Social Responses to Climate Change in a Politically Decentralized Context: A Case Study from East African History

Abstract

AbstractOver the past 3,000 years, speakers of the Ateker family of languages in East Africa chose various strategies to respond to periods of climate change including the end of the African Humid Period and the Medieval Climate Anomaly. Some Ateker people made wholesale changes to food production, adopting transhumant pastoralism or shifting staple crops, while others migrated to wetter lands. All borrowed new economic and social idea from neighbors. These climate-induced changes in turn had profound social and political ramifications marked by an investment in resilient systems for decentralizing power, such as age-classes and neighborhood congresses. By integrating evidence from historical linguistics and oral traditions with paleoclimatological data, this paper explores how a group of stateless societies responded to climate change. It also considers whether these cases complicate concepts such as “collapse” and “resilience” that are derived from analyses of mostly state-centric climate histories.