Book launch & discussion with Peter Lockwood

On the northern periphery of Nairobi, in southern Kiambu County, the city’s expansion into a landscape of poor smallholders is bringing new opportunities, dilemmas, and conflicts. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Peter Lockwood examines how Kiambu’s ‘workers with patches of land’ struggle to sustain their households as the skyrocketing price of land ratchets up gendered and generational tensions within families. The sale of ancestral land by senior men turns would-be inheritors, their young adult sons, into landless and land-poor paupers, heightening their exposure to economic precarity. Peasants to Paupers illuminates how these dynamics are lived at the site of kinship, how moral principles of patrilineal obligation and land retention fail in the face of market opportunity. Caught between joblessness, land poverty and the breakdown of kinship, the book shows how Kiambu’s young men struggle to sustain hopes for middle-class lifestyles as the economic ground shifts beneath their feet.
doi.org/10.1017/9781009643467 (Open Access)

Dr Peter Lockwood is a Post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, at Göttingen University. Peter is an economic and political anthropologist whose research sits at the intersection of political economy, kinship studies, and moral economy. His work examines the contradictions produced by a ‘rentier’ or ‘asset’ form of capitalism characterised by possession rather than production, one that simultaneously renders people’s labour surplus to its requirements.