Hannah Elliott | Copenhagen Business School, CBS (original) (raw)

Peer reviewed articles by Hannah Elliott

Economic Anthropology, 2022

In Isiolo, a northern Kenyan town earmarked for development as part of a large-scale infrastructu... more In Isiolo, a northern Kenyan town earmarked for development as part of a large-scale infrastructure project, the value of land has increased dramatically. Local residents with insecure tenure at the town's edges were selling off plots at ever-rising prices. Yet the money generated was renowned for its rapid expenditure, leaving the holder with little to show for the sale. This article examines the discourse of “selling and building,” whereby residents aspired to discipline flighty money generated through land sale by converting it into durable investments. In particular, selling and building was seen as a means of strengthening individual property claims: By selling a little land, one could invest the money it yielded in the remainder, most often by building a “permanent” house. Yet “selling and building” was an individual, private property solution to the collective problem of insecure customary tenure and worked to gloss over and perpetuate inequalities among residents. The problems associated with the “money of plots” (pesa ya ploti), and struggles with building, attest to the complexity of property relations in urbanizing northern Kenya as historically collective and prospectively individual. Moreover, they illuminate residents' deep ambivalence about private property and the inequalities inherent to it.

Critique of Anthropology

In 2007, Unilever, the world’s largest tea company, announced plans to source its entire tea supp... more In 2007, Unilever, the world’s largest tea company, announced plans to source its entire tea supply sustainably, beginning with the certification of its tea producers in East Africa to Rainforest Alliance standards. As a major buyer of Kenyan tea, Unilever’s decision pushed tea producers across Kenya to subscribe to Rainforest Alliance’s sustainable agriculture standard in order to maintain access to the global tea market; according to a 2018 report, over 85% of Kenya’s tea producers were Rainforest Alliance certified. Drawing on ethnographic material among supply chain actors across different sites along the sustainable tea value chain (from those designing and disseminating standards to tea traders to smallholder tea farmers), this article examines how these actors frequently attributed the power to determine the outcomes of certification to a faceless ‘market’. Deferring to ‘the market’, we observe, served primarily to mask the outsized power of lead firms (in particular Unilever...

Camel dairy products have long been recognised as important in pastoralist livelihoods in norther... more Camel dairy products have long been recognised as important in pastoralist livelihoods in northern Kenya, but only in recent years has camel milk been marketed commercially in the urban centres of the region. This article charts the commodification of camel milk in Isiolo, considering the evolution from simple urban hawking, led by female vendors, to commercial retail sales and international exports involving investment of higher levels of capital. Gender labour dynamics, and capital investment, emerge as critical themes in this story of camel milk's commodification. The formalisation and regularisation of camel milk sales has inevitably led to a requirement for greater professionalisation and firmer control of production, moving away from the itinerant women who initially pioneered the commodification and towards camel owners who have greater levels of education and who are better able to capitalise the trade.

As the gateway to the former Northern Frontier District, Isiolo town has long been viewed as mark... more As the gateway to the former Northern Frontier District, Isiolo town
has long been viewed as marking the beginning of a ‘Kenya B’ – a
‘low potential’ desert region of communally owned land – set in
contrast to more economically productive and individually owned
land to the south. In recent years, however, Isiolo has been
reframed as the gateway to a region of economic potential with
the announcement of the ambitious Lamu Port-South Sudan-
Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) project, which seeks to transform the
town into an economic hub along an infrastructure network
spanning the north. While ‘new frontier’ discourses portray the
transformation of Isiolo and northern Kenya as a process of
conversion and integration into the ‘nation proper’, and in
particular through the formalisation and privatisation of its land,
this article argues that transformations in Isiolo town are rather
occurring through the articulations or ‘frictions’ between the
anticipation of the projects and Isiolo’s historical politics of land
and settlement. Since the town’s establishment in the early
twentieth century, questions over who ‘owns’ the town have
manifested in inter-ethnic competition over territory. The focus of
this competition shifted to residential plots during the 1990s,
when ownership of land at the town’s edges began to be rewritten
through ‘town planning’ initiatives and the formal
allocation of plots. Between 2014 and 2015, the anticipation of
LAPSSET and the increased demand for plots that accompanied it
was amplifying the politics of land, settlement and ethnic identity
in the town. Through tracing the historical micro-politics of
settlement and the making of plots, the article illustrates how
transformations in the town are occurring through the
anticipation of LAPSSET, its articulation with historical politics of
belonging, and local agency as people seek to secure a place in
the anticipated city of the future.

Peer reviewed book chapters by Hannah Elliott

In Carrier, N. and T. Scharrer (eds.) Mobile Urbanity: Somali Presence in Urban East Africa. Berghahn Books, 2019. , 2019

Land, Investment & Politics: Reconfiguring Eastern Africa's Pastoral Drylands edited by Jeremy Lind, Doris Okenwa and Ian Scoones, 2020

Papers by Hannah Elliott

This report presents findings from ethnographic research in a rural area of Malindi District in K... more This report presents findings from ethnographic research in a rural area of Malindi District in Kenya’s Coast region. The study explored the local institutionalisation of savings groups implemented by Catholic Relief Services as part of their Savings and Internal Lending Communities (SILC) programme. The study was commissioned by the Financial Sector Deepening Trust Kenya and Catholic Relief Services as part of a broader research project on mesolevel impacts of savings groups in Malindi District. The ethnographic study sought to understand the extent to which savings groups as institutions were locally embedded and how they were shaped by and, in turn, were shaping the broader political economies of the rural settings in which they are situated.

