Mark Lamont - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Mark Lamont
Technology and Culture, 2015
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UNP - Nebraska eBooks, Sep 7, 2017
The Making of the African Road, 2017
LIAS Working Paper Series, 2018
Alternative Rites of Passage (ARP) are a relatively recent invention, and a key element in female... more Alternative Rites of Passage (ARP) are a relatively recent invention, and a key element in female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) abandonment strategies organised by NGOs in some regions of Africa, particularly East Africa. They aim to replicate traditional initiation rituals for pubescent girls who are transitioning to womanhood, but without FGM/C. This paper briefly describes the genesis of ARP in Kenya since 1996, and discusses its significance as a hybridised cultural assemblage that forms part of new cultural and relational processes. It emphasises the importance of examining the deep context in which ARP takes place, including the traditional ritual that it aims to replace. The paper identifies lacunae in the literature, and potential lines of enquiry for future research. The Appendix includes summaries of a selection of the literature on ARP.
African Studies, 2018
Do forced male circumcisions have political legitimacy in Kenya that they do not have internation... more Do forced male circumcisions have political legitimacy in Kenya that they do not have internationally? This article asks what these acts of public violence tell us about the relationships between moral ethnicity and state formation in Kenya. It examines the place of intermarriage and migration as factors to consider in this violence. Forced male circumcision highlights certain ambivalence towards human rights in Kenya that should not be ignored by observers of African pluralism and constitutional reform. Amid a generalised crisis of masculinity, forced circumcisions raise important questions about human rights processes and different kinds of social authority. This focus on forced circumcision brings to the surface historically layered understandings of citizenship, masculinity, and gender violence.
Technology and Culture, 2015
For guidance on citations see FAQs.
African Dynamics in a Multipolar World, 2013
This chapter focuses on Kenya's new infrastructural dispensation and this is explored through... more This chapter focuses on Kenya's new infrastructural dispensation and this is explored through the analytic and political value of speed embedded in that nation-state's most recent development planning, "Vision 2030". The discussion of Kenya's new 'infrastructural dispensation' centers on a controversial new development project in the north of Kenya: the Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia-Transit Corridor (LAPSETT). The chapter theoretically draws on anthropological notions of 'friction' in the ethnography of globalization (Tsing 2006) and develops a complementary perspective on the acceleration of Kenya's infrastructural development through speed's implication for political transformation. Apart from these theoretical contributions, It is most intent on forwarding the idea that the recent concerns with 'multipolarity' in Africa's political economy would do well to be more explicitly historicized in any treatment of 'traditional' or 'non-traditional' sources of investment, taking care to evaluate rhetoric overburdened ideologically by the compelling spin of neo-liberalism's apologists. Keywords: Kenya's new infrastructural dispensation; LAPSETT; multipolar world; neo-liberalism; Sudan
Social Anthropology, 2010
This study examines social change in Meru District, Kenya following the economic liberalization o... more This study examines social change in Meru District, Kenya following the economic liberalization of the coffee sector. The empirical material presented was collected during fieldwork in Kenya from June to December 1998. The case studies demonstrate how local ...
