The Land Is Dying : : Contingency, Creativity and Conflict in Western Kenya / / Paul Wenzel Geissler, Ruth Jane Prince.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Berghahn Books Complete eBook-Package 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Geissler, Paul Wenzel,; Prince, Ruth Jane,
• Place / Publishing House: New York; , Oxford : : Berghahn Books, , [2010]; ©2010
• Year of Publication: 2010
• Language: English
• Series: Epistemologies of Healing ; 5
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (444 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Acknowledgements -- 1. Introduction: ‘Are we still together here?’ -- 2. Landscapes and histories -- 3. Salvation and tradition: heaven and earth? -- PART I. -- 4. ‘Opening the way’: being at home in Uhero -- 5. Growing children: shared persons and permeable bodies -- PART II. -- 6. Order and decomposition: touch around sickness and death -- 7. Life seen: touch, vision and speech in the making of sex in Uhero -- 8. ‘Our Luo culture is sick’: identity and infection in the debate about widow inheritance -- PART III. -- 9. ‘How can we drink his tea without killing a bull?’ – Funerary ceremony and matters of remembrance -- 10. ‘The land is dying’ – traces and monuments in the village landscape -- 11. Contingency, creativity and difference in western Kenya -- Bibliography -- Index