Cityscapes Magazine, 2017

The KNOW RESET Project, which is co-financed by the European Union, is carried out by the EUI in ... more The KNOW RESET Project, which is co-financed by the European Union, is carried out by the EUI in partnership with ECRE (the European Council on Refugees and Exiles). The general objective of the project is to construct the knowledge-base necessary for good policy-making in the refugee resettlement domain in the EU and its 27 Member States. It aims to explore the potential to develop the resettlement capacity, to extend good practices and to enhance cooperation in the EU.

Book reviews by Hannah Elliott

Exertions, Society for the Anthropology of Work, 2021

Review of 'Roses from Kenya: Labor, Environment, and the Global Trade in Cut Flowers, by Megan A.... more Review of 'Roses from Kenya: Labor, Environment, and the Global Trade in Cut Flowers, by Megan A. Styles (2019). Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

PhD thesis by Hannah Elliott

PhD thesis, University of Copenhagen, 2018., 2018

This thesis is a study of anticipation as it manifests in practices of property-making in Isiolo,... more This thesis is a study of anticipation as it manifests in practices of property-making in Isiolo, a provincial town in northern Kenya. Having long been cast in the national imaginary as a peripheral frontier town, Isiolo has recently been reimagined as a future industrial centre. This reimagining has been majorly facilitated by the town’s positioning in the Lamu Port South Sudan Ethiopia Transport corridor (LAPSSET), a large-scale infrastructural development project that is part of the nation’s long-term development strategy Vision 2030. As part of the development strategy’s overarching aim of making Kenya into a middle-income country by the year 2030, LAPSSET proposes to transform northern Kenya, a region long perceived as unworthy of investment, into a ‘new frontier’ for economic growth.

At the time of my fieldwork between 2014 and 2015, many of the LAPSSET developments planned for Isiolo had not yet materialised, and there was much to disrupt and delay their realisation. But the ‘not-yet’ was full of activity, predominantly centred around what I term ‘propertying’ – collective and individual material practices of claiming exclusive ownership of plots of land. Propertying was being carried out by diverse actors on peri-urban land that had previously been considered marginal and without economic value. It was also occurring at the town’s edges on land which was already occupied and claimed by settled pastoralist and agro-pastoralist groups as ‘first settlers’ and was now rapidly appreciating in value.

Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in these sites between 2014 and 2015, this thesis uses the concept of anticipation to make sense of propertying. I understand anticipation as an affective orientation towards the future that demands action in the present. Viewing propertying as anticipatory action, I examine the futures that ‘first settlers’ at the town’s edges act upon and realise through propertying. I show that large-scale development projects remake the spaces they intend to transform not (or not only) through top-down processes but through the ‘small acts’ of ordinary people’s anticipatory actions. In doing so, I argue that people popularly portrayed as ‘marginalised’ and ‘outside’ of centres of power actively demand inclusion and resist exclusion by participating in their making. This participation is driven and shaped not only by people’s quests for material security but also by moral dilemmas and ambivalence about power and wealth. Examining propertying illuminates local tensions and contradictions related to what ‘property’ is, how people should make it, and the futures it makes possible.

Working papers by Hannah Elliott

DIIS Working Paper, 2018

‘Trust’ is a concept that has received much attention in studies of informal economies which oper... more ‘Trust’ is a concept that has received much attention in studies of informal economies which operate in large part outside of formal state regulation. Somali trade provides a pertinent case. In Somalia, across Somali East Africa and beyond, business has thrived, in spite of – or, some would argue, partially because of – the statelessness of the homeland. Beyond scholarly uses, ‘trust’ is also a concept used by Somalis themselves to explain their entrepreneurial success. This Working Paper asks what the concept of ‘trust’ reveals and conceals about Somali economic life, examining the concept in both its etic and emic uses. It does so drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Eastleigh, an estate in Nairobi’s Eastlands, whose economy is, in many ways, exemplarily ‘informal’, and driven by Somali enterprise and capital investments. We argue that while the concept of ‘trust’ can help explain the social relations underpinning trade, and in particular the provision of credit, trust is not a prerequisite for acts of trusting in business. Rather, acts of trusting can themselves work to produce trust, even though they do not eliminate deceit and mistrust in the estate. Trust in its emic usage emerges as a normative rather than descriptive discourse that creates a moral impetus for acts of trusting, even as ‘trusters’ may not necessarily fully trust those they do business with. In Eastleigh, an important driver of this discourse is the demand for credit, which itself plays a crucial role in driving the estate’s economy.

Blog posts by Hannah Elliott