The Nature of Entrustment: Intimacy, Exchange, and the Sacred in Africa (Yale Agrarian Studies) (Yale Agrarian Studies Series) - Hardcover

Shipton, Parker

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300116012 ISBN 13: 9780300116014

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2007

Synopsis

This groundbreaking book addresses issues of the keenest interest to anthropologists, specialists on Africa, and those concerned with international aid and development. Drawing on extensive research among the Luo people in western Kenya and abroad over many years, Parker Shipton provides an insightful general ethnography. In particular, he focuses closely on nonmonetary forms of exchange and entrustment, moving beyond anthropology’s traditional understanding of gifts, loans, and reciprocity. He proposes a new view of the social and symbolic dimensions of economy over the full life course, including transfers between generations. He shows why the enduring cultural values and aspirations of East African people―and others around the world―complicate issues of credit, debt, and compensation.
The book examines how the Luo assess obligations to intimates and strangers, including the dead and the not-yet-born. Borrowing, lending, and serial passing along have ritual, religious, and emotional dimensions no less than economic ones, Shipton shows, and insight into these connections demands a broad rethinking of all international aid plans and programs.

About this title

About the Author

Parker Shipton is associate professor of anthropology and research fellow in African studies, Boston University. He has conducted research in Kenya, The Gambia, Colombia, and elsewhere and is former president of the Association for Africanist Anthropology, a division of the American Anthropological Association. He lives in Cambridge, MA.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Nature of Entrustment

Intimacy, Exchange, and the Sacred in AfricaBy Parker Shipton

Yale University Press

Copyright © 2007 Parker Shipton
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-11601-4

Contents

Preface............................................................................................ixAcknowledgments....................................................................................xvCHAPTER 1 Introduction.............................................................................1CHAPTER 2 Fiduciary Culture: A Thread in Anthropological Theory....................................17CHAPTER 3 Luo and Their Livelihood: The Great Lake Basin and Beyond................................40CHAPTER 4 Entrustment Incarnate: Humans and Animals over Years and Generations.....................81CHAPTER 5 Teaming Up: Borrowing, Lending, and Getting By...........................................99CHAPTER 6 Marriage on the Installment Plan: The Present and the Promised...........................120CHAPTER 7 Debts in Life and Death: Shared Responsibility and the Funerary Flow.....................158CHAPTER 8 In the Passing: Inheritance of Things and Persons........................................173CHAPTER 9 Blood, Fire, and Word: Luo, Christian, and Luo-Christian Sacrifice.......................187CHAPTER 10 Conclusion: Entrustment and Obligation..................................................205Notes..............................................................................................223Glossary...........................................................................................249Bibliography.......................................................................................253Index..............................................................................................271

Chapter One

Introduction One person throws a ball; the other does not know: whether he is supposed to throw it back, or throw it to a third person, or leave it on the ground, or pick it up and put it in his pocket ... -LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

Birthplace of humanity it may be. A home of the lion and leopard, the hippo, and the crowned crane it has been for sure. For me though, the area had another appeal when I first decided to venture to the equator to live among people overlooking Africa's largest lake. There was something mysterious about the map.

Here was a straight border dividing an ostensibly capitalist Kenya from an ostensibly socialist Tanzania. Or so they were proclaimed in the popular press, and in government policies endlessly repeated in presidential speeches and national development plans. Stretching southeast from the lake, the line, first etched by European imperial statesmen in Berlin in 1884-85, cut right across the territories of several population groups, whether labeled as races, tribes, ethnic groups, or languages-as if these could all mean the same thing.

The people on the map nearest the lake, as you looked southeast along the border, were known and still are as Luo, Kuria, and Maasai. The straight line officially cut each of these unofficial territories in two. It was as if the people there, in each of the three "tribes" (or non-tribes), were somehow of divided minds about capitalism and socialism, those imported ideologies of which Kenya and Tanzania had been standing since the early 1960s as Africa's famous exemplars. Were "the Luo" (or "the Kuria," or "the Maasai") on one side of the border all busy entrepreneurs, buying and selling commodities and each other in the chancy pursuit of selfish accumulation? Were their cousins on the other side all comrades locked arm in arm, struggling to level conflicting classes, and freely sharing all they had? Or was this entire region of eastern middle Africa a land of illegality and civil disobedience? There must be something the map was not showing. Something the speeches were not telling.

Odd too were the descriptions of the people written by earlier visitors, who seemed deeply divided by disciplines. The reports by the anthropologists about clan segmentation, ghostly vengeance, and initiation rites; by economists about crop price elasticity and interest rate spreads; and by political scientists about party platforms and nation building might as well have been describing three different continents, not to say planets. So here was a land divided by nation, by ethnicity, and in the journals by discipline.

The politicians' speeches and economists' five-year plans were all about growth and development; and for a while, after the independence of these countries, the hopes had seemed grounded in opportunities newly opened to African minds and hands. But by the end of the 1970s, talk of development was starting to ring hollow. Charts on trade and investment-or health and nutrition-were sloping downward. Nor did much of the rhetoric square with the stories and pictures in the papers. East African poverty seemed to rub right up against great wealth-at least in the towns or at the edges of the reserves or resettlement areas-without their canceling each other out. Production, entitlement, or charity was falling short.