This is an historical ethnography about age-class formation among the people known as the Imenti ... more This is an historical ethnography about age-class formation among the people known as the Imenti and Tigania Meru of central Kenya. By reexamining social anthropology's long standing study of societies with age-sets and age-organisation, this research focuses on the problem of historical perspective which such forms of social organisation inevitably provoke. Ethnographers writing in the 1990s, like their counterparts in the 1950s, seemed convinced that the contingent, uncertain, and often ad hoc nature of age-class formation meant that such forms of social organisation were fated to disappear. This thesis aims to overturn such an assumption by presenting differing ethnographic contexts where debate about age-classes' viability in the present led to community-wide reappraisals of traditional and modem categories of thought and action. By the time of fieldwork in 2001-2003, the formation of Mem age-classes fed into intense debates about what constituted 'tradition' and an authentic construction of local social identity. Research in two fieldsites, Imenti and Tigania, allowed for comparison between one segment of the Mem where such organisation is seen as defunct and another section where it is vicariously implicated in local politics. Ageclasses, it is argued in the Mem context, are both social formations and tropes within the makings of a local political imaginary. National concerns such as the 2002 General Elections could be locally reinterpreted as power struggles between the generations, such that the transfer of power at the state level was likened to generational succession, a pressing local issue which was still left unresolved when the author left Kenya. Such debates also surfaced in the controversies of differing styles of traditional and modem male circumcision, mirroring a similar debate about clitoridectomy which has come and gone since at least the 1930s. The thesis also examines the uses of Kimeruthe local languagein literacy programmes, where debates and arguments about traditional and modem categories of thought were inscribed within a wider constmction of culturally entangled moralities. Examinations of how Mem's vernacular modernity required a familiar vocabulary to express itself, drawn from tradition, was made through examining forms of popular music. In the 1990s, gospel music sung in the vernacular drew upon the language and imagery of age-classes and generations in applying them to typically modem problems of alienation and anomie. Research was also focused on showing how the historical contexts of migration and education were and continue to be implicated in the uncertain formation of age-classes, rather than spell out their demise as predicted by modernisation theory. The ethnographic materials presented in this thesis suggest several arguments about contemporary social theory. By detailing the social and political situations through which age-classes entered into debates about tradition and modernity, local concepts of age and generation were critical to making a political imaginary 'about' tradition from 'within' modernity. This is important because it forces anthropologists to reconsider age-classes as a 'traditional' category of thought and arena for action and refocus on how they are the sites of multiple historical and cultural entanglements. A further break from structural-functionalist models of age-class formation and a reexamination of the uncertainties and contingencies which actors face in attempting to form them has allowed, at least, to critically reappraise the concepts of 'society' and 'culture' respectively. The focus on uncertainty allows the thesis to look at 'society' as a community of argument and 'culture' as an arena of interpretation. Although authored by a single person, this thesis is actually the outcome of a long, drawn-out collaborative effort. Of course, all misinterpretations and gaffes are my own. In Kenya, Bw. Kaaria of the Ministry of Science, Education & Technology not only issued the necessary research permit for me to begin work, but also taught me a great deal about who 'owns' the state. Staff at the Kenya National Archives also assisted me to sort through the mass of papers collected there. The Institute of Development Studies, University of Nairobi graciously accepted me as a research affiliate and their administrator's expedient actions saved the day on a number of occasions. Not least, however, I'd like to thank some very special people back in Meru, for guiding me in the arts of remaining nthoni (respectful): Mutuma and
Social Anthropology, 2006
Anthropology Today, 2010
* * * These threads can be successfully woven together by telling one's own story – the ... more * * * These threads can be successfully woven together by telling one's own story – the inevitable compromises that have had to be made, the misrepresentation of mes-sages, the negotiations with 'stakeholders', the developing encounters with different peoples and ideas, the ...
American Ethnologist, 2010
African Studies Review, 2010
African Studies Review, 2009
African Studies, 2012
This article offers an anthropological critique of the recent epidemiological turn in global road... more This article offers an anthropological critique of the recent epidemiological turn in global road safety through ethnographic attention to the ways in which people in East Africa actually discuss fatal road traffic accidents. Through limiting case studies of professional ...
Africa, 2013
ABSTRACTIn this article, I focus on the place of road safety in Kenyan legislative history since ... more ABSTRACTIn this article, I focus on the place of road safety in Kenyan legislative history since independence in 1963 as a way of illustrating the analytic value of speed for the anthropology of the state. Road safety, a highly visible public concern in Kenya since the 1960s, offers us a way to rethink the temporal dangers and uncertainties of automotive travel under global capitalism, but also to go further in seeking out historical continuities in Kenya's post-colonial aspirations for safer and more efficient roads. This focus on road safety takes us from Africanization, in the 1960s and 1970s, to the regulatory reforms of the 1990s and 2000s in the guise of neo-liberalism. From the vociferous complaints and debates of Kenyan politicians about imported Peugeots being dangerous to drive on Kenya's rough and sparsely tarmacked roads in 1964, to the much publicized traffic crackdown of 2003, the so-called ‘Michuki Rules’, road safety is a field of study ideally suited to the ...
