Examples Of Ethnographic Fieldwork In Kenya

What if we were to imagine relationships themselves and not just the people or things they connect, as objects of care? What might this mean for policies which seek to care for people? Furthermore, what might it mean for anthropology, a discipline where social relationships have always been so central? In Caring Cash, I consider these questions through an ethnographic exploration of social and humanitarian policies in Kenya that simply give people cash with no strings attached. Between 2010 and 2012, I spent eighteen months carrying out ethnographic fieldwork in Nairobi and particularly in Korogocho, a slum in the east of the city. There residents struggled to survive. But crucially, so too did relationships, which like bodies were fragile

There has been a growing recognition that the urban poor are often far worse off in many ways than their rural counterparts. Some NGOs, scholars and activists consider the urban slums as this century’s greatest humanitarian crisis. In this regard, Korogocho takes a prominent position as one of the largest, poorest, and most densely populated slums in one of Africa’s biggest and most international cities. This had led to it becoming central to international efforts to tackle the issue. The latest effort, as part of a global social and humanitarian set of policies across the world, has been to give residents cash, with no strings attached. Every month, selected people would receive a payment, either from the government or an NGO, of KSh2000 (at the time of fieldwork around $22). A significant amount when many were living on around a dollar per day. In Caring Cash, I tell the story of how Korogocho, a violent, dangerous and impoverished slum became the centre of experiments in these innovative social and humanitarian cash grant (often called cash transfer) policies. Along the way, I introduce the reader to mothers and their children, lovers, neighbours, wider kin, as well as the local bureaucrats as they all became embroiled in these experiments. In exploring their lives, I make the argument that the grants that came into Korogocho revealed, required and

Much of this literature explicitly states its opposition to what is seen as the individualism of Western thought or masculine dominated theory. In the attention it places on relationships, Caring Cash is no different. However, its unique contribution is to show the importance not just of caring relationships, but the care for relationships, in a context in which relationships were especially fragile. By understanding relationships as being the object of care it becomes possible to re-interpret some apparently uncaring behaviour as actually quite caring. In chapter four, for example, I show how people recognised that in order for relationships to endure, they had to detach themselves from the other person. This might even mean restraining their munificence. In chapter five, I examine how parents might care for the relationships with their children in a way which challenges the humanitarian urge to prioritise immediate biological survival. Then in chapter six, I show how local bureaucrats sought to care for the relationship between the philanthropic economy and impoverished families by, somewhat paradoxically, mistrusting those