The Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya
The Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya
$51.00
USDOnce the major success story of a troubled continent, by the early 1990s Kenya came to be regarded as its fallen star. This book challenges such images of reversal and the analytical polarities which sustain them. Based on several years of research in Kenya, the analysis ranges from telescopic to microscopic fields of vision - from national political culture, oratory, and the staging of politics, to everyday struggles for livelihood among people in one rural locale during the past century. This sliding scale of analysis allows the author to experiment theoretically with a number of themes informed by contemporary analytical tensions among post-modernist 'chaos', historical contingency, and structural regularities. The result is a study which combines many disciplines and perspectives to give a rich and varied picture of the culture of politics in twentieth-century Kenya.
- First-time paperback of successful title
- High-profile author, both in Europe and the United States
- Lucidly written, subtle, rich material
- Breaks new ground in anthropology
Reviews & endorsements
"This book is an exciting attempt to bring methods and concepts from contemporary anthropology to bear on African politics." Foreign Affairs
"Simons brackets her aims and achievements honestly....The silences in her text voice significant themes for the future consideration." Joan Vincent, American Anthropologist
"An exceptionally rare and powerful combination of analytical sophistication joined to a scrupulous, historically-grounded account of politics, social practice, and material life." James C. Scott, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science, Yale University
"This book is an exciting attempt to bring methods and concepts from contemporary anthropology to bear on African politics." Foreign Affairs
"Simons brackets her aims and achievements honestly....The silences in her text voice significant themes for the future consideration." Joan Vincent, American Anthropologist
Product details
May 1997Paperback
9780521595902
284 pages
229 × 152 × 19 mm
0.465kg
3 maps 7 tables
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- 1. Staging politics in Kenya
- 2. Shattered silences: political culture and 'democracy' in the early 1990s
- 3. Open secrets: everyday forms of domination before 1990
- 4. Moral economy and the quest for wealth in central Kenya since the late nineteenth century
- 5. The dove and the castor nut: Embu household economy in the 1980s
- 6. Conclusions: 'the showpiece of an hour'.