Africa, 2009
In the past decade, there has been a flurry of ethnographic and historical writing about death an... more In the past decade, there has been a flurry of ethnographic and historical writing about death and dying in sub-Saharan Africa. Africa published no less than thirteen articles between 2001 and 2009 on African ways of death, and other journals such as African Studies ...
Africa, 2010
In recent years there has been an outpouring of Kenyan scholarship on the ways popular musicians ... more In recent years there has been an outpouring of Kenyan scholarship on the ways popular musicians engage with politics in the public sphere. With respect to the rise in the 1990s and 2000s of gospel music – whose politics are more pietistic than activist – this article challenges how to ‘understand’ the politics of gospel music taken from a small speech community, in this case the Meru. In observing street performances of a new style of preaching, ‘lip-synch’ gospel, I offer ethnographic readings of song lyrics to show that Meru's gospel singers can address moral debates not readily aired in mainline and Pentecostal-Charismatic churches. Critical of hypocrisy in the church and engaging with a wider politics of belonging and identity, Meru gospel singers weave localized ethnopoetics into their Christian music, with the effect that their politics effectively remain concealed within Meru and invisible to the national public sphere. While contesting the perceived corruption, sin and ...
African Studies, 2018
Culture, and its bedfellow cultural rights, are fast becoming ubiquitous global concepts and rall... more Culture, and its bedfellow cultural rights, are fast becoming ubiquitous global concepts and rallying cries in today's world. If the second half of the 20 th century saw the ascendancy of universal human rights, as this century unfolds we are witnessing the relentless rise of cultural rights in law, policy, rhetoric, and everyday practice. Some of the reasons for this flourishing (such as the concomitant explosion in identity politics, and a growing culture of entitlement) will be discussed in this Special Issue, primarily with regard to Kenya, whose new (2010) constitutional cultural rights provisions provide a useful case study whose implications go way beyond that country. Many of the articles share an analytical framework of governmentality and citizenship, linked to culture, rights and constitutionalism, which has applications across the continent. This Special Issue is the main written output of the ESRC-funded research project 'Cultural rights and Kenya's new constitution', which was based from 1 September 2014 to 30 September 2017 at The Open University, UK. 1 Core articles by members of this interdisciplinary research team are complemented by contributions from other scholars and practitioners who bring fresh and exciting perspectives that are largely, like ours, based on new empirical research. These other perspectives look beyond Kenya in some cases (for example Harriet Deacon; Jérémie Gilbert & Kanyinke Sena; Celia Nyamweru & Tsawe-Munga Chidongo; and Yash Ghai), and we believe the insights and analysis expressed in these pages can be applied more broadly to other countries in Africa and beyond. The team set out to examine and analyse the different ways in which Kenyans are engaging with culture and exercising their cultural rights, following the promulgation in 2010, following a public referendum, of a new constitution which enshrined such rights for the first time (see Deacon; and Ghai in this Special Issue). These rights included, for example, rights to ancestral land, cultural expression, protection for traditional knowledge, endangered languages and intellectual property, promotion of alternative forms of dispute resolution, and simply the right to 'enjoy' one's culture. At the same time, the constitution outlawed harmful cultural practices, without naming any. In the event of a clash between cultural rights and human rights, it was clear (though maybe not entirely so to all citizens) that the constitution would trump 'tradition'. It also allowed for the devolution of governance to 47 new county governments which have, since 2013, been extremely active in promoting and employing culture for economic, political and other ends. 2 This
Technology and Culture, 2015
For guidance on citations see FAQs.
