From Hunters to Herders: Subsistence Change as a Reproductive Strategy among the Mukogodo

The demography of sociocultural change has become an important topic for anthropologists and other social scientists, yet seldom have the reproductive interests and strategies of individuals been considered as possible sources of change. Such interests and strategies are crucial to an understanding of an episode of rapid and radical change among the Mukogodo of north-central Kenya. I shall argue that their transformation from hunters to herders within a few decades early in this century was a response to the need to obtain livestock in order to marry.