Ethno-erotic Economies: Crafting Samburu Futures in Postcolonial Kenya
Ethno-erotic Economies: Crafting Samburu Futures in Postcolonial Kenya

Author: George Paul Meiu

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 9781303423215

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This dissertation examines how a people long venerated and vilified for their ethnic and sexual difference use that very same difference to produce livelihoods. Since the 1980s, young men from the Samburu District of northern Kenya migrated to beach resorts to sell souvenirs and perform traditional dances for tourists. They sought to capitalize on the colonial image of the exotic Maa-speaking male "warrior" or moran, who had become a core brand of East Africa as a tourist destination. Most of them hoped to meet European women for transactional sex. As more and more women from Western Europe had relationships with Samburu men, some of these men acquired spectacular wealth in a very short time. Through gifts of money from their partners, men built houses, bought land, livestock, and cars, and opened various businesses. Many of them paid bridewealth and married one or two local wives. Some jumped across age grades by paying for an early initiation into elderhood. Others funded elections and became regional councilors. In a time when most people in Samburu District struggled to produce livelihoods in face of a declining cattle economy, rapid population growth, the alienation of land, and unemployment, the wealth of these "young big-men" became a salient object of moral contestation.

Ethno-erotic Economies
Ethno-erotic Economies

Author: George Paul Meiu

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-10-10

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 022649117X

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In Ethno-Erotic Economies, anthropologist George Paul Meiu looks at how fantasies of sexual difference create what we think of as "ethnicity" in a globalized world. Meiu draws back the curtain on a fascinating case of sexual tourism in Coastal Kenya in which young men deploy stereotypes of African warriors to establish transactional sexual relationships with foreign women. Meiu's deep familiarity with Samburu culture allowed him to explore the long-term effects of the sex trade on things like intimate affiliations, kinship, ritual, gender, and age in rural Kenya. What happens to communities when wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of its young men? How do these men seek to convert fast money into traditional, lasting forms of prestige to become "elders" and thus secure higher moral and social standing? And, crucially, how do others not privy to the sexual encounters themselves understand the circulation of new money? Meiu's exceptional skills as an ethnographer yield riveting testimonies from all quarters of Samburu society, resulting in a compelling look at how intimacy and ethnicity come together to shape the pathways of global and local trade in the postcolonial world.

Ethno-erotic Economies
Ethno-erotic Economies

Author: George Paul Meiu

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-10-10

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 022649120X

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Ethno-erotic Economies explores a fascinating case of tourism focused on sex and culture in coastal Kenya, where young men deploy stereotypes of African warriors to help them establish transactional sexual relationships with European women. In bars and on beaches, young men deliberately cultivate their images as sexually potent African men to attract women, sometimes for a night, in other cases for long-term relationships. George Paul Meiu uses his deep familiarity with the communities these men come from to explore the long-term effects of markets of ethnic culture and sexuality on a wide range of aspects of life in rural Kenya, including kinship, ritual, gender, intimate affection, and conceptions of aging. What happens to these communities when young men return with such surprising wealth? And how do they use it to improve their social standing locally? By answering these questions, Ethno-erotic Economies offers a complex look at how intimacy and ethnicity come together to shape the pathways of global and local trade in the postcolonial world.

Patina
Patina

Author: Shannon Lee Dawdy

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-05-31

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 022635122X

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When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the world reacted with shock on seeing residents of this distinctive city left abandoned to the floodwaters. After the last rescue was completed, a new worry arose—that New Orleans’s unique historic fabric sat in ruins, and we had lost one of the most charming old cities of the New World. In Patina, anthropologist Shannon Lee Dawdy examines what was lost and found through the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. Tracking the rich history and unique physicality of New Orleans, she explains how it came to adopt the nickname “the antique city.” With innovative applications of thing theory, Patina studies the influence of specific items—such as souvenirs, heirlooms, and Hurricane Katrina ruins—to explore how the city’s residents use material objects to comprehend time, history, and their connection to one another. A leading figure in archaeology of the contemporary, Dawdy draws on material evidence, archival and literary texts, and dozens of post-Katrina interviews to explore how the patina aesthetic informs a trenchant political critique. An intriguing study of the power of everyday objects, Patina demonstrates how sharing in the care of a historic landscape can unite a city’s population—despite extreme divisions of class and race—and inspire civil camaraderie based on a nostalgia that offers not a return to the past but an alternative future.

Obama and Kenya
Obama and Kenya

Author: Matthew Carotenuto

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 2016-07-29

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0896804925

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Barack Obama’s political ascendancy has focused considerable global attention on the history of Kenya generally and the history of the Luo community particularly. From politicos populating the blogosphere and bookshelves in the U.S and Kenya, to tourists traipsing through Obama’s ancestral home, a variety of groups have mobilized new readings of Kenya’s past in service of their own ends. Through narratives placing Obama into a simplified, sweeping narrative of anticolonial barbarism and postcolonial “tribal” violence, the story of the United States president’s nuanced relationship to Kenya has been lost amid stereotypical portrayals of Africa. At the same time, Kenyan state officials have aimed to weave Obama into the contested narrative of Kenyan nationhood. Matthew Carotenuto and Katherine Luongo argue that efforts to cast Obama as a “son of the soil” of the Lake Victoria basin invite insights into the politicized uses of Kenya’s past. Ideal for classroom use and directed at a general readership interested in global affairs, Obama and Kenya offers an important counterpoint to the many popular but inaccurate texts about Kenya’s history and Obama’s place in it as well as focused, thematic analyses of contemporary debates about ethnic politics, “tribal” identities, postcolonial governance, and U.S. African relations.