UNP - Nebraska eBooks, Sep 7, 2017
The Making of the African Road, 2017
LIAS Working Paper Series, 2018
Alternative Rites of Passage (ARP) are a relatively recent invention, and a key element in female... more Alternative Rites of Passage (ARP) are a relatively recent invention, and a key element in female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) abandonment strategies organised by NGOs in some regions of Africa, particularly East Africa. They aim to replicate traditional initiation rituals for pubescent girls who are transitioning to womanhood, but without FGM/C. This paper briefly describes the genesis of ARP in Kenya since 1996, and discusses its significance as a hybridised cultural assemblage that forms part of new cultural and relational processes. It emphasises the importance of examining the deep context in which ARP takes place, including the traditional ritual that it aims to replace. The paper identifies lacunae in the literature, and potential lines of enquiry for future research. The Appendix includes summaries of a selection of the literature on ARP.
African Studies, 2018
Do forced male circumcisions have political legitimacy in Kenya that they do not have internation... more Do forced male circumcisions have political legitimacy in Kenya that they do not have internationally? This article asks what these acts of public violence tell us about the relationships between moral ethnicity and state formation in Kenya. It examines the place of intermarriage and migration as factors to consider in this violence. Forced male circumcision highlights certain ambivalence towards human rights in Kenya that should not be ignored by observers of African pluralism and constitutional reform. Amid a generalised crisis of masculinity, forced circumcisions raise important questions about human rights processes and different kinds of social authority. This focus on forced circumcision brings to the surface historically layered understandings of citizenship, masculinity, and gender violence.
Technology and Culture, 2015
For guidance on citations see FAQs.
African Dynamics in a Multipolar World, 2013
This chapter focuses on Kenya's new infrastructural dispensation and this is explored through... more This chapter focuses on Kenya's new infrastructural dispensation and this is explored through the analytic and political value of speed embedded in that nation-state's most recent development planning, "Vision 2030". The discussion of Kenya's new 'infrastructural dispensation' centers on a controversial new development project in the north of Kenya: the Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia-Transit Corridor (LAPSETT). The chapter theoretically draws on anthropological notions of 'friction' in the ethnography of globalization (Tsing 2006) and develops a complementary perspective on the acceleration of Kenya's infrastructural development through speed's implication for political transformation. Apart from these theoretical contributions, It is most intent on forwarding the idea that the recent concerns with 'multipolarity' in Africa's political economy would do well to be more explicitly historicized in any treatment of 'traditional' or 'non-traditional' sources of investment, taking care to evaluate rhetoric overburdened ideologically by the compelling spin of neo-liberalism's apologists. Keywords: Kenya's new infrastructural dispensation; LAPSETT; multipolar world; neo-liberalism; Sudan
Social Anthropology, 2010
This study examines social change in Meru District, Kenya following the economic liberalization o... more This study examines social change in Meru District, Kenya following the economic liberalization of the coffee sector. The empirical material presented was collected during fieldwork in Kenya from June to December 1998. The case studies demonstrate how local ...