The topic that drew me deeper into the library was attachment to land: a question of belonging. Everyone knew there were people in East Africa who did not quite belong, or who at least sometimes behaved as if they did not. There on the old colonial map of western and central Kenya were the so-called white highlands, vast tracts thinly settled by British and other immigrant settlers after the people who had lived there before had been lured, or forced, away from their homes, some for good. Then, as everyone knew, there were game reserves like the Tanzanian Serengeti and its Kenyan extension, the Maasai Mara, where Maasai people and their cows, goats, and sheep had been invited out-not always to stay, though-and tourists and their money invited in. But what about everyone else in the rest of the lands, labeled "native reserves"-for instance, around the lake and along that straight border? On what basis did they belong where they lived?

Colonial ethnographies revealed more than one system of land settlement, tenure, and community organization described as traditional. Around the eastern side of the lake, the Luo and their neighbors in western Kenya had a system in which kin groups, especially clans and lineages, seemed the most salient traditional principles of organization. Around the southern side of the lake where Sukuma people and neighboring groups lived, by contrast, it was territorially defined chiefdoms and sub-chiefdoms that seemed the salient mode. Over the lake's horizon north and northwest, in Buganda and beyond in Bunyoro, had been those famous grand kingdoms, and systems of labor and loyalty sometimes described as "feudal." Curiously, the places with centralized kingdoms were not the ones with the highest population densities. The densest rural areas, such as those of the Luo and their Bantu-speaking Luhya and Gusii neighbors, were ones that had nothing of the sort. On what basis they were organized was still hard to tell. Whether centralized and uncentralized, or stratified and egalitarian, meant civilization and savagery I had learned to doubt, as everyone should. But it was already clear that some areas had long done without structures of rule that held others together. It was clear too that whatever sorts of community the European and postcolonial "capitalist" and "socialist" systems were imposed upon in the lake region, they took more than one form.

So there was more than one old way people tried to organize themselves, and more than one new. But how did old connect to new, I wondered-and how did rich connect to poor? What had European conquest, colonialism, and independence actually changed on the ground? What had become of "custom," and what was the nature of community? There had to be a way to find out such things by studying something specific. Something that related to the wealth and poverty, and the capitalism and socialism, that seemed so central to Africa's concerns, or to the world's concerns about Africa. Exchange, for instance. Gift. Theft. Whatever comes between.

But what does come between? Is there any form of transfer or exchange that can span the range from giving to taking, from sharing to profiteering?

If there is, I supposed, it must be the loan. Some sort of reciprocity. Something like a ball tossed back and forth-but one that might change size, shape, or feel between the giving and the taking back. A loan, or credit, can be made to help or to exploit-or maybe to do both at once. Or just to establish a relationship. And if any sort of exchange can bridge the gap between the most intimate relations within households even, and the most distant between continents, might it not again be the loan?

Eventually, people in the lake basin would teach me to ask whether credit relations, fiduciary relations, could do more than that: whether they could mean transferring living and breathing creatures, including humans themselves, whether they could bridge the living and the dead, or whether they could link the sacred and secular. But asking questions like these would require expanding "loan" or "credit" to a looser, more inclusive idiom, one like entrustment and obligation, in which reciprocity might not be the only way to understand things.

Attachment and loyalty would certainly be key concerns. To whom, and what, do people feel they belong? What might their transactions suggest about whom they identify with and trust ... and what they owe to whom? And how might loyalty, trust, and obligation affect the nature of overseas aid (or "aid") interventions-something that must concern us all? If international aid agencies and national governments were attempting to change the basic nature of attachment and belonging through land tenure "reforms" (as they were and are), and to alter the nature of commodity flows through gifts and loans (as they also were and are), then how might their interventions relate to the cultural, social, and economic life of the region's people? These questions would take years, even decades, to reframe and address.

But now there was at least a topic: credit, debt, and human belonging. Belonging would mean attachment not just between people and things but also between people and each other.

On the Ground As it turned out, when I arrived in Kenya in 1980 for my extended stay and my research there was no legal access across the border between Kenya and Tanzania. That road block turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Proceeding with the simple assumption that Kenya was about capitalism and Tanzania about socialism, and carrying out a neat comparison as such, would have meant missing most of what I was eventually to learn about how African rural economies really work.

Borderlines or not, people in the Luo part of the lake basin, where I settled, seemed to be living life more or less intact. Most were not behaving as capitalists or socialists in any consistent manner but were forging their own way, as indeed they had always done. They may have been members of a state, and by law a picture of the president hung high in every mud and wattle shop, to remind them-but that was a president whose regime's legitimacy would come increasingly into question, and who before two years would disappear for several days in an attempted coup. They were eating and using resources they grew or caught, and others they borrowed or bought. People who had been to school were deftly switching languages mid-sentence in the marketplace, falling back on simplified up-country Swahili or on English when their own languages failed. People were sharing customs of clay pot decorating or calabash mending, I would come to learn, and consulting healers from around the countryside or overseas to work their most powerful medicine among them as strangers. These things could be seen in my initial weeks in Nairobi and several more in the small town of Awendo, where there was a sugar plantation and factory and a strip of shops, some immigrant-owned: a busy, dusty sort of town with loudly competing music boxes, striving to outgrow its smallness. By then I was introduced to, and ready for, a more settled local community in the countryside.

