being “Maasai”; being “people‐of‐cattle”: ethnic shifters in East Africa

Conventional notions of ethnicity are similar to Maasai ideology, which asserts that the term Maasai refers to a nonproblematical, unitary, and given social entity. The term serves not as a simple ethnic marker, however, but as a pragmatic shifter. Its sense and reference vary across the ethnosociological context, signifying economic practice, the social margin, and the pastoral division of labor. The semiotic process, then, generates, rather than simply represents, the social order [ethnicity, semiotics, East African pastoralism, ideology, symbolic classification, economics]