Cultural Production and Change in Kenya
Cultural Production and Change in Kenya

Author: Kimani Njogu

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2007-06-15

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 9966151079

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Art, Culture and Society Vol 1 is the first in a series of books to be published by Twaweza Communications on the relationship between art and society, with special reference to Kenya. It is part of a cultural leadership initiative being undertaken by the organization through a reexamination of the arts as they are produced and studied. This volume brings together important reflections on the arts and is a major step in encouraging dialogue on the relationship between creativity and the human condition in the region. Significantly, it creates a space for university-based academics to engage in dialogue with artists and writers based outside institutions of higher learning. The conversations will bridge the gap between the two domains for knowledge production and enrich creative enterprise in Kenya, in theory and practice. As the essays in this collection show, the present global situation demands a way to conceptualise and theorise an ever growing cultural interconnectedness, sometimes manifested in art; and interconnectedness that draws from a myriad of cultures and experiences. Through the bridges of contact and cultural exchange distant images are mediated and brought closer to us. They are reinterpreted and modified. In the final analysis, culture is shown to be an important aspect of human creativity but separateness and boundedness is contested. Instead, culture is shown to be malleable and fluid. The essays bring in a new freshness to our reading of the creative arts coming out of Kenya.

Commodities and Globalization
Commodities and Globalization

Author: Angelique Haugerud

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2000-07-05

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0742574180

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TodayOs growing fascination with flows of people, commodities, technology, capital, images and ideas across national and other boundaries poses fresh theoretical and methodological challenges to anthropology. Commodities offer a particularly useful window on globalization because they, unlike electronically conveyed capital, transport cultural messages. These ideological or symbolic transfers are of particular interest to economic anthropology. This collection considers how conceptions and roles of commodities may change in response to widening spheres of economic interaction and exchange. The essays in this volume are ordered under two themes. Those included in the first section, OCommodities in a Globalizing Marketplace,O address historically and culturally defined variations in meanings and practices associated with commodities in globalizing markets. In Part Two, OThe Circulation and Revaluation of CommoditiesO, contributors analyze how commodity producersO experiences are informed by colonial and post-colonial history, state directives in the marketplace, and locations in dependent or marginalized regions. The chapters all focus on the production process as it responds to, is distorted by and increasingly is controlled by the determination of the value of those commodities outside a OlocalityO.

Kenya's Running Women
Kenya's Running Women

Author: Michelle M Sikes

Publisher: MSU Press

Published: 2023-12-01

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1628955147

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Since Pauline Konga’s breakthrough performance at the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta, the world has become accustomed to seeing Kenyan women medal at major championships, sweep marathons, and set world records. Yet little is known about the pioneer generation of women who paved the way for Kenya’s reputation as an international powerhouse in women’s track and field. In Kenya’s Running Women: A History, historian and former professional runner Michelle M. Sikes details the triumphs and many challenges these women faced, from the advent of Kenya’s athletics program in the colonial era through the professionalization of running in the 1980s and 1990s. Sikes reveals how over time running became a vehicle for Kenyan women to expand the boundaries of acceptable female behavior. Kenya’s Running Women demonstrates the necessity of including women in histories of African sport, and of incorporating sport into studies of African gender and nation-building.

The Indigenous Games of the People of the Coastal Region of Kenya
The Indigenous Games of the People of the Coastal Region of Kenya

Author: Mwangi Peter Wanderi

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 9994455567

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Since the time of the early Greek, Egyptian and Chinese civilizations, games are depicted as having played a significant role in the lives of the people, similarly, games of different kinds have been a vital hallmark of peopleís culture in Kenya, and everywhere else in Africa, for hundreds of years. The focus of this research project is to identify the traditional games of the people from the Kenyan coastal region and describe how they were conducted as well as the socio-cultural setting within which they were performed, and to establish the significance of these activities in enhancing the acquisition and learning of verbal information, cognitive strategies, attitudes, and motor skills by the participants in specific and their significance to the community in general. The study also suggests ways in which traditional games could be adopted into the contemporary educational curriculum as well as for mass sports participation.