No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Overheated stomachs: notes on urban life and toxicity in Nakuru, Kenya
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 April 2021
Abstract
In Nakuru, a secondary city in Kenya, herbal doctors argue that African bodies are infested by ‘dirt’. Gathering at crossroads, they teach about the dangerous effects of processed foods on African bodies. During public product demonstrations, they patch together urban gossip, kemikali (chemicals in Kiswahili) and consumer goods from abroad to demonstrate their overheating effects on stomachs. In this article, I think through metabolism and digestion to demonstrate how ‘navigating’ urban toxicity in Nakuru implies a bodily praxis that hinges on debates about the porosity of the nation's borders responding to the afflictions of globalization. I show how the occult character of kemikali pivots on the collapse between insides and outsides, leading to overheating stomachs, and consequently argue that herbal interventions coating the lining of the stomach and the gut do what national borders are unable to achieve: keeping out toxic intrusions. From this point of view, herbal practices in Nakuru demonstrate agency and resistance to worlds perceived as increasingly toxic and polluted.
Résumé
À Nakuru, ville secondaire du Kenya, des herboristes soutiennent que les corps africains sont infestés par la « saleté ». Rassemblés aux carrefours de la ville, ils éduquent sur les effets dangereux des aliments transformés sur les corps africains. Lors de démonstrations publiques de produits, ils amalgament rumeur urbaine, kemikali (produits chimiques en kiswahili) et biens de consommation venus de l’étranger, pour démontrer les effets de surchauffe de ces produits sur l'estomac. Dans cet article, l'auteur s'intéresse au métabolisme et à la digestion pour démontrer comment la navigation de la toxicité urbaine à Nakuru implique une pratique corporelle qui repose sur des débats sur la porosité des frontières nationales respondant aux afflictions de la mondialisation. L'auteur montre comment le caractère occulte des kemikali tourne autour du malaise entre le dedans et le dehors, provoquant une surchauffe de l'estomac. Il soutient par conséquent que les interventions des herboristes visant à tapisser la paroi de l'estomac et de l'intestin font ce que les frontières nationales n'arrivent pas à faire : empêcher les intrusions toxiques d'entrer. De ce point de vue, l'herboristerie à Nakuru démontre une agentivité et une résistance à des mondes perçus comme de plus en plus toxiques et pollués.
- Type
- Toxicity and taboos
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota.Google Scholar
Bollig, M., Greiner, C. and Österle, M. (2014) ‘Inscribing identity and agency on the landscape: of pathways, places, and the transition of the public sphere in East Pokot, Kenya’, African Studies Review 57 (3): 55–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Broch-Due, V. (1990) ‘Cattle are companions, goats are gifts: animals and people in Turkana thought’ in Pálsson, G. (ed.), From Water to World-making: African models and arid lands. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet.Google Scholar
Broch-Due, V. and Schroeder, R. A. (2000) Producing Nature and Poverty in Africa. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet.Google Scholar
Chapman, B. (2019) ‘Is chlorinated chicken bad for our health and the environment?’, Independent, 3 March <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/is-chlorinated-chicken-bad-for-our-health-and-the-environment-a7860866.html>, accessed 2 July 2019.,+accessed+2+July+2019.>Google Scholar
Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J. L. (1993) Modernity and its Malcontents: ritual and power in postcolonial Africa. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J. L. (1999) ‘Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: notes from the South African postcolony’, American Ethnologist 26 (2): 279–303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J. L. (2002) ‘Alien-nation: zombies, immigrants, and millennial capitalism’, South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (4): 779–805.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cousins, T. (2015) ‘A mediating capacity: towards an anthropology of the gut’, Medicine Anthropology Theory 2 (2) [online].CrossRefGoogle Scholar
D'Arcy, M. and Cornell, A. (2016) ‘Devolution and corruption in Kenya: everyone's turn to eat?’, African Affairs 115 (459): 246–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davies, T. (2018) ‘Toxic space and time: slow violence, necropolitics, and petrochemical pollution’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers 108 (6): 1537–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davies, T., Isakjee, A. and Dhesi, S. (2017) ‘Violent inaction: the necropolitical experience of refugees in Europe’, Antipode 49 (5): 1263–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Boeck, F. (1994) ‘When hunger goes around the land: hunger and food among the Aluund of Zaire’, Man 29 (2): 257–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Boeck, F. (1998) ‘The rootedness of trees: place as cultural and natural texture in rural southwest Congo’ in Lovell, N. (ed.), Locality and Belonging. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
