Caring Cash: Free Money And The Ethics Of Solidarity In Kenya (Anthropology, Culture And Society)

In just over one hundred years, Nairobi has emerged from its inception in 1899, as a small railway depot sitting on swampy Maasai land, into one of the largest cities in sub-Saharan Africa. Today it is a sprawling international hub, home to Kenyans from all ethnicities and to foreigners from all over the world. But it is also home to marked inequality.It is within this context, that in the early 2010s, a quarter of the households in the Nairobi slum of Korogocho began receiving cash grants, either from the government or a humanitarian NGO. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with this population as well as with government and NGO workers in Nairobi, this book examines how communities experienced these cash grants and how their recipients used them to care for themselves and their families. Cash grants revealed and facilitated caring practices that were orientated not only to other people around them but to the character and endurance of the relationships.Neumark focuses on a variety of these relationships in Korogocho, from parent-child relationships, to those between neighbours, and those between residents, government departments and NGOs. In summary, this book is about new policies of care, their place in assemblages of redistribution and care, and their interaction with the existing ways in which the urban poor of Kenya seek to care for the fragile relationships that join them together. In bringing together classic concerns in economic anthropology with the more recent interest within the discipline of anthropology concerning policy and ethics, the book has much to offer a range of readers.

• | Author: Tom Neumark
• | Publisher: Pluto Press
• | Publication Date: Feb 20, 2023
• | Number of Pages: 232 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 0745340148
• | ISBN-13: 9780745340142