Water, Cultural Diversity, and Global Environmental Change
Water, Cultural Diversity, and Global Environmental Change

Author: Barbara Rose Johnston

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2011-12-07

Total Pages: 594

ISBN-13: 9400717741

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Co-published with UNESCO A product of the UNESCO-IHP project on Water and Cultural Diversity, this book represents an effort to examine the complex role water plays as a force in sustaining, maintaining, and threatening the viability of culturally diverse peoples. It is argued that water is a fundamental human need, a human right, and a core sustaining element in biodiversity and cultural diversity. The core concepts utilized in this book draw upon a larger trend in sustainability science, a recognition of the synergism and analytical potential in utilizing a coupled biological and social systems analysis, as the functioning viability of nature is both sustained and threatened by humans.

The Messages of Tourist Art
The Messages of Tourist Art

Author: Bennetta Jules-Rosette

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-04-17

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1475718276

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Tourist art may be a billion dollar business. Nevertheless, such art is despised. What is worse, the "bad" culture is seen as driving out the "good. " Commer cialization is assumed to destroy traditional arts and crafts, replacing them with junk. The process is seen as demeaning to artists in the traditional societies, who are seduced into a type of whoredom: unfeeling production of false beauty for money. The arts remain problematic for the social sciences. Sociology textbooks treat the arts as subordinate reflections of social forces, norms, or groups. An thropology textbooks conventionally isolate the arts in a separate chapter, failing to integrate them with analyses of kinship, economics, politics, language, or biology. Textbooks reflect the guiding theories, which emphasize such factors as modes of production, patterns of thought, or biological and normative con straints, but their authors have not adequately formulated the aesthetic dimen sion. One may compare the theoretical status of the arts to that of religion. After the contributions by Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, the sociology of religion is well established, but where is a Durkheim or Weber for the sociology of art? What is true of the social sciences in general holds for understanding of modernization in the Third World. These processes and those places are analyzed economically, politically, and socially, but the aesthetic dimension is treated in isolation, if at all, and is poorly grasped in relation to the other forces.

What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa?
What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa?

Author: Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2017-06-16

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0262533901

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Explorations of science, technology, and innovation in Africa not as the product of “technology transfer” from elsewhere but as the working of African knowledge. In the STI literature, Africa has often been regarded as a recipient of science, technology, and innovation rather than a maker of them. In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines show that STI in Africa is not merely the product of “technology transfer” from elsewhere but the working of African knowledge. Their contributions focus on African ways of looking, meaning-making, and creating. The chapter authors see Africans as intellectual agents whose perspectives constitute authoritative knowledge and whose strategic deployment of both endogenous and inbound things represents an African-centered notion of STI. “Things do not (always) mean the same from everywhere,” observes Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, the volume's editor. Western, colonialist definitions of STI are not universalizable. The contributors discuss topics that include the trivialization of indigenous knowledge under colonialism; the creative labor of chimurenga, the transformation of everyday surroundings into military infrastructure; the role of enslaved Africans in America as innovators and synthesizers; the African ethos of “fixing”; the constitutive appropriation that makes mobile technologies African; and an African innovation strategy that builds on domestic capacities. The contributions describe an Africa that is creative, technological, and scientific, showing that African STI is the latest iteration of a long process of accumulative, multicultural knowledge production. Contributors Geri Augusto, Shadreck Chirikure, Chux Daniels, Ron Eglash, Ellen Foster, Garrick E. Louis, D. A. Masolo, Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Neda Nazemi, Toluwalogo Odumosu, Katrien Pype, Scott Remer

Africa's Future, Africa's Challenge
Africa's Future, Africa's Challenge

Author: Marito H. Garcia

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2008-01-18

Total Pages: 558

ISBN-13: 0821368877

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Early childhood, from birth through school entry, was largely invisible worldwide as a policy concern for much of the twentieth century. Children, in the eyes of most countries, were 'appendages' of their parents or simply embedded in the larger family structure. The child did not emerge as a separate social entity until school age (typically six or seven). 'Africa's Future, Africa's Challenge: Early Childhood Care and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa' focuses on the 130 million children south of the Sahel in this 0-6 age group. This book, the first of its kind, presents a balanced collection of articles written by African and non-African authors ranging from field practitioners to academicians and from members of government organizations to those of nongovernmental and local organizations. 'Africa's Future, Africa's Challenge' compiles the latest data and viewpoints on the state of Sub-Saharan Africa's children. Topics covered include the rationale for investing in young children, policy trends in early childhood development (ECD), historical perspectives of ECD in Sub-Saharan Africa including indigenous approaches, new threats from HIV/AIDS, and the importance of fathers in children's lives. The book also addresses policy development and ECD implementation issues; presents the ECD programming experience in several countries, highlighting best practices and challenges; and evaluates the impact of ECD programs in a number of countries.