The Land Is Dying: Contingency, Creativity and Conflict in Western Kenya

By Paul Wenzel Geissler and Ruth Jane Prince

Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book explores life in and around a Luo-speaking village in western Kenya during a time of death. The epidemic of HIV/AIDS affects every aspect of sociality and pervades villagers' debates about the past, the future and the ethics of everyday life. Central to such debates is a discussion of touch in the broad sense of concrete, material contact between persons. In mundane practices and in ritual acts, touch is considered to be key to the creation of bodily life as well as social continuity. Underlying the significance of material contact is its connection with growth – of persons and groups, animals, plants and the land – and the forward movement of life more generally. Under the pressure of illness and death, economic hardship and land scarcity, as well as bitter struggles about the relevance and application of Christianity and ‘Luo tradition’ in daily life, people find it difficult to agree about the role of touch in engendering growth, or indeed about the aims of growth itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781845458027

Paul Wenzel Geissler

Paul Wenzel Geissler teaches social anthropology at the University of Oslo. With Lachenal, Manton, Tousignant and other scholars and artists he published Traces of the Future (2016). With Ruth Prince, he is currently studying remains and afterlives of epidemics in East Africa, revisiting their book on AIDS in Kenya, The Land Is Dying (2010).

Book preview

Chapter 1

Introduction: ‘Are we still together here?’

This book is based on fieldwork in Uhero in the Dholuo-speaking Bondo District of western Kenya at the end of the twentieth century.¹ It examines late modern East African village life, looking particularly at the central role of everyday practices of material contact or touch for the constitution and contestation of relations, and for the construction and reconstruction of time. Underlying the significance of material contact is its connection with growth, of persons, groups and the forward movement of life more generally. As we shall show, for many people in western Kenya growth is engendered by material engagements among persons and between persons and things. Yet both the capacity of touch and the nature of growth are contested in Uhero, which is why they have become the analytical themes of this book. In the first part of this introduction, we provide an outline of these themes; in the second part, we reflect on our way to Uhero village and on how we arrived at some of these concerns.²

A community at the end of the world

To talk of Uhero is to talk of a group of people, JoUhero (914 persons in February 2001), attached to a particular place, a peninsula on Lake Victoria.³ Like all Luo, JoUhero have connections – practiced or fictitious – to distant places.⁴ Many of them travel widely, but home is never forgotten, although, for various reasons, people may rarely go there.⁵ Few of them are buried away from the home where they belong by birth or marriage, death being – at least in these days of uncertainty – the definite return home. The world beyond Uhero – cities, neighbouring nations, other continents – is present in Uhero in material objects that are used or longed for, in dreams of going abroad and in fears of exploitation. But, in spite of the considerable mobility of many JoUhero, at the centre of people's life world is still – and probably increasingly – the idea of ‘home’ (dala): a particular, named place of belonging and of a community of people attached to this place.

Yet, as the question in this chapter's title – asked in a conversation between young people – shows, the most salient trait of this community is its profound doubt in itself. Uhero is not usually evoked by either young or old as a coherent, stable and safe community, but in relation to the fractures and tensions between its members. Beneath these conflicts, what JoUhero share is a profound sense of crisis and loss. This undoubtedly encompasses what JoUhero call ‘the death of today’ (tho mar tinende) – the AIDS-related sickness and death of many villagers during the past decade or more – but this is seen as but the most recent outcome of longer processes of economic and social change that affect the very constitution of sociality itself. Nostalgia pervades everyday conversations, public oratory and popular music (Prince 2006), and generalising statements of loss are ubiquitous; either taken straight from Achebe/Yeats: ‘Things fall apart’ – words that generations of Kenyans have read in school – or in a local idiom: ‘The earth is dying. There is no love nowadays’ (‘Piny tho. Tinende hera onge’), which link the loss of life and belonging directly to that of social relations, continuity and sense of direction. Uhero calls forth, then, a sense of longing as much as of belonging.

Laments about the ‘death of land’ and the decline of ‘love’ seem to be as widespread across contemporary Africa as the literary quotation. In Ghana, Geurts found frequent references to ‘worldly demise or something rotten and amiss in the universe’, expressing concerns with land degradation, AIDS, poverty and moral decline (2002: 112–14;183); de Boeck observed in post-Mobutu Congo ‘a deeply felt sense of personal and communal crisis which pervaded all levels of society’ and ‘a growing sense of loss of a viable basis of social relations’ (1998: 25; see also Gable 1995; Hutchinson 1996; Mamdani 1996; Yamba 1997; Ferguson 1999; Sanders 2001; Dilger 2003).⁶ JoUhero (as well as Luo people elsewhere) say this crisis started in the 1980s. This was a time of accelerating economic decline that disappointed the expectations of ‘development’ of the period after the Second World War, which had been encouraged by independence and the achievements of the new nation's first, progressive years. The 1980s were a time of authoritarian political rule, corruption, externally imposed austerity policies and economic decline that betrayed the promises of independence; and it coincided with a sharp rise in mortality due to deprivation and, increasingly, to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Since over 60 per cent of JoUhero are under thirty years of age (Figure 1.1), few of them have personal memories of better days. The Luo contemporary sense of loss, then, does not simply reflect an experience of change, but is also a distinct way of talking about people's sufferings and the challenges to survival in the present.

Figure 1.1. Age distribution of Uhero's population, December 2002 (n = 956).