My main base for the two years or so I would spend in western Kenya, and for the longest of my return visits a decade later, was a farming hamlet (which I shall call Kagogo) in Kanyamkago location, in that space between the main road and the great lake where there was little on the map. On the ground it was hill and valley land, mostly green, with scattered homesteads, and with farmed fields checkered around the landscape and visible from most anywhere. It was just big enough to have a small school and a couple of one-window, mud-walled shops open on and off. Most of the houses on the hillside had thatched roofs and floors of bare earth; a few had corrugated iron roofs or cement floors. Some of the farmers' fields had sugar cane being grown for a factory at Awendo or for making molasses (jaggery), and some had tobacco they were growing for a multinational firm with a buying station nearby. But mostly it was maize, sorghum, and other annual crops (sometimes eaten in seed by birds in the fields) ... and cattle (no longer raided by lions), sheep, goats, and chickens (still occasionally prey to smaller wildcats or hyenas).

From that main base, over the next two years or so, I made briefer, interspersed stays, up to several weeks at a time, in other rural settings. These included the locations of Kagan (where I stayed in a small market town) and lakeside Uyoma (where I stayed in a rural school), farther north in the Luo part of Nyanza Province. An eventual opportunity to sojourn among Luhya people in Isukha, north of the Luo country, gave me a chance to go visit a higher-altitude zone. These, and short visits to sites of other researchers and aid volunteers in Kuria and Maasai country and elsewhere in Kenya (as some of them visited mine too), and periodic short trips into the (then) South Nyanza district capital Homa Bay, the provincial capital Kisumu City, the national capital Nairobi, and other cities rounded out my view of Kenya and especially its agrarian western lakeside region.

This, then, was what the map looked like on the ground-and where I arrived to make friends (the crucial thing on which so much else depended), to learn a language and work along on another, to conduct interviews and observations daily, and to try to fit in as best I could. With a good deal of locally recruited help, while carrying on my own interactions, I eventually designed, participated in, and oversaw interview surveys of a more formal sort too, both around Kagogo in Kanyamkago and elsewhere in and nearby the Luo country, with numbers up to 286 informants representing their respective homesteads in the Kagogo case. More is said on these method topics toward the end of Chapter 3 and in the accompanying studies to come.

It did not take long to see I would be well treated in Kenya. From the start, wherever I stayed, my hosts, friends, and eventually fictive kin would be friendly, patient, and agreeable almost always. Indeed, where I stayed longest, they often enough proved warm and caring in all I could tell of their feelings toward me, and the same toward my spouse, who, when I had been there a year, came to Africa to join me and to work as a teacher and editor in Nairobi. They showed us this spirit in those years of my first visits (about two years and three months, covering all seasons, from October 1980 to January 1983, interrupted for a few weeks by illness) and in shorter revisits in 1986, 1988, and from October 1991 to January 1992.

Equatorial Africa is a land with much humor and good cheer at all but times of hunger or civil strife, and sometimes even then, as I would find out. Often people of little linguistic commonality laughed together-in that universal language, inflected so many ways to mean so many things. Sometimes they could not help laughing at the nave questions a researcher in training asked-to which the only response was to laugh along. "Graduate student" was not a status all elders readily recognized or had a name for anyway, except nyathi e skul-skul maduong' (a schoolchild-in a big school). A schoolboy arriving with no shorts but long trousers, and at times a motor vehicle, was an oddity enough to begin with. (Revisiting years later, once teaching in another university, would be easier to explain.) This odd pupil seemed to ask at times about things too obvious or far-fetched even to mention. Sometimes, by laughing at first, my interlocutors let me know there was something deep and unspoken to ask about, to listen to more carefully, maybe to think about some radically different way.

Among those topics were the debts and obligations involved in mating and marriage, and in life and in death. On first arrival I already knew that credit, debt, and claims over land and graves were things I wished to look into. These had to connect to each other and to much else, my intuition told me, but I had hardly the dimmest idea how. It did not become clear to me until years later that much of what I had been studying, and collecting words in several languages to describe, would somehow fit under the broader heading of entrustment-one which, along with its reciprocal obligation, belonged to no one discipline.

The more I learned, of course, the more beholden to the people of the lake basin, and others farther away, I became in my own way. They were entrusting me, and those working with me, with a way of life and with their current conditions. They were passing me a ball, to pass along abroad (as some explicitly asked), to speak and write about. They were passing it too for their grandchildren. But it would be wrong to have illusions about this either. They had their own oral traditions no less important, and their own novelists and scholars of accomplishment one could only admire. The ball would need to be passed back and forth. And anyway I was not the first person from outside to try to describe the place or what went on there.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0300116012
• ISBN 13: 9780300116014
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 320