This is an historical ethnography about age-class formation among the people known as the Imenti ... more This is an historical ethnography about age-class formation among the people known as the Imenti and Tigania Meru of central Kenya. By reexamining social anthropology's long standing study of societies with age-sets and age-organisation, this research focuses on the problem of historical perspective which such forms of social organisation inevitably provoke. Ethnographers writing in the 1990s, like their counterparts in the 1950s, seemed convinced that the contingent, uncertain, and often ad hoc nature of age-class formation meant that such forms of social organisation were fated to disappear. This thesis aims to overturn such an assumption by presenting differing ethnographic contexts where debate about age-classes' viability in the present led to community-wide reappraisals of traditional and modem categories of thought and action. By the time of fieldwork in 2001-2003, the formation of Mem age-classes fed into intense debates about what constituted 'tradition' and an authentic construction of local social identity. Research in two fieldsites, Imenti and Tigania, allowed for comparison between one segment of the Mem where such organisation is seen as defunct and another section where it is vicariously implicated in local politics. Ageclasses, it is argued in the Mem context, are both social formations and tropes within the makings of a local political imaginary. National concerns such as the 2002 General Elections could be locally reinterpreted as power struggles between the generations, such that the transfer of power at the state level was likened to generational succession, a pressing local issue which was still left unresolved when the author left Kenya. Such debates also surfaced in the controversies of differing styles of traditional and modem male circumcision, mirroring a similar debate about clitoridectomy which has come and gone since at least the 1930s. The thesis also examines the uses of Kimeruthe local languagein literacy programmes, where debates and arguments about traditional and modem categories of thought were inscribed within a wider constmction of culturally entangled moralities. Examinations of how Mem's vernacular modernity required a familiar vocabulary to express itself, drawn from tradition, was made through examining forms of popular music. In the 1990s, gospel music sung in the vernacular drew upon the language and imagery of age-classes and generations in applying them to typically modem problems of alienation and anomie. Research was also focused on showing how the historical contexts of migration and education were and continue to be implicated in the uncertain formation of age-classes, rather than spell out their demise as predicted by modernisation theory. The ethnographic materials presented in this thesis suggest several arguments about contemporary social theory. By detailing the social and political situations through which age-classes entered into debates about tradition and modernity, local concepts of age and generation were critical to making a political imaginary 'about' tradition from 'within' modernity. This is important because it forces anthropologists to reconsider age-classes as a 'traditional' category of thought and arena for action and refocus on how they are the sites of multiple historical and cultural entanglements. A further break from structural-functionalist models of age-class formation and a reexamination of the uncertainties and contingencies which actors face in attempting to form them has allowed, at least, to critically reappraise the concepts of 'society' and 'culture' respectively. The focus on uncertainty allows the thesis to look at 'society' as a community of argument and 'culture' as an arena of interpretation. Although authored by a single person, this thesis is actually the outcome of a long, drawn-out collaborative effort. Of course, all misinterpretations and gaffes are my own. In Kenya, Bw. Kaaria of the Ministry of Science, Education & Technology not only issued the necessary research permit for me to begin work, but also taught me a great deal about who 'owns' the state. Staff at the Kenya National Archives also assisted me to sort through the mass of papers collected there. The Institute of Development Studies, University of Nairobi graciously accepted me as a research affiliate and their administrator's expedient actions saved the day on a number of occasions. Not least, however, I'd like to thank some very special people back in Meru, for guiding me in the arts of remaining nthoni (respectful): Mutuma and
Social Anthropology, 2006
Anthropology Today, 2010
* * * These threads can be successfully woven together by telling one's own story – the ... more * * * These threads can be successfully woven together by telling one's own story – the inevitable compromises that have had to be made, the misrepresentation of mes-sages, the negotiations with 'stakeholders', the developing encounters with different peoples and ideas, the ...
American Ethnologist, 2010
African Studies Review, 2010
African Studies Review, 2009
African Studies, 2012
This article offers an anthropological critique of the recent epidemiological turn in global road... more This article offers an anthropological critique of the recent epidemiological turn in global road safety through ethnographic attention to the ways in which people in East Africa actually discuss fatal road traffic accidents. Through limiting case studies of professional ...
Africa, 2013
ABSTRACTIn this article, I focus on the place of road safety in Kenyan legislative history since ... more ABSTRACTIn this article, I focus on the place of road safety in Kenyan legislative history since independence in 1963 as a way of illustrating the analytic value of speed for the anthropology of the state. Road safety, a highly visible public concern in Kenya since the 1960s, offers us a way to rethink the temporal dangers and uncertainties of automotive travel under global capitalism, but also to go further in seeking out historical continuities in Kenya's post-colonial aspirations for safer and more efficient roads. This focus on road safety takes us from Africanization, in the 1960s and 1970s, to the regulatory reforms of the 1990s and 2000s in the guise of neo-liberalism. From the vociferous complaints and debates of Kenyan politicians about imported Peugeots being dangerous to drive on Kenya's rough and sparsely tarmacked roads in 1964, to the much publicized traffic crackdown of 2003, the so-called ‘Michuki Rules’, road safety is a field of study ideally suited to the ...
