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Samuel Derbyshire

0000-0001-5022-6022

Anthropologist (Human society; History, heritage and archaeology)

Nairobi

Samuel Derbyshire is a Junior Research Fellow in Anthropology at St John’s College, University of Oxford and Associate Researcher at the Pitt Rivers Museum. His research explores socio-economic and political change in eastern African drylands, tracking livelihood adaptations amongst pastoralist communities who are currently grappling with diverse ecological challenges. His most extensive research to date has focused on the Turkana region of northern Kenya, where he has been involved in long-term ethnographic fieldwork for much of the past decade. Turkana’s pastoral economy is the subject of his recent book Remembering Turkana: material histories and contemporary livelihoods in north-western Kenya (Routledge 2020), which was a finalist for the 2021 Bethwell Ogot Book Prize. Derbyshire also writes regularly for print and broadcast media. He has reported on a range of issues for the BBC’s From Our Own Correspondent and his long-read articles have appeared in The Independent.

Publications

  • Remembering Turkana ; Material Histories and Contemporary Livelihoods in North-Western Kenya
  • A dilemma of perspectives
  • PHOTOGRAPHY, ARCHAEOLOGY AND VISUAL REPATRIATION
  • Ethnographic Photographs and Quotidian History: An Archaeological Approach to the Recent Past in Turkana, Northern Kenya
  • Livestock, divination and the era of the abusibus headdress
  • Cars, relief food and irrigation canals
  • The fieldwork
  • Summary and conclusions to Part II
  • Mobility, seasonal exchange and atap
  • Hippopotamus hide shoes, colonial taxes and cotton blankets
  • Trade, development and resilience: an archaeology of contemporary livelihoods in Turkana, northern Kenya
  • Fishing nets, fibreglass boats and the NORAD scheme
  • Remembering Turkana
  • Sugar sacks, maize flour and the establishment of commercial markets
  • Guns, cloth ngapukoto and Ekaru a Ngatuk a Nakirionok (the Year of Black Cows)
  • The nature of change
  • Material Culture, Analysis of
  • ‘Sufurias cannot bring blessings’: change, continuity and resilience in the world of Marakwet pottery, a case from western Kenya
  • Trade, development and destitution: A material culture history of fishing on the western shore of Lake Turkana, northern Kenya
  • Social-ecological change in the Omo-Turkana basin: a synthesis of current developments
  • Social-ecological change in the Omo-Turkana basin: A synthesis of current developments
  • Social-ecological change in the Omo-Turkana basin: A synthesis of current developments
  • Social-ecological change in the Omo-Turkana basin : a synthesis of current developments.
  • Social-ecological change in the Omo-Turkana basin: A synthesis of current developments
  • The river: peoples and histories of the Omo-Turkana area ; edited by Timothy Clack and Marcus Brittain. Oxford, Archaeopress. 2018, xii + 186 pp., £40 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-789690330. Also available as an ebook (open access) ISBN 978-1-789690347.
  • Fish bone ornaments, ngakoroumwa and marriage
  • Summary and conclusions to Part III
  • Spears, shields and colonial conquest
  • Synthetic fibre hats, plastic spoons and ngingoroko
  • Summary and conclusions to Part IV
  • Turkana in historical and ethnographic perspective
  • Divining the Future: Making Sense of Ecological Uncertainty in Turkana, Northern Kenya
  • Tangled crises in Turkana: investigating the spread of Prosopis in Kenya’s northern drylands

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