What exactly has been lost people disagree upon. For some it is an idealised pre-colonial world of morally upright pastoralists, for some it is civil servants’ and wage-earners’ expectations of development, modernity and progress that seemed achievable in the 1960s and 1970s – and often Arcadian and Utopian longings merge. Accordingly, ethical arguments take on a temporal dimension: ‘These people don't do as they should do any more’; ‘Those people still do as it was good to do in the past’; and ‘Because people still behave like this, we have not yet achieved that future.’ Contact and continuity with the past, especially material contact in ritual and everyday practices, are widespread and contested concerns. Some people fear it, such as born-again Christians, who regard the African past as the ancestors’ (in their terms: devils’) realm. In contrast, others struggle to reconnect to the past by calling for the restoration of ‘Luo Tradition’⁷ or by trying to reconcile what they distinguish as ‘Christian’ and ‘Luo’ practices. Through these contested practices, different understandings of temporality are materialised in everyday life and engaged with each other. For the purpose of this study, the most significant fact is that, irrespective of people's particular orientation in time, tropes of loss have become a leitmotiv of conversations about sociality and change in Uhero and give shape to people's practices in the present.

They also shape imaginations of the future. How one creates families, marries and raises children, ensures their future, builds houses, uses one's property and arranges for its devolution, works the land to produce food or surplus, cares for one's body, provides for old age, cares for the sick and elderly, copes with illness, and buries and remembers the dead depends on how one understands the past and wishes the future to be. Orientations forward as well as back in time thus give shape and meaning to people's present practices and are equally contested. Conflicts and disagreements about personhood and social relations, property and durability, crystallise around people's attempts to bring about the futures they desire. Some dream of moving ahead, leaving past and origins behind, while others dwell on imaginations of return; but these are different orientations rather than characteristics of different persons and groups; people adapt positions contextually and move between these orientations, including contradictions and dilemmas, which guide their social practice in the present.

For JoUhero, these temporal trajectories from past to future are entangled with spatial trajectories spanning what in colonial times was designated as ‘reserve’, the rural repository of backward lifestyles; the Kenyan cities and farms, places of transformation and possibility; and the realm of remoter futures, Europe or the USA. In the second half of the twentieth century, after political independence, colonial separations between spaces of the past and those of the future were somewhat eroded, initially spurring people's mobility and their hopes of eventually arriving somewhere. However, from the 1980s onwards the present crises – in politics, health and the economy – have considerably challenged these movements and expectations. Suspended between past and future, the present continues to be imagined in terms of movement, journeys along the battered tarmac roads and railway lines, longed-for jet travel and virtual movements through letters, penfriends and, of late, for some, the Internet. But alongside this is a sense of immobilisation – no past to return to, no future to gain – which is well captured by young people's responses to the question of what they are doing: ‘I'm just sitting’ (‘Abetabeta’) – implying not working or moving – or ‘I'm just walking around’ (‘Abayabaya’) – without productive purpose or destination.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, this community on the shore of Lake Victoria finds itself at ‘the end of the world’, in both a locational and a temporal sense. This sense of being stuck in place and time does not, however, imply isolation. People see their predicament as part of a larger pattern; they recognise how wider currents with distant sources flow through and shape life in Uhero. Structural Adjustment and donor policies, (antiretroviral) drug prices and globalised medical research are issues of debate, as are Kenyan politics, government policies and corruption scandals, and the expansion of South African influence during the past decade – manifested in fish export, satellite TV, gold prospectors and rumours about child abduction – augments the spatial imagination. Yet the experience of being part of a larger whole, which affects people's lives but remains outside their control, being part of a process but unable to affect its course, exacerbates their sense of immobility and loss.

Although it is not our main theme, this book does necessarily have something to say about how people engage with wider, so-called global, processes of change, or modernity, a theme that has gained prominence in the anthropology of Africa over recent decades (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; Moore and Vaughan 1994; Hutchinson 1996; Weiss 1996; Crehan 1997; Ferguson 1999). Some of these works emphasise the destruction resulting from the confrontation between local societies and global modernity (e.g. Fernandez 1982; Vansina 1990). Others celebrate the creativity of global modernity in peripheral African locations (and ignore its destructive sides) as if the engagement with wider connections were a specifically new phenomenon (e.g. Hannerz 1992; see also Appadurai 1986). Others again acknowledge that African and other modernities have co-evolved, and seek to replace the dichotomy between pre-modern African and modern Western societies and culture in favour of an analysis of ‘African modernities’ (e.g. Fabian 1990; Comaroff, J.L. and Comaroff J. 1991; Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J.L.1997; Geschiere and Konings 1993). This book takes its orientation from accounts of African modernities that explore changing ideas and practices of personhood and social relations through observations of localised social practice, such as Piot's study of Kabre sociality (1999), Hutchinson's work on Nuer relatedness (1996) and Taylor's work on changing and contrasting imaginations of the body and practices of healing in Rwanda (1992). What these ethnographies share, despite their different approaches, is that they transcend the older ethnographic fiction of cultural or social otherness (e.g. between Africa and the West), not by collapsing them into the convenient sameness of a global ecumene, but by retracing within African societies the patterns of radical alterity that mark the predicament of modernity. In a similar manner, this book will focus on concrete everyday practices between JoUhero, and JoUhero's reflections about these practices and how they change, emphasising the diversity of experiences within this community (see Chapter 3). Despite the apparent clarity of distinctions drawn by JoUhero between ‘then’ and ‘now’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘us’ and ‘them’, we argue that there are, in fact, no such clear-cut, easy distinctions to be had – especially in these times of confusion and death.

