The organisational structure of a pastoral society can be described in terms of a hierarchy which includes households, extended families, encampments or villages, neighbourhoods containing encampments and regional associations of neighbourhoods. Functional aspects of pastoral society include decision making and allocation of responsibilities and resources in support of its production and management systems. Material in this chapter focuses on structure and function of the Borana household and the relationship of households to the encampment (or olla). Relationships of encampments to each other and the roles of neighbourhoods and regional units of resource allocation are respectively reviewed in Section 7.3.1.2: Grazing management and Section 2.4.1.7: Water resources. The objective of this chapter is to provide a synthesis of studies conducted largely during average rainfall years in the 1980s. Specific topics of investigation included household composition and livestock holdings, marketing behaviour principally involving livestock and dairy products, labour allocation, patterns of cash income and expenditure, allocation of animal production to subsistence and commercial purposes and degree of crop-livestock integration and patterns of emergent agropastoralism.
These topics were prioritised in a series of independent investigations.
