Economic Development and Economic Change: The Case of East African Cattle [and Comments and Replies]

Exploring anew the old question of why East African pastoral peoples tend to be conservative, this paper suggests that a de-Westernized cross-cultural application of economic theory, both statics and dynamics, coupled with transaction theory, (social exchange), reveals a distinction between economic development, the exponential growth of a specific economy, and economic change, a shift from one specific kind of economy to another. Economic development is normal in any economy and is favored by Africans as well as ourselves. Economic change, however, the aim of national and international planners, involves opportunity costs such as those faced by the Chagga as they pursue simultaneously two types of production, bananas and coffee, which to some extent compete. The opportunity costs for pastoralists are likely to be much higher than for people whose wealth is principally in land, because pastoralists incur far greater status losses than nonpastoralists in the shift from indigenous to Western economies. The thesis is supported by examination of important features of traditional African government, kinship, and marriage.