The death of today

Before we move on to lay out the main concepts explored in this book – growth and movement, touch and relations – we must address the place of the ‘death of today’ and of AIDS in the lives of JoUhero, as well as in this book. Death is omnipresent in Uhero, in fresh graves, deserted houses, and homes inhabited by very young and very old people. Saturday has become the day of funerals, which are the only social occasion of note. During our last longer fieldwork period (2000–2), seventy-seven JoUhero (forty-one women and thirty-six men) died, and thirty-seven of these were young adults (fifteen to forty-five years of age).⁸ Estimates for western Kenya suggest that, during the time of our fieldwork, 30–40 per cent of young adults were HIV-positive (KNACP 1998; UNAIDS 2000). This means that every third adult in Uhero will die within ten years unless a radical change of health care provision occurs. Young adults die before they are married or even before they have had children, and children are orphaned and left with relatives, old people, or to care for themselves. ‘Growth’ in the sense of ordered generational sequence can no longer be taken for granted.⁹

Yet, although death, presumably related to AIDS, is central to JoUhero's current sense of crisis, we choose not to place AIDS at the centre of this account. Until recently, ‘AIDS’ or ayaki (from yako, ‘to plunder’, ‘to raid’) were scarcely used terms in Uhero and, even in 2000, when one could hear them in private conversations and funeral speeches, this was rarely related to a particular person but to health problems in general. Even though JoUhero are keenly aware of the epidemic and its immediate causes, it is still not common for somebody's illness or death to be openly attributed to HIV. Instead, people say ‘she has been sick for a long time’ (or claim, more commonly, that this has not been the case). If AIDS is mentioned, it is after someone's death, since speaking the name of the ‘death’ while the sufferer lives would almost amount to a curse.

Moreover, for many people, the omnipresence of death is understood in a broader context, extending well beyond the biomedical facts of HIV/AIDS and originating in the ‘confusion’ (nyuandruok, from nyuando, ‘to confuse, jumble up, disarrange’) of social relations that the past century has brought about.¹⁰ This death is not merely a long-term side effect of modernity; it also reveals the impotence of modernity itself, as biomedicine offers no remedy for it.¹¹ The defeat of modern science leaves JoUhero suspended between a lost past and a fading future. Well aware of the fact that treatment for AIDS exists for those who can afford it, JoUhero are left behind as, some of them say, ‘us poor Africans’.¹² The understanding that ‘AIDS is our illness’, as one young JaUhero put it, ‘and not yours’, is reiterated and debated around the notion of chira, a deadly affliction arising from disordered social relations and affecting the growth of families. Thus, the death of today is understood within wider historical struggles about power and resources. Were we explicitly to centre this account on AIDS, we would suppress the critical potential of the villagers’ interpretations of their present condition and its genesis.

However, if we choose not to place AIDS at the centre of analysis, this does not mean that it is not present throughout this book. The bodily suffering and death of young people are experienced as opposed to any form of growth, creating a sense of being stuck, and opening up the question of what exactly growth is and how it should be produced. Moreover, AIDS makes certain kinds of material contact problematic and potentially dangerous – notably bodily intercourse, care for the sick and burial of the dead. But how exactly AIDS affects social relations and concerns with touch and growth is far from obvious, and this question occupies JoUhero as well as the pages of this book. AIDS brings many tensions and conflicts in social relations to a head, but the situation of this sociality cannot be reduced to it or explained by it. JoUhero's primary concern is not with death, but with growth and how to engender it against considerable obstacles.

As we shall argue, all kinds of substance – body and bodily fluids, food or earth – and all substantial ties established through touch and material contact have the potential to bring about growth; and they are all related to one another through metonymic associations. Every form of touch potentially evokes another one. Touch and sharing of substance in the sexual union have an important place in this metonymic cluster, but not the dominant one. Every substantial relation has the potential to create life and growth as well as to kill. Thus we contend that, only if we understand how a loaf of kuon (stiff porridge) is shared or not shared in modern Uhero, can we begin to examine bodily intercourse and its effects, including the problems arising from HIV. The specific problems that sex, reproductive fluids and AIDS pose in these times is implicitly present in our account, but to place it at the centre would be to distort the representation and would prevent us from understanding AIDS in this place, at this time: it is omnipresent, it enters all existing tensions and conflicts, but it is not the dominant theme. Uhero is not an ‘AIDS village’.

Growing relations

JoUhero agree that ‘there is no love these days’, sharing a sense of loss and – to a greater or lesser extent – of being lost, and locating this loss in the workings of their sociality. ‘Love’ (hera) should here be understood less as an emotion or attitude than as a practice, or, rather, the multiplicity of everyday practices through which people create and enact positive social relations. However, people do not agree about what human relations in their community should be like and blame different causes for their malfunctioning.¹³ People deal differently with the present predicament, and the same people may respond differently to different situations. Rather than framing our study in terms of ‘the consequences of social change’, or the effect of time on social relations (in Tönnies’ idiom of the dissolution of Gemeinschaft), we look at how images and debates about rupture and loss are used in relations, concretised in people's use of ‘time figures’ (pre-modern/modern, nostalgia/expectations, decay/development) in social practices and ethical reflections about practice. Undoubtedly, many things have changed in living conditions and people's ways of acting towards one another in the course of the ‘-ations’ of the twentieth century: colonisation, monetisation, commodification, Christianisation, modernisation, globalisation, individualisation (and, of late, Africanisation and Traditionalisation), and their concomitant phenomena: biomedicine and schooling, wage labour and private property, literacy and mass media, demographic change and epidemics. However, JoUhero rarely talk about the past in such linear terms; rather their memories emerge through everyday practices and evaluations of other's practice. People's position in the present and towards other people shapes their access to and use of the past and vice versa. Imaginings of rupture and continuity are realised through relational practices towards others and the environment; temporality is translated into social space. This practised and relational sense of time is what we shall try to grasp. Practices of relatedness and ethical reflections about relations provide a historiography written in the present, in which global ‘-isations’ engage with local patterns of relatedness. Rather than framing JoUhero's experiences within the narrative of ‘modernisation’, we shall see how tropes of modernity, of rupture and difference, are played out among them.

