Paul Wenzel Geissler, Ruth Jane Prince

The Land Is Dying

Contingency, Creativity and Conflict in Western Kenya

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Explores conflicts and concerns about personhoood, gender relations, memory and sociality that take shape under the shadow of the HIV/AIDS epidemic but that have deeper historical roots relating to Christianity, neo-traditionalism, and growing economic inequality. Links study of ritual and religion with that of history and memory and that of AIDS and crisis. Situates body, person, and social relations in the broader context of material engagements with the world and the historical changes affecting both.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Berghahn Books
• Seitenzahl: 444
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. Juni 2010
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 240mm x 161mm x 28mm
• Gewicht: 828g
• ISBN-13: 9781845454814
• ISBN-10: 1845454812
• Artikelnr.: 31881363

Autorenporträt

After studying social anthropology in London and Copenhagen, Ruth Jane Prince is presently Smuts Fellow at the Centre of African Studies, University of Cambridge. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in western Kenya since 1997 focusing on medical anthropology, kinship and Christianity. Her current research deals with HIV interventions and antiretroviral treatment programmes in Kenya, and related issues of global health, the political-economy of knowledge, transnationalism and the state. The authors have co-published articles on kinship and ethics, religion and social change, and the anthropology of the body, healing and science.

Inhaltsangabe

Table of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Introduction: "Are we still together here?"
* A community at the end of the world
* The death of today
* Growing relations
* Being together
* Growth
* Touch
* Searching for another social practice
* Engaging boundaries
* Hygiene
* Knowing boundaries
* Changing perspectives?
* Coming together
* Visiting
Chapter 2. Landscapes and histories
* Returns
* A road in time
* Kisumu
* Driving out Bondo District
* The lake
* Piny Luo - 'Luoland'
* A 'tribe'
* Luo sociality
* The reserve
* Return to Uhero Yimbo Muthurwa
* Making Uhero village
* (Re-)Settlement
* Belonging and ownership
* A modern Luo village
* 'Down' into the village
* 'Up' and 'down' KaOkoth
* Alternative 'modernities': the beach and 'Jerusalem'
* KaOgumba
Chapter 3. Salvation and Tradition: heaven and earth?
* Dichotomies in everyday life
* Salvation
* Strong Christians
* Saved life
* Saved and others
* Faith in purity
* Tradition
* The Luo rules
* 'Born-again'
* Traditionalism
* Traditionalism, Christianity and The West
* Customary everyday life
* Searching ways
* Tradition in everyday life
* Everyday ritual
* The absence of ritual
* The omnipresence of ritual
PART ONE
Chapter 4. 'Opening the way': being at home in Uhero
* Introduction
* "Our culture says that one must make a home"
* Relational flows: embedding growth in the home
* Tom's new home
* Moving forward - directions
* Openings and closures
* Order and sequence
* Complementarity and growth: coming together in the house
* Making a house
* Sharing the gendered house
* The living house
* Gender, generation and growth
* Struggling against implication
* The home in heaven
* 'The rules of the home'
* Powers of explication
* Practicing rules
* Cementing relations
* Traditionalism and other kinds of ethnography
5. Growing children: shared persons and permeable bodies
* Introduction
* Sharing
* Sharing or exchange?
* Sharing food
* Food, blood and kinship
* 'The child is of the mother'
* Changed foods and relations
* Sharing and dividing nurture
* Shared bodies
* Illnesses of infancy and their treatment
* Evil eye and spirits
* Medical pluralism?
* Herbal medicines
* Cleanness and dirt
* Sharing names
* Being named after
* Being called
* Sharing names and naming shares
* Conclusion
PART TWO
Chapter 6. Order and decomposition: touch around sickness and death
* Introduction
* Otoyo's home
* The sickness of a daughter
* Return of a daughter
* Kwer and chira
* Continuity and contingency
* Avoiding the rules
* Treating chira
* Caring
* The death of a husband
* Expected death
* "She should remember her love!"
* Death
* The funeral
* The dead body
* Loving people
* Conclusion
Chapter 7. 'Life Seen': touch, vision and speech in the making of sex in
Uhero
* Introduction
* Earthly ethics and Christian morality
* Riwruok
* Riwruok: outside intentionality
* Chira: Growth and directionality
* Chodo and luor: continuity and change
* Cleanness: Sex and separation
* The proliferation of 'Sex'
* AIDS and chira
* The fight against AIDS
* Pornography - 'bad things'
* Conclusion
Chapter 8. "Our Luo culture is sick": identity and infection in the debate
about widow inheritance
* Introduction
* Testing positive
* Becoming a widow
* Contentious practices
* A tough head
* Tero
* Independence
* Alone
* Inheritance and infection
* Past and present tero
* Fighting tero
* Deprivation and property
* Inheriting HIV - fears about women's sexuality and social
reproduction
* Turning tero into a business
* Ambiguous heritage: Tero as source of identity and infection
* 'Our Luo culture is sick'
* 'The most elaborate and solemn ritual': tero is our culture
* Sanitising Luo culture?
* Conclusion
PART THREE
Chapter 9. "How can we drink his tea without killing a bull?" - funerary
ceremony and matters of remembrance
* Introduction
* Funerary ceremonies
* Funerals in Uhero
* Funeral commensality
* Returning to the funeral
* Osure's sawo
* An Earthly feast
* Rebekka
* Eating the sawo
* Traces of the past
* 'Sides'
* Baba Winston's memorial
* A Christian funerary celebration
* Debates
* The service
* Remembrance
* Conclusion
Chapter 10. "The land is dying" - Traces and monuments in the village
landscape
* Introduction
* Cutting the land
* Ownership
* Land, paper and power
* Living on the land
* Gardens and farms
* The bush
* Fences
* At home
* Traces and inscriptions
* Getting one's land - finding one's place
* Conclusion
Chapter 11. Contingency, creativity and difference in western Kenya
* Creative difference
* Old and new dealings with hybridity
* "Are we still together here?"
* Postscript
* Ka-Ogumba 2007
Bibliography
Books and Articles
Newspaper articles and electronic media
Music
Index