Africa, 2009
In the past decade, there has been a flurry of ethnographic and historical writing about death an... more In the past decade, there has been a flurry of ethnographic and historical writing about death and dying in sub-Saharan Africa. Africa published no less than thirteen articles between 2001 and 2009 on African ways of death, and other journals such as African Studies ...
Africa, 2010
In recent years there has been an outpouring of Kenyan scholarship on the ways popular musicians ... more In recent years there has been an outpouring of Kenyan scholarship on the ways popular musicians engage with politics in the public sphere. With respect to the rise in the 1990s and 2000s of gospel music – whose politics are more pietistic than activist – this article challenges how to ‘understand’ the politics of gospel music taken from a small speech community, in this case the Meru. In observing street performances of a new style of preaching, ‘lip-synch’ gospel, I offer ethnographic readings of song lyrics to show that Meru's gospel singers can address moral debates not readily aired in mainline and Pentecostal-Charismatic churches. Critical of hypocrisy in the church and engaging with a wider politics of belonging and identity, Meru gospel singers weave localized ethnopoetics into their Christian music, with the effect that their politics effectively remain concealed within Meru and invisible to the national public sphere. While contesting the perceived corruption, sin and ...
African Studies, 2018
Culture, and its bedfellow cultural rights, are fast becoming ubiquitous global concepts and rall... more Culture, and its bedfellow cultural rights, are fast becoming ubiquitous global concepts and rallying cries in today's world. If the second half of the 20 th century saw the ascendancy of universal human rights, as this century unfolds we are witnessing the relentless rise of cultural rights in law, policy, rhetoric, and everyday practice. Some of the reasons for this flourishing (such as the concomitant explosion in identity politics, and a growing culture of entitlement) will be discussed in this Special Issue, primarily with regard to Kenya, whose new (2010) constitutional cultural rights provisions provide a useful case study whose implications go way beyond that country. Many of the articles share an analytical framework of governmentality and citizenship, linked to culture, rights and constitutionalism, which has applications across the continent. This Special Issue is the main written output of the ESRC-funded research project 'Cultural rights and Kenya's new constitution', which was based from 1 September 2014 to 30 September 2017 at The Open University, UK. 1 Core articles by members of this interdisciplinary research team are complemented by contributions from other scholars and practitioners who bring fresh and exciting perspectives that are largely, like ours, based on new empirical research. These other perspectives look beyond Kenya in some cases (for example Harriet Deacon; Jérémie Gilbert & Kanyinke Sena; Celia Nyamweru & Tsawe-Munga Chidongo; and Yash Ghai), and we believe the insights and analysis expressed in these pages can be applied more broadly to other countries in Africa and beyond. The team set out to examine and analyse the different ways in which Kenyans are engaging with culture and exercising their cultural rights, following the promulgation in 2010, following a public referendum, of a new constitution which enshrined such rights for the first time (see Deacon; and Ghai in this Special Issue). These rights included, for example, rights to ancestral land, cultural expression, protection for traditional knowledge, endangered languages and intellectual property, promotion of alternative forms of dispute resolution, and simply the right to 'enjoy' one's culture. At the same time, the constitution outlawed harmful cultural practices, without naming any. In the event of a clash between cultural rights and human rights, it was clear (though maybe not entirely so to all citizens) that the constitution would trump 'tradition'. It also allowed for the devolution of governance to 47 new county governments which have, since 2013, been extremely active in promoting and employing culture for economic, political and other ends. 2 This