Being together

Positioning their concerns with relatedness and belonging within spatio-temporal dichotomies, JoUhero often state: ‘We are still together here’ (‘Wan pod wariwore kae’ or ‘Wan pod wabed kanyakla achiel’); some question whether this is really still the case; others have reservations about being together, preferring different connections and groupings, or to stand alone. These debates will occupy us throughout this book. Like JoUhero, we shall not be able to provide an unequivocal answer to the question of whether JoUhero are still together; instead, the question will help us to prise open some of the understandings of relations, personhood and temporality with which JoUhero are struggling.

The importance of substantial relations for the conception of time was identified by the early structural-functionalist ethnographies of East African societies (e.g. Evans-Pritchard 1940; Lienhardt 1961). While this is probably the case in all societies, it is particularly evident in those ‘acephalous’ African societies that did not have political institutions that produced alternative ways of time-reckoning. These ethnographers’ notions of society (as bounded and unified), of time (as equilibrium) and of relations (as natural bonds of biological kinship) have been subjected to much critical scrutiny, but this does not detract from the empirical foundation of their analyses. More recent Africanist ethnographies confirm that to understand these societies and their recent transformations, time and social relations, enacted in locally specific material practices, must be studied together because changes are conceptualised within concrete practices between people, and in turn, imaginations of time and change orient these relational practices (see, for example, Fernandez 1982; James 1988; Werbner 1991; Moore and Vaughan 1994; Hutchinson 1996). Thus we follow older social anthropological concerns when we explore questions of time and relatedness in a place where time seems to have come to an end and where relations are experienced as breaking apart.

Growth

Our and JoUhero's interest in time and relations, movements and change, converges in another familiar theme of African ethnography: ‘growth’ (see, for example, Richards 1939, 1995; Lienhardt 1961; Fortes and Dieterlen 1965; Turner 1967; Karp and Bird 1980; Beidelman 1986, 1997; Jackson and Karp 1990; Taylor 1992; Devisch 1993; Moore et al. 1999). Far from supporting reductionist renderings of East African societies as concerned with biological reproduction, ethnographic evidence reveals a notion of growth, in which the well-being of cosmic and social worlds, the fertility of the land and its inhabitants, people and animals, living and dead, form an interconnected whole, and in which seemingly disparate dimensions of growth are dependent upon one another.

Two interrelated dimensions of growth appear in these ethnographic accounts: (gendered) complementarity and (generational) sequence. Growth relies here on bringing together male and female, not only in the obvious instances of sexual intercourse (e.g. Heald 1999; Moore 1999) or in marriage as ‘the principle of order in human existence’ (Whyte 1990:111), but also in the enactment of gendered complementation among non-human ‘things’ that engenders creativity and transformation (e.g. Sanders 2002). Creation myths tell of how life originated from a fusion of otherwise separate categories, qualified variously as male and female, up and down or dry and wet (Jacobson-Widding and van Beek 1990; Broch-Due 1999); and rituals recapitulate this original fusion, which releases creative potential by transcending boundaries (Kratz 1994; Kaare 1999; Devisch 2007). The complementarity of one and other is powerful and needs ordering within an overall ‘social communion’ (Jacobsen-Widding and van Beek 1990: 41), based on peace and respect between the generations, including between the living and the dead (e.g. Whyte and Whyte 1981; Beidelman 1986). Growth is synonymous with gendered complementation and ordered generational sequence; challenges to this order pose a threat to growth.

Another observation of the older ethnographers should be mentioned here: the important role played by material substance and physical ‘participation’ between living and dead persons and with things and with place, in the conception of growth. Transformative material contact – variously referred to as ‘interfusion’ (Lienhardt 1985: 154), ‘participation’ (Moore 1986: 112), ‘embeddedness’ (Boddy 1998: 256) or ‘interbeing’ (Devisch 2007: 118) – is often made here through creative substances like rain, blood, semen, milk, beer or porridge; these bring different entities together to create new life, and they are in turn produced through good relations. Material flows, social relations and processes of growth are intertwined.

In this book we examine JoUhero's increasingly diverse struggles to grow in a time of death, when growth seems to have all but ceased. Our approach to growth differs from that of previous ethnographies in two ways. While many focus on ritual, myth and symbolism, our main concern is everyday practice: mundane material engagements and their effects. Moreover, older ethnographies tend to present somewhat static and coherent ‘cultural systems’, ignoring their interplay with colonial and post-colonial political, economic and religious change. While it does indeed appear as if the ‘matrices’ of growth (de Boeck 1999: 205) persist, especially in religious practices (Fernandez 1978, 1982; Jules-Rosette 1979), rites of rainmaking (Sanders 2002) and initiation (Kratz 1994; Kaare 1999), and some forms of healing (Devisch 1993), it is within such seemingly stable practices and discourses that changes – often radical ones – occur. ‘Traditional’ practices of healing and associated notions of personhood, relatedness and growth have been transformed in the context of post-colonial capitalism (e.g. Taylor 1992); and it is precisely the apparent stability of ‘traditional’ forms that lends itself to culturalist elaboration and deployment in modern politics (Parkin 1978; see also Kratz 1994; Sanders 2003). In this book we shall follow negotiations and conflicts about growth in late modern East African social life, under the shadow of widespread suffering and death. To do this, we will focus on concrete moments of contact among people and between people and things and places – potentially creative events, which engender growth but can also disturb it. It is these transformative moments of contact that, based on what appears to us a pervasive concern among JoUhero, we choose to address as ‘touch’.