De Boeck, F. (2012) ‘Infrastructure: commentary from Filip De Boeck’. Cultural Anthropology Online, 26 November <https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/infrastructure-filip-de-boeck>, accessed 22 December 2020.,+accessed+22+December+2020.>Google Scholar
De Boeck, F., Cassiman, A. and Van Wolputte, S. (2010) ‘Recentering the city: an anthropology of secondary cities in Africa’ in African Perspectives 2009: the African city: (re)sourced. Pretoria: Department of Architecture, University of Pretoria.Google Scholar
De Meulder, B. (1998) ‘Nakuru, a patchwork: from colonial outpost to East African town’ in De Meulder, B., Loeckx, A., Shannon, S. and Fleisch, I. (eds), Nakuru: an African town. Leuven: City of Leuven and Leuven University.Google Scholar
Devisch, R. (1993) Weaving the Threads of Life: the Khita gyn-eco-logical healing cult among the Yaka. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Douglas, M. (1969) Purity and Danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. 2nd edition. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Esho, L. (2009) ‘“The mode of extemporization”: the role of informality in reconstituting formal urban spaces: the case of Nakuru, Kenya’. PhD thesis, Catholic University of Leuven.Google Scholar
Fabian, J. (1990) Power and Performance: ethnographic explorations through proverbial wisdom and theater in Shaba, Zaire. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Geissler, P. W. (2000) ‘The significance of earth-eating: social and cultural aspects of geophagy among Luo children’, Africa 70 (4): 653–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geissler, P. W. and Prince, R. (2010a) The Land Is Dying: contingency, creativity and conflict in Western Kenya. Volume 5. New York NY: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Geissler, P. W. and Prince, R. (2010b) ‘Purity is danger: ambiguities of touch around sickness and death in western Kenya’ in Dilger, H. and Luig, U. (eds), Morality, Hope and Grief: anthropologies of AIDS in Africa. New York NY: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Geschiere, P. (1997) The Modernity of Witchcraft: politics and the occult in postcolonial Africa. Charlottesville VA: University of Virginia Press.Google Scholar
Geschiere, P. (2009) The Perils of Belonging: autochthony, citizenship, and exclusion in Africa and Europe. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geschiere, P. (2013) Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust: Africa in comparison. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geschiere, P. and Meyer, B. (2003) Globalization and Identity: dialectics of flow and closure. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Gutmann, B. (1926) Das Recht der Dschagga: Arbeiten zur Entwicklungspsychologie. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck.Google Scholar
Hayes-Conroy, J. and Hayes-Conroy, A. (2013) ‘Veggies and visceralities: a political ecology of food and feeling’, Emotion, Space and Society 6: 81–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hodgson, D. L. (2006) Gendered Modernities: ethnographic perspectives. New York NY: Palgrave.Google Scholar
Hoffman, D. (2017) ‘Toxicity’, Somatosphere, 16 October <http://somatosphere.net/2017/toxicity.html/>, accessed 22 December 2020.,+accessed+22+December+2020.>Google Scholar
Holtzman, J. (2007) ‘Eating time: capitalist history and pastoralist history among Samburu herders in northern Kenya’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 1 (3): 436–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holtzman, J. (2009) Uncertain Tastes: memory, ambivalence, and the politics of eating in Samburu, Northern Kenya. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoover, E. (2017) The River Is in Us: fighting toxics in a Mohawk community. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Hornborg, A. (2014) ‘Technology as fetish: Marx, Latour, and the cultural foundations of capitalism’, Theory, Culture and Society 31 (4): 119–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnsen, N. (1997) ‘Maasai medicine: practicing health and therapy in Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania’. PhD thesis, University of Copenhagen.Google Scholar
Landecker, H. (2011) ‘Food as exposure: nutritional epigenetics and the new metabolism’, BioSocieties 6 (2): 167–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Langston, N. (2010) Toxic Bodies: hormone disruptors and the legacy of DES. New Haven CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Langwick, S. A. (2018) ‘A politics of habitability: plants, healing, and sovereignty in a toxic world’, Cultural Anthropology 33 (3): 415–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leakey, L. S. B. (2007 [1977]) The Southern Kikuyu before 1903. 2nd edition. Nairobi: Richard Leakey.Google Scholar
Little, P. C. (2019) ‘Bodies, toxins, and e-waste labour interventions in Ghana: toward a toxic postcolonial corporality?’, AIBR (Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana) 14 (1): 51–71.Google Scholar
