Seed exchange networks, ethnicity, and sorghum diversity

Significance This study helps untangle the multiscale processes involved in the relationships between crop genetic and human cultural diversity patterns. It quantifies the effect of homophily on seed exchange networks and details the major role played by kinship systems. By bridging anthropology and crop genetics through an in-depth social network analysis, this study provides a better understanding of the social processes involved in crop diversity dynamics. These findings urgently call for a specification of social and cultural factors in crop metapopulation models, which has been neglected so far. Recent studies investigating the relationship between crop genetic diversity and human cultural diversity patterns showed that seed exchanges are embedded in farmers’ social organization. However, our understanding of the social processes involved remains limited. We investigated how farmers’ membership in three major social groups interacts in shaping sorghum seed exchange networks in a cultural contact zone on Mount Kenya. Farmers are members of residence groups at the local scale and of dialect groups clustered within larger ethnolinguistic units at a wider scale. The Chuka and Tharaka, who are allied in the same ethnolinguistic unit, coexist with the Mbeere dialect group in the study area. We assessed farmers’ homophily, propensity to exchange seeds with members of the same group, using exponential random graph models. We showed that homophily is significant within both residence and ethnolinguistic groups. At these two levels, homophily is driven by the kinship system, particularly by the combination of patrilocal residence and ethnolinguistic endogamy, because most seeds are exchanged among relatives. Indeed, residential homophily in seed exchanges results from local interactions between women and their in-law family, whereas at a higher level, ethnolinguistic homophily is driven by marriage endogamy. Seed exchanges and marriage ties are interrelated, and both are limited between the Mbeere and the other groups, although frequent between the Chuka and Tharaka. The impact of these social homophily processes on crop diversity is discussed.