Anthropologists have shown how recent efforts to tell apart foreigners from autochthons have played out, often subtly disguised, in panics over objects that may seem trivial: “alien species” of fish, trees, or plants that endanger “local” nature. Little has been said about plastic's dominant position among these objects. In Samburu county, northern Kenya, “plastic boys” are unemployed men whom others despise for being unattached, “useless paupers,” who, not unlike plastic itself, have allegedly no capacity to grow roots and thrive. Analyzing this subject position against a wider background of objects and afflictions deemed “foreign”—including plastic bags, plastic rice, plastic hair, plastic smiles, and homosexuality as a “plastic pollutant”—I show how different troublesome objectifications of plastic resonate with one another and their wider context. I argue that panics over plastics and the politics of belonging shape one another, producing new, less‐obvious forms of inclusion and exclusion. [belonging, materiality, plastic, Samburu, Kenya]
In the 1980s, Samburu men from northern Kenya began migrating to coastal tourist resorts to sell souvenirs and perform traditional dances for European tourists. Many of them engaged in transactional sex or marriages with European women attracted to the image of the exotic African young male warrior. Through relationships with European women, some Samburu men managed to rapidly accumulate wealth, becoming so-called 'young big-men'. As a way to transform their wealth into more durable forms of respectability, these men used their money to marry local women and speed up their ritual initiation into elderhood. Meanwhile, there also emerged the figure of 'beach-boy elders', men who aged before accumulating sufficient wealth. They returned to coastal tourist resorts, dressed as young warriors, and waited to find European partners. In the article, I argue that beach-boy elders and young big-men produce queer moments in the temporalities of ageing, in that they subvert normative expectations of ageing at the very same time that they seek to produce them.keywords Age, temporality, sexuality, Samburu, Kenyan tourism B amburi is one of the most popular tourist beaches on the north coast of Mombasa. Luxurious tourist hotels and expensive Italian restaurants, swimming pools, and disco bars line the beach front, facing onto the Indian Ocean. Tourists -mainly from Western Europe -sunbathe on the white sands. Kenyan men from all over the country sell souvenirs or offer tourists picturesque boat trips and scuba diving sessions, camel rides, or guided tours ethnos, vol. 80:4, 2015 (pp. 472-496), http://dx.
Les années 1980 ont vu l'expansion de l'industrie touristique auKenya et durant cette période, de nombreux jeunes Samburu ont fait des voyages saisonniers vers les stations balnéaires touristiques du littoral pour gagner de l'argent. Ces hommes ont établi des relations avec des touristes blanches et se sont fait une petite fortune. Ils ont ainsi formé un nouveau groupe social à l'intérieur de leurs communités d'origine. Cet article s'applique à montrer que ces hommes, fréquemment nommés "morans de Mombasa" ont fini par incarner les effets des représentations (post) coloniales de leur identité et ceux de la critique morale des jeunes de la même génération. Leurs efforts pour représenter l'exemple corporel spécifique du "guerrier Masai" dans le contexte du tourisme sexuel féminin a mené à des conflits eux-mêmes générateurs de nouvelles dispositions concernant le corps. Ici, la critique morale ciblant la sexualité de ces hommes a constitué non seulement un moyen discursif de discréditer les inégalités matérielles croissantes mais aussi une ressource symbolique pour fabriquer de nouvelles masculinités tout en créant une nouvelle conception du corps. Abstract With the growth of the Kenyan tourism industry in the 1980s, numerous young Samburu men migrated seasonally to coastal tourist resorts seekDownloaded by [University of Toronto Libraries] at 03:48 03 January 2015ing the niche of tourism for material gains. By developing relationships with white female tourists, many of these men have rapidly accumulated wealth, and came to form a new social group within their home communities. This article argues that these men, often referred to as "Mombasa morans," came to embody the effects of (post)colonial representations of their identity, and the effects of the moral criticism of their age-mates. Their attempt to perform a specific bodily paradigm of the "Maasai warrior" in the context of female sexual travel led to conflicts generative of new bodily dispositions. Here, the moral criticism targeting the sexuality of these men constituted not only a discursive means of discrediting rising material inequalities but also a symbolic resource for fashioning new masculinities while refiguring bodies.
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Within colonialism, or the expansion and maintenance of the sovereignty of one group of people over another, sexuality has played an important role in the representation of the colonized Other, in the drawing and policing of racial, ethnic, and cultural boundaries, and in the ways in which colonial subjects produced livelihoods and imagined futures. Through sexual imaginaries, colonial actors constructed and contested arguments about race and culture, difference and sameness, superiority and inferiority, morality and indecency. By classifying the intimate desires and bodily pleasures of the colonized as “sex,” for example, colonials could prove that these deviated from bourgeois standards of morality and thus required their “enlightened” intervention and reform. The historical legacies of colonial sexual politics continue to shape the lived realities of postcolonial subjects in a variety of ways.
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