Preliminary, comments welcome MODELING SOCIAL RULES AND HISTORY: The Impact of the Sepaade Tradition on the Rendille of Northern Kenya

This paper models the age-group social rules followed by the Rendille of northern Kenya and develops a simple simulation model (available to the reader) for experimenting with the history induced by those rules. Rendille society is well described as a graded age-group society with negative paternal linking. This age-group demography is elegantly captured by an overlapping generations model, arguably the paradigm theoretical model for macroeconomic analysis. We use the model to examine a prominent and unique institutional feature of the Rendille age-group system, termed Sepaade. Sepaade involves women from every third age group marrying unusually late. The model shows that Sepaade reduces the level and the growth rate of the population, induces periodicity in the age-group demographics and dramatically favours one of the age-group lineages. We examine the impacts of the introduction of Sepaade in 1825 and its dissolution in 1998. This method of examining history is valuable because it both provides answers to existing questions and suggests additional important questions. The relevance of both answers and questions is confirmed by the emic test of asking Rendille elders. OLG models of age-set societie