This open access book examines the often overlooked entanglements and affinities between emerging models of formal and informal finance and welfare with longer-running religious structures and concerns.
Since independence in 1963, Kenya has seen the steady growth of mutual aid arrangements; a practice which creatively combines market logic with redistributive politics and older forms of reciprocity and solidarity. As a