherty. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press 2013, pp. 87-110.
(Extended [!] Print version of the Ebook publication of 2010)
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Growing Up, Growing Old: Trajectories of Times and Lives
Book by Andrea Nicolas and Ian Flaherty (eds.)
Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press 2013
ISBN: 978-1-904710-94-8
(link also contains Table of Contents and Downloadable Introduction)
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Abstract:
In contrast to individual life-course projections, North-east African age organization enables male individuals to pass as a group of age-mates through a defined sequence of age grades. The Gadaa organization of the Boran of Kenya and Ethiopia combines this type of age-staging with a generational mode of recruitment. A son gets introduced to a specific set correlated to that of his father and subsequently changes his status every eight years as a member of his cohort. The son’s set always remains at an equal distance from his father’s set that synchronically ‘moves’, always some distance ahead, through the same life cycle. Such a filial ‘bond’, embedded as it is in the group’s socio-political organisation, can have affective values but it can also become a ‘fetter’ on personal decisions. The moment a member of the family fails to stick to the rules of timing for legitimate procreation the whole generational chain is brought out of step. Demographic surveys suggest that large numbers of people no longer match the ideal correlation of age and generation set membership, nominally having fallen out of the system. In spite of this, Gadaa organisation is still very much present among the Boran and is far from ‘extinction’. This article deals with the question of how an institutionalized aging and procreation ‘charter’ can work as a coherent framework in the face of the erosive forces of fission and individual non-compliance. On a deeper theoretical level, the study raises the question of why at all a society introduces such a highly elaborated and normatively sanctioned way of ‘collective aging’ and generational streamlining? Is there a need ‘to be in step’ with others?