Mabera, F. (2016) ‘Kenya's foreign policy in context (1963–2015)’, South African Journal of International Affairs 23 (3): 365–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meiu, G. P. (2020) ‘Panics over plastics: a matter of belonging in Kenya’, American Anthropologist 122 (2): 222–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mol, A. (2009) ‘Good taste: the embodied normativity of the consumer-citizen’, Journal of Cultural Economy 2 (3): 269–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moll, T. (2020) ‘Gloves, embryos, and DDT: thinking with surfaces on toxicity in South Africa’, Somatosphere, 25 February <http://somatosphere.net/2020/toxicity-south-africa.html/>, accessed 22 December 2020.,+accessed+22+December+2020.>Google Scholar
Myhre, K. C. (2018) Returning Life: language, life force, and history in Kilimanjaro. New York NY: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Nixon, R. (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nyamnjoh, F. B. (2017) ‘Incompleteness: frontier Africa and the currency of conviviality’, Journal of Asian and African Studies 52 (3): 253–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pathak, G. (2019) ‘Permeable persons and plastic packaging in India: from biomoral substance exchange to chemotoxic transmission’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 36 (4): 751–65.Google Scholar
Peterson, D. R. (2002) ‘Gambling with God: rethinking religion in colonial Central Kenya’ in Peterson, D. R. and Walhof, D. (eds), The Invention of Religion: rethinking belief in politics and history. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Petit, P. (2004) Byakula: approche socio-anthropologique de l'alimentation à Lubumbashi. Brussels: Académie Royale des Sciences d'Outre-Mer.Google Scholar
Piot, C. (1999) Remotely Global: village modernity in West Africa. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pype, K. (2012) The Making of the Pentecostal Melodrama: religion, media and gender in Kinshasa. New York NY: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Pype, K. (2018) ‘On interference and hotspots: ethnographic explorations of rural–urban connectivity in and around Kinshasa's phonie cabins’, Mededelingen der Zittingen 62 (2): 229–60.Google Scholar
Reno, J. (2015) ‘Waste and waste management’, Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 557–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, E. F. (2017) ‘What gets inside: violent entanglements and toxic boundaries in Mexico City’, Cultural Anthropology 32 (4): 592–619.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ruel, M. (1993) ‘Passages and the person’, Journal of Religion in Africa 23 (1–4): 98–124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ruszczyk, H. A., Nugraha, E. and de Villiers, I. (2020) Overlooked Cities: power, politics and knowledge beyond the urban South. Abingdon and New York NY: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schatzberg, M. G. (2001) Political Legitimacy in Middle Africa: father, family, food. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, J. H. (2008) Bewitching Development: witchcraft and the reinvention of development in neoliberal Kenya. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Solomon, H. (2016) Metabolic Living: food, fat, and the absorption of illness in India. Durham NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Stead, V. (2019) ‘Who feeds (on) whom? Labour and the porosity of environments and bodies’, Somatosphere, 19 March <http://somatosphere.net/2020/labour-porosity-environments-bodies.html/>, accessed 22 December 2020.,+accessed+22+December+2020.>Google Scholar
Straight, B. (2007) Miracles and Extraordinary Experience in Northern Kenya. Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strathern, M. (1996) ‘Cutting the network’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 (3): 517–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strathern, M. (2012) ‘Eating (and feeding)’, Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 30 (2): 1–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stroeken, K. (2000) ‘Bringing home the heat: an anthropological study of bewitchment and mediumship in Sukumaland’. PhD thesis, Catholic University of Leuven.Google Scholar
Stroeken, K. (2010) Moral Power: the magic of witchcraft. New York NY: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Stroeken, K. (2018) Medicinal Rule: a historical anthropology of kingship in East and Central Africa. New York NY: Berghahn Books.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stuckler, D. and Nestle, M. (2012) ‘Big food, food systems, and global health’, PLoS Medicine 9 (6).CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Taylor, C. C. (1988) ‘The concept of flow in Rwandan popular medicine’, Social Science and Medicine 27 (12): 1343–8.Google ScholarPubMed
Trovalla, U. (2011) ‘Medicine for uncertain futures: a Nigerian city in the wake of a crisis’. PhD thesis, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.Google Scholar
Turner, B. (2018) Taste, Waste and the New Materiality of Food. Abingdon and New York NY: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weiss, B. (1992) ‘Plastic teeth extraction: the iconography of Haya gastro-sexual affliction’, American Ethnologist 19 (3): 538–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar