PhD thesis Title Page Final _Richard Juma - Victoria University ...

height of the drought, sacrifices were made to the high God (akuj) at the
instruction of the regions high priest or diviner (Emuron).
3.4.4 Household interview.
Even though I refer to the Turkana people in previous chapters as ‘rural
people’, the ‘vulnerable people’, the ‘poor people’, or men, women and
children, I am fully aware of the danger of presenting people as a
homogenous group. I chose the household interview method because I
fully recognize that the informants are individual actors with different
experiences, status, needs, and motives. I also acknowledged that within
my research domain, it was important to be able to categorize individual
people’s experiences, behaviours, and values to be able to say something
general about the specific group of people I was researching, and their
livelihood. This conforms to conventional livelihoods literature where a
household is usually regarded as the suitable social unit for livelihoods
research (Mikkelsen 2005; Bryman 2004).
To be able to systematically select the interviewees (informants), I found it
prudent to get the local definition of the term ‘household’. Ellis’ (2000: 31)
recommends a clear definition of a household while studying livelihoods of
rural people. He states “a household may represent a barrier to
understanding interaction between individuals and group identities if
unnecessarily narrow, unitary and static view of household, its
composition, and the roles of its individual members are taken”.
The concept of a ‘household’ is a fairly contested and complex term, and
defining it may not be as straightforward as it seems. No matter which
definition one decides to use, it may not be applicable to all societies and
cultures. The specific forms and characteristics of households often
depend on context, a combination of social and cultural norms and
economic incentive (World Bank 2001). The way in which households are
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