Touch

Our joint work in Uhero began with questions regarding health, sickness and practices of care. Thus, from the onset, our attention was directed towards moments of material contact between people, concrete acts of touch between persons’ bodies. During our fieldwork, we came to realise that touch (v. mulo; n. mulruok, ‘touching’ and ‘being touched’) – defined broadly as the making of material contact between persons – was an overarching concern for JoUhero across social divides and different domains of social practice. We looked at caring, benevolent and evil touches, and learned about the particular importance of moments marked by absence or avoidance of touch. Straying away from ‘medical anthropology’, we expanded the scope of our studies to include other concrete, material practices in which persons and their relations are brought together and thereby made and remade: the production of houses and homes, care for children and for dying persons, bodily (sexual) intercourse in the context of pleasure and of death, cooking and eating in everyday and ceremonial occasions, funeral ceremonies, architecture and land use.

We shall argue that, in Uhero, touch is usually understood as a form of merging, in which the substances of one and other are shared. As we shall show, this merging has a potent creative capacity, which by some people, or in certain circumstances, is appreciated as ‘growth’ (dongruok), but which also contains destructive, threatening potential. This principle behind imaginations and practices of sociality, this ambivalent first cause, is captured in the Dholuo term riwo (‘to unite’, ‘to share’, ‘to merge through sharing’, ‘to be together’), which will provide an underlying theme of this book. Riwo and mulo are linked in that touching the other person's body and bodily products, or persons and things that extend her person, implies shared substance and merging, and in turn someone who does not wish to, or must not, merge with a particular other would say: ‘I cannot touch her/it’ (‘Ok anyal mule’). Sometimes merging through sharing is desired for its profound and lasting effects (as we shall discuss in regard to ritual commensality and bodily intercourse); sometimes it is ephemeral and unmarked, even unintentionally contained in mundane gestures; and sometimes the capacity and effects of merging are feared, in a particular situation or generally, and therefore avoided. Yet, irrespective of whether material contact is purposely established or not, and whether it is wished for as creative moment or feared as destructive threat, we shall argue that when getting in touch or avoiding it, JoUhero conceptualise boundaries – of their bodies, other humans and non-human things, and the spaces between them – as permeable interfaces, not as closed frontiers. Important aspects of this notion of touch or merging through sharing evoke Lévy-Bruhl's concept of ‘participation’ (e.g. 1926: 69–104, 1975), to which we shall return. We prefer to use the term ‘touch’, which conveys the sensual and material character of this elementary dimension of social practice.

Anthropological studies of touch are relatively scarce (see Hsu 2000). The only monograph dedicated to this topic treats the universal importance of touch as ‘basic need’ and foundation of personhood (Montagu 1971: 289), and contrasts European ‘tactile deprivation’ (ibid.: 250) with the positive appreciation of touch, especially in relationships with children, in other cultures (see also Mead and Macgregor 1951; Ainsworth 1967). Similarly, Geurts proposes that touch, hearing and movement are relatively more important for the Ghanaian Ewe than for ‘Western’ culture (2002). While we concur with some of these authors’ observations, our own interest in touch is not a concern with senses, but with the work that touching (or not touching) the other can do in everyday sociality. Although it is about bodies and substance, our study is thus not about embodiment. Geurts's study on the cultural ‘sensorium’ of the Ewe shows the problem of the latter approach: it tends to take as universals the individual body, an understanding of sensual knowledge as information and of the mind as the destination of this knowledge (2002: 227, 234). Geurts therefore underemphasises what we found the most striking aspect of her ethnography: not that the Ewe rank ‘the senses’ differently, but that what she presses into her model of ‘sense’ is not at all located inside individual person-bodies, but in between them: less ‘senses’ than modalities of relating or ‘being together’ – hence the primacy of touch, walking, balance, speech and hearing over vision (2002: Chapter 3). Below, we study touch as a ‘practice of relatedness’, as the primary modality of making relations, which reaches, momentarily, across the physical separation in between one and the other.

In contrast to the quoted studies of touch, our interest is not in exploring a contrast between (idealised) European and African social practices, but in examining the differences and conflicts that arise from touch within one particular sociality. Here again we must emphasise the lack of consensus in Uhero. The practices of relatedness that we examine as forms of touch in Uhero are not one set of habits and ideas that are culturally agreed upon: they are debated and contested. Two (or more) people who touch each other can experience their contact in the same or in different ways. Moments of contact are observed by other people and evaluated by them, possibly differently from the actors. Surfaces have an ambivalent potential to connect or separate, relate or exclude, protect or expose, open or contain. Therefore people's movements between, along and across surfaces, and the practices by which substantial relations are articulated and produced, always involve tensions and conflicts, possibly more so in certain conditions than in others. In contemporary Uhero, radically different modes of imagining and making subjects and relations have become available to people, and diminishing resources for life, together with the omnipresence of death, have raised the stakes in potential social conflicts. Discussions and struggles about the interfaces between people and – since many things are aspects of persons here – between people and things and among things will run through this ethnography.

It is in concrete moments of touch that relations are produced, contested and dissolved. Based on the growing literature on what has recently been called ‘cultures of relatedness’ (e.g., Meigs 1984; Strathern 1988; Gow 1991; Carsten 2000; Schweitzer 2000; Franklin and McKinnon 2001), we take it for granted that social relations are made in substantial practice rather than simply given by formal affiliations. While different societies emphasise one or other of these practices, a concern with immediate, substantial contact (be it through blood, semen, food, sweat or bodily nearness) appears to be widely shared.¹⁴ However, our book is not a study of ‘how the Luo make relations’, which would imply the critical application of Melanesian and Amazonian models in the East African highlands. Rather than exploring another cultural model of relatedness, we shall focus upon how social relations are practised, and how these practices – which are fraught with tensions and often hard to live with – in turn make and remake persons. Thereby, we hope to better understand not only the predicament and the creativity of JoUhero, but also the problems of social relations that they share with us at this historical juncture. How we get near to others or keep distances and how we touch, engage and defend the surfaces of the other are universal practical and ethical problems that take on specific shapes in particular societies and times. Even in those societies or particular domains of social practice where firm boundaries around and between individual persons are ideologically stressed, there is always a struggle, a movement, a moment of life when a human meets the other. This struggle, and the mundane practices in which it takes place, will occupy us here.

