Vol. 6 · No. 2 · 2002

Barbara Casciarri

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The Ahāmda are a Muslim and Arabic-speaking people of Central Sudan. They are part of the larger category of 'arab peoples, a term that in broad Sudanese terminological classification - largely analogous to that in most Middle-Eastern countries - defines nomadic pastoralists and distinguishes them from rural and urban settled communities (Casciarri 1999; Grandin 1980). They conceive of themselves as a group of agnatic kin (known as gabīla in Sudanese Arabic, I gloss this as 'tribe') descended from an eponymous ancestor, Hammed, and claim further origins from 'Abbās (the Prophet Mohammad's father's brother), as do many of the Arabic-speaking peoples of Northern and Central Sudan (MacMichael 1922; Trimingham 1949). Their socio-political organisation is similar to that of the Bedouin (Bonte et al. 1991). They live in a semi-desert environment on the central-western fringes of the Butāna plains, east of the Main Nile, north of Khartoum, and obtain most of their subsistence from extensive herding (mostly of sheep and goats, with a few camels) complemented by the rain-fed cultivation of sorghum. Practising a bipolar cycle, they approach the Nile during the dry season and go deep into the Butāna pastures during the wet season. In the last two decades this community has experienced a general crisis, with processes familiar among other nomadic populations of arid zones (Galaty et al. 1983, 1994; Rigby 1985) - namely increasing sedentarisation, a shift from nomadism to transhumance, the forced switching to new sources of income, a general proletarisation and continuous marginalisation. This paper focuses on the dynamics of socioeconomic change that have accelerated since the 1970s. Generalised sedentarisation and major transformations of the Ahāmda pastoral system have become more significant only during the last fifteen to twenty years, but the extreme rapidity of this recent change has had a strong disruptive impact on the entire society and threatens to reshape not only the economic processes, but the entire community's social relationships, thus putting at risk its production and social reproduction. These processes of transformation will be seen within the wider context of national and international trends of economic and political strategies. My analysis focuses specifically on those aspects of commoditisation that typify the shift from use-value to exchange-value and are of broader interest for anthropological theory.