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.

For nearly a decade, writers' collectives such as Kwani Trust in Kenya and Femrite , the Ugandan women writers' association, have dramatically reshaped the East African literary scene. This text extends the purview of postcolonial literary studies by providing the long overdue critical inquiry that these writers so urgently deserve.

Religious Responses to Pandemics and Crises explores various dimensions of the interrelations between the individual, community, and religion. With their global scope, the contributions to this volume represent reflections on the rich and multifaceted spectrum of human responses in a variety of different religions and cultures to the current SARS-2-COVID-19 pandemic and similar crises in the past. The contributions are organized in three thematic parts focusing on strategies, rituals, and past and present responses to pandemics and crises. They reflect on the intersection of personal or communal responses and state-mandated policies relative to SARS-2-COVID-19 while outlining different strategies to cope with the pandemic crisis. Timely questions explored include: How do individuals connect with or disconnect from religious and spiritual communities during times of personal and collective crises, including pandemics? How do religious practices such as rituals bridge individuals and communities? How do religious texts from past and present highlight and represent crises and pandemics? Dynamic and multidisciplinary in its inquiry, this volume is an outstanding resource for scholars of religion, theology, anthropology, social sciences, ritual theory, sex and gender studies, and contemporary medical science.

In this edited book we are compelled to think about the convergences between the technological advances made possible by lockdowns brought on by the Covid-19 Pandemic and increased 4IR use in the South African context. The insights presented in this edited volume make a case that transformation of higher education scholarship cannot happen without making space for historically excluded knowers, thinking differently about historically marginalized knowledges and by constantly grappling with new developments and how they facilitate or encumber the transformation project. Consequently, Transforming Higher Education Scholarship After Covid-19 and in the Context of the 4th Industrial Revolution does a good job of illustrating how shifts towards the advancement of 4IR in the South African Higher Education sector impacted the transformation trajectory. In their efforts to reimagine universities in Africa into African universities the authors in this edited volume grapple with how race and gender intersect in making the experiences of Black women in the South African academy untenable. The chapters also contend for the significance of pluriversal knowledges by making a case for the place of Indigenous Knowledges Systems in building African universities. As we grapple with the changes the 4IR has on the world and the teaching and learning landscape, some of the chapters in this volume make a compelling argument for thinking both from a critical perspective about what the challenges the developments coming out of these technologies mean for South Africa and the continent as well as what possibilities for positive impact these tools bring. Transforming Higher Education Scholarship After Covid-19 and in the Context of the 4th Industrial Revolution, is timely and makes an important contribution to higher education transformation discourses.

George Ndege provides an examination of the conflicts and compromises between Western biomedicine and African traditional therapies in colonial Kenya.

11 Motives and motivations for mature women's participation in higher education in Ghana -- Introduction -- Conceptualising the study -- Mature women's motives and motivations for HE participation -- Method -- Research context and participants -- Results and discussion -- Motivations for returning to study -- Parents' motivation -- Partners' encouragement, socio- economic status and childcare arrangements -- Geographical relocation and social networks -- Motives for entering HE -- Higher education as a tool for breaking the cycle of poverty -- Personal development -- "Everybody was going, so I wanted to go"--Conclusions -- Concluding remarks -- 12 Epilogue - reflections on cultural responsiveness -- Index

Children's Places examines the ways in which children and adults, from their different vantage-points in society, negotiate the 'proper place' of children in both social and spatial terms. It looks at some of the recognised constructions of children, including perspectives from cultures that do not distinguish children as a distinct category of people, as well as examining contexts for them, from schools and kindergartens to inner cities and war-zones. The result is a much-needed insight into the notions of inclusion and exclusion, the placement and displacement of children within generational ranks and orders, and the kinds of places that children construct for themselves. Based on in-depth ethnographic research from Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, Australia and New Zealand.

Becoming Somebody in Teacher Education explores the realities of contemporary teacher education in Kenya. Based on a long-term ethnographic fieldwork, it views the teacher training institution as a space to grow, become and be shaped as teachers in complex moral worlds. Drawing on a rich conceptual and theoretical vocabulary, the book shows how students in these teacher education institutions constantly negotiate and confront the complex constructions of ethnicity, gender and class, as well as moral, religious and academic issues and a lack of resources encountered in the different institutional cultures. It outlines a complex array of concerns affecting student teachers that shape what professional becoming means in a stratified and diverse culture. This story of the process of growing up and becoming a professional teacher in an African setting will appeal to researchers, academics and students in the fields of teacher education, organizational studies, international education and development, social anthropology and ethnography.