Searching for another social practice: contingency, creativity and difference

The work of Michel de Certeau and Emmanuel Lévinas influenced our thinking about social life in Uhero, about touch and relatedness and about the role that imaginations of time play in them. De Certeau's reflections about the centrality of encounters with the other (rather than of, say, individual agency) in the constitution of ‘everyday life’ turned our attention to the role of contingency in human sociality (De Certeau 1984). Lévinas's attempts to speak about that which is ‘between us’, before the advent of subjectivity, and his reflections about touch equally resonated with our experiences in Uhero (e.g. Lévinas 1967).

One point of convergence between Lévinas and De Certeau is their perception of the use of time and place in relation to the other. De Certeau differentiates between ‘strategies’ and the ‘tactics’ of everyday life (see Desjarlais 1997: 183–89). Like Foucault, he uses strategy to designate the privileged modern dispositives of power:

the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships…[by] a subject with will and power. [Strategy] postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority…can be managed…A Cartesian attitude…, an effort to delimit one's own place in a world bewitched by the powers of the other. (De Certeau 1984: 35–36)

Strategy thus relies on a particular order of space, on the production of lasting boundaries that define what they contain and on alterity. In contrast, ‘tactics’ – a term inspired by Bourdieu's observations on practice, but without the deterministic implications of the ‘habitus’ (De Certeau 1984: 45–60) – are contingent and relational: where strategies are grounded in firm subjectivity, tactics are marked by ‘absence of a proper locus’ and have only ‘the space of the other’ (ibid.: 39), relying upon opportunities arising between one person and the other in moments of encounter. Tactics’ lack of an own place and permanence differs from the condition of strategies, yet tactics do not necessarily oppose strategy. On the contrary, as De Certeau argues, they often ‘make use’ of strategies without being inevitably subjected to them in the way Foucault's earlier writings suggested they might. Everyday life is neither the malleable material of modern strategic dispositives nor their resistant antagonist; it is a substrate of life that predates and will outlast the modern subject's purposeful strategies.

De Certeau's emphasis on the contingent moment that affords tactical opportunity between one and the other, on relations emerging in everyday practice and on the difference between such practice and the stability and ownership of strategic power may persuasively be linked to Lévinas's critique of the firm ground of being and immanence, upon which, he suggests, ‘occidental’ approaches to the other in philosophy, science and social practice rest. These approaches, Lévinas argues, understand the subject as consciousness that turns exterior being into knowledge through experience. The other is internalised as identical, appropriated into the self, annihilating difference and missing the possibility of transcendence that (only) the encounter with the other in his radical otherness offers (Lévinas 1981). This internalisation implies objectification (making the other into a thing), the condition of technical rationality and of its specific potential to exercise domination.¹⁵ Instead, Lévinas searches for a foundation of thought ‘in-between’ humans, in the relation that has no fixed ground, but emerges from an instant in time: the moment of addressing or touching the other.

Lévinas and De Certeau share a concern with touch. Emerging from momentary contact with the other, De Certeau's ‘tactics’ imply tactility and tact, sensibility and sense. Everyday practice occurs as physical ‘contacts touches’, resulting from movement and the continuous construction and transgression of boundaries, ‘the operation of distinctions resulting from encounters’ between the person and her exterior, other persons and things (De Certeau 1984: 126–27):

[The] paradox of the frontier: created by contacts, the points of differentiation between two bodies are also their common points. Conjunction and disjunction are inseparable in them. Of two bodies in contact, which one possesses the frontier that distinguishes them? (ibid.: 127).

According to this perspective, it is not the case that touch arises from the intentionality of pre-existing subjects towards one another, but rather that persons and their ways in life are constituted by getting in touch. Instead of being an inner essence, personhood is at skin level, made and remade through touch. Hence the ambiguity and contestedness, but also the surprising and creative potential of touch, which, we shall argue, is echoed in JoUhero's everyday practices and their understanding of riwo.

Lévinas's philosophy focuses on touch in contrast to the visually framed, objectifying epistemology of most modern thought (see Fabian 1983; Jay 1993). For him, touch is more than a sense, ‘it is a metaphor for the impingement of the world as a whole upon subjectivity…to touch is to comport oneself not in opposition to the given but in proximity with it’ (Wyschogrod 1980: 199). Touch is the original sense, before subjective cognition, before intention and knowing. Certainly, touch can be employed to know, to explore the surface of the other; but in this role as cognition, the senses are superficial: ‘before transforming itself into the knowledge of the exterior of things – and even during this process – touch is pure approximation and nearness that cannot be reduced to the perception of nearness’ (Lévinas 1967: 227, our transl.). Touch is not a primordial sense in contrast to vision, but the potential of nearness that visual and aural senses possess as well.¹⁶ Even seeing, the ‘noblest sense’ of modern cognition, can establish touch, meeting the other's eye; and, if touch is applied as a grasp, even tactility follows the appropriative and recognisant logic of Cartesian vision.

