The Shungwaya Problem 
23 
The picture is simplified, it is true, but what it suggests is a scale of 
cultural distance, and as such it is of importance, for in that guise it can be 
tested by a different method of scoring. What can be expected then is either a 
certain measure of corroboration, or, also, of rejection. If the first is forth 
coming we will be assured that the tradition is "true” and the hypothetical 
series as represented in Diagram A will stand as approximately confirmed. 
However, regional proximity and the ensuring small-scale migrations of families 
in time of stress and famine, or under duress because of factional or magical 
threats makes our tribal units far from pure as isolates in an experiment. Also 
tradition repeatedly assured us that the moving columns did not enter empty 
lands. This twofold admixture will greatly influence the results of the test which 
follows. 
2. Cultural Similarity and Cultural Distance 
In the present section the best guarantee for success seems to lie in 
the temporary abandonment of ethnic or linguistic concepts such as "Hamitic”, 
‘Bantu” or “Nilo-hamitic” and to treat the available material from the view 
point of culture alone. Our present point of view, then, is "diffusionist” rather 
than “migrationist”. The fact that we know that there is an area predominantly 
occupied by Bantu-speakers should therefore be forgotten, because it will be a 
stumbling block rather than a help. High-frequency patterned sets of locally 
recurrent events like irrigation, weeding, reaping, building, protecting, cursing 
or burying, in which the ecological relations between human groups and their 
environment are considered as of primary importance form the core of the 
present approach. 
When I said that language should not stand in our way in viewing and 
solving, or at least adequately formulating our present problem, I had a num 
ber of instances in mind which are sufficiently illuminative in themselves. 
One refers to the two essentially similar cultures on both flanks of Mount Meru, 
the Arusha being Masai-speaking, the Meru Bantuphone (Gulliver 1963: 
passim). Under similar conditions the western Chagga and those of the eastern 
chiefdoms reveal the same amount of general cultural diversity as do the 
Arusha and Meru, yet they all speak Bantu dialects (Gutmann 1926). This 
linguistic uniformity should not blind us to observe other dissimilarities which 
really should prevent us of talking of Chagga culture in the singular. Another 
instance of similar content (unpublished fieldwork): the Ikumi phratry in 
H. E. Teita are sedentary Masai ethnohistorically; culturally they are a local 
variant of Teita culture; linguistically they are Bantu like the other Teita. 
The same situation obtains among the Pokomo (Prins 1952), where, viewed 
from the ethno-historical viewpoint the Elwana "sub-tribe” are of Boni 
extraction and hence sedentary ex-hunters, but culturally they are riverine 
agriculturists like the bulk of the Pokomo, and linguistically they are no longer 
Cushites like their Boni brethren as they speak a Bantu language. 
Whereas it can be expedient in some cases to treat cultures and tribes 
a s temporal and spatial isolates, or even to consider them as closed systems,