For Lévinas, touch is the event in-between that occurs before dialogue or understanding and it is the origin of ethics (rather than the result of ethical reflection). The other's response to one's address or touch, his act of ‘non-indifference’ towards me, ‘can also turn into hate, but it has the potential for that which one – cautiously – could term love or something similar to love’ (Lévinas 1981: 78, our transl.). In this relation, which is different from ‘intersubjective’ experience or ‘dialogue’ (ibid.: 75), the other remains an absolute other and engagement transcends but does not erase difference. Hence, a human ‘relation’ is a transcendent act, to be distinguished from a ‘connection’ (ibid.: 76) between objects (or subjects), which remains immanent.

Lévinas's respect for the encounter and the touch as transcendental (and contingent) events resonates with JoUhero's concerns with touch and material nearness to the other human, concerns that are expressed in the notion of riwo (‘to merge through sharing’, ‘to be together’) and its creative potential and with their understanding of growth as transformative process. Jay observed that, for Lévinas, touch is the core of religious ritual (Jay 1993: 558). Indeed, touch is for him the religious act. We argue that JoUhero's emphasis on what we shall describe as ‘everyday ritual’ – an emphasis derived from their recognition that mundane practices have the potential to relate persons (including ancestors and personhood embodied in things) and thereby to facilitate flows of substance or block them, enable growth or prevent it, give life or kill – reflects an awareness of this transcendental aspect of human relations, a sensitivity to the potential of touch as origin of the ethical relation.

Lévinas draws attention to the link between his thinking and the ethnographic search for other modes of rationality and ethics in an essay on Lévy-Bruhl (Lévinas 1991). Here, he embraces the ethnographic tenet that ‘Western thought relied upon a combination of circumstances, which could also have produced another thinking’ (ibid.: 65, our transl.), and acknowledges that Lévy-Bruhl's reflections on being as ‘participation’ (e.g. Lévy-Bruhl 1975)¹⁷ pre-empts the phenomenologists’ concerns with ‘being in the world’ and Lévinas's explorations of the ‘in-between’ beyond phenomenological intentionality. Lévinas's insistence upon the relation as prior to the subject is paraphrased in Lévy-Bruhl's warning not to assume:

that beings were already given and would only then enter into participation. For them to be given, for them to exist, participations are already required. Participation is not just a mysterious, inexplicable merging of beings, who lose and at the same time maintain their identity…Without participation they would not be given in their own experience: they would not exist at all. (Lévy-Bruhl 1975 (1949), quoted by Lévinas 1991: 59, our transl.)

Lévinas underlines that ‘of course it is not the issue to return to the primitive articles of faith, but it is about rediscovering intellectual structures that make them possible and ultimately ways of being – an ontology – that make such structures possible’ (Lévinas 1991: 55, our transl.). He thus proposes a search, not for other socialities in evolutional time and/or geographical space, but for other potentialities within social life, for an ‘extension of the category of reason itself’ (ibid.: 67, our translation) as a source of ethical practice.

Lévinas and De Certeau share an ethical project, a search for another kind of social practice that can counter the dangers of instrumental, economic rationality. Lévinas proposes this other social practice in terms of an ‘ethics of the other’ (a position elaborated upon in Bauman's Postmodern Ethics (1993)).¹⁸ De Certeau locates it in ‘everyday life’, people's ‘tactical practices’ underneath the modern dispositives of power.¹⁹ This book takes some orientation from their ethical project as it discerns, within social life in Uhero, different practices, discourses and ethics of everyday life and explores their contrasts and connections. JoUhero's conflicts about different modes of being towards other humans, and thereby of being persons, do not guide us ‘back’ to an ‘African’ or ‘non-modern’ sociality. Instead, their debates can help us to understand the contradictions and conflicts that mark our common modern situation, not in order to find a way out of reason, individuality or agency, but to realise that these fictions do not exhaust modern human existence, that there is something else – there, as well as here. In our ethnography, tropes of modernity and tradition will be prominent, as they are critical categories in JoUhero's debates, but our aim is not to discern survivals of a pre-modern past or to contrast ‘their’ sociality with ‘ours’. Instead, we want to recognise in modern JoUhero's everyday life dimensions of the ethical challenges we share with them at this time.

In social anthropology, Lévy-Bruhl's search for other ways of being with others remained somewhat constrained by the spatio-temporal frame of his era, the evolutionary ‘othering’ that Fabian called the ‘allochronism of anthropology’ (Fabian 1983: 32).²⁰ Standard-functionalism continued within this framework, despite the interest of some of its proponents in the practices and ethics of relatedness (e.g. Fortes 1949; Lienhardt 1961). Structuralism had little scope for the small movements of human practice, and what was called ‘wild’ here had little resemblance to the wilderness of everyday life.²¹ Victor Turner moved closer to the issue in his analysis of communitas (1995) among American students as well as Ndembu youths. He drew our attention to the role of physical nearness and merging with the other for religious ceremony and the constitution of sociality and he engaged his understandings of African and American sociality with each other, searching for traits of a sociality other than that which he found dominant around him. However, his communitas remained enshrined in ritual, in special moments outside the ‘structure’ of ordinary life, and it was understood as a coherent group experience, rather than as a more general everyday event between two or more humans. His study of other forms of social practice, particularly in Africa, sometimes led Turner to identify non-modern, religious forms of social practice as solutions to the predicaments of modern sociality, which appears to us as a valid consequence of this kind of enquiry (for a similar argument see Fernandez 1982). For other ethnographers, examining modes of relating and of being a person that were found to be radically different from Western models – such as Strathern's work on personhood and exchange in Melanesia (e.g. 1988) – served as a means of prising open familiar and taken-for-granted constructs of person and relation. The different sociality serves here not as something to return to or long for, but to denaturalise assumptions that place ‘our’ understandings at the centre of analysis. Both kinds of ethnography challenge the occidental epistemology against which Lévinas and De Certeau argue and cast doubt upon one of its cornerstones: the taken-for-granted individual subject. Our ethnography takes some inspiration from these different anthropological takes on otherness/difference. In the remainder of this chapter, we shall begin to explore these themes by examining our way into the field, our position within it and relations between field and home.

Engaging boundaries

Our first encounters with JoUhero (between 1994 and 1998) concerned, respectively, worms and intelligence: as a zoologist, Wenzel studied the epidemiology of worm infections; trained as a human scientist, Ruth devised psychological tests to measure the cognitive effects of worm infections. We met in Uhero in 1996 and have since then lived there periodically, first separately, then together, and eventually joined by our first child. From 2000 to 2002, we both returned for our social anthropological fieldwork. Our attention to touch and growth and our approach to studying them arose partly from, as well as in reaction to, our initial medical concerns and the attendant mode of ‘data collection’, which we gloss below as ‘hygiene’.

Hygiene

We began our journey into social anthropology with scientific explorations, investigating connections between worms, nutrition and cognition in children. Thus, we contributed to a ‘randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial’ to demonstrate that deworming improves physical and mental development (e.g. Geissler et al. 1998a, b; Olsen et al. 2003); catalogued villagers’ knowledge of herbal and pharmaceutical drugs (Prince et al. 2001); and measured medicinal knowledge and local concepts of knowing (Grigorenko et al. 2001; Sternberg et al. 2001). As we argue in a critical reassessment of this work elsewhere, these very varied academic endeavours share a preoccupation with bounded entities on different levels of scale: with the defence of boundaries against outside enemies, and with the accumulation of capacity within them (Geissler and Prince 2009). In this sense, ‘hygiene’ was a crucial aspect of our first engagement with Uhero.

The OED defines ‘hygiene’ as a ‘department of knowledge or practice which relates to the maintenance and promotion of health’ or a ‘sanitary science’ and defines ‘sanitary’ as ‘cleanliness and precautions against infection and other deleterious influences’: a science of boundaries and their defence. Hygiene is a central aspect of modern biomedicine, and especially of tropical medicine's expansive, appropriative and accumulative imaginary of health and space – pushing out and defending the boundaries of the known and the own (e.g., MacLeod and Lewis 1988; Farley 1991). The historical links between tropical medicine and colonialism in Africa have been extensively studied (Packard 1989; Vaughan 1991; Ranger 1992; Comaroff 1993; Comaroff, J.L. and J. Comaroff 1997). In this section, we shall examine only some epistemological aspects of hygiene as a field science that are relevant for the ethnographic study presented below. These reflections are inspired by Fabian's insight that hygiene merges medical, religious and political concerns, pursuing ‘a quasi-spiritual, ascetic ideal of purity and selfcontrol…which conquers the dangers of a hostile physical and social environment through the mastery of mind over body’ (1991: 159). Hygiene in this broad sense was critical to the construction of the (post-)colonial encounter and its sciences and representations, including ethnography.

On different levels of scale, our first studies in Uhero were concerned with ‘precautions against infection and deleterious influences’. This was most obviously the case for the ‘data collection’ in the worm control trial: its ‘study population’ consisted of the (supposedly) immobile inhabitants of a remote administrative Division with high prevalence of worms and malnutrition – a stable, bounded entity in need of intervention; a field, constituted as distinct from the scientist's observational position into which the researcher enters and exits to gather his ‘data’. The members of the ‘study cohort’ were selected from this population at random, statistically excluding the influence of their relations. These ‘study subjects’ were the individual loci of health and illness, of development and knowledge – and eventually the targets of intervention. The children's bodies were accessed through their stools and blood; using psychological tests, we examined their intelligence, i.e. their minds’ capacity to acquire, store and apply knowledge; and finally we correlated these different individual properties (Sternberg et al. 2001). Laboratory and intelligence tests share the ideal of the individual person as owner of its attributes and of development as individual accumulation. Physical or intellectual capacities add up in the progressive completion of the person, from which lack of nourishment or the consuming activity of parasites subtract, calling for hygienic intervention.

The studied children were thus constructed in much the same spatial mode as the study area, on a different scale: bounded entities, parasite-infested, whose integrity was to be restored by eradicating the disease agent. The resulting purified bodies can accumulate nutrients; the minds attached to these bodies can absorb information; by strengthening the body/mind container the person is enabled to add substance and capacity. Hygiene in this original wide sense aims to ensure the integrity and completeness of individual entities by defending boundaries (primarily those of the body, but also those of families, territories and populations). Hence, the imaginary of hygiene can serve individual disease prevention and national disease control, and bodily discipline and political domination. Hygiene construes surfaces as frontiers engaged in struggles about ‘eradication’, battles until victory or destruction (see Parkin 1995 for the contrast between ‘eradication’ and ‘dispersal’). In these struggles, the control of bounded spaces is the necessary condition of health. Time, the process of illness, is imagined as stages in a territorial battle: intrusion, infestation, intervention, eradication. This is a battle for purity, ultimately a moral battle, in which the infested or dirty body (or place) is associated with a morally deficient person (or population) in need of unequivocal intervention.

As intervention and epistemological stance, hygiene aims for control over place, an archetypical modern imaginary, pure enactment of ‘strategy’ in De Certeau's sense. In De Certeau's terminology, epidemiological studies and disease control – and the attendant notions of ‘areas’, ‘cohorts’ and ‘subjects’’ bodies and minds that shaped our early work – emphasise a logic of ‘place’ (lieu), implying separations and order, boundedness and stability (1984: 117). This contrasts with ‘space’ (espace), which is place transformed by interactive and surprising movements between humans. In most human practice, persons are shaped through acts of drawing as well as of transgressing separations – ‘boundaries’ and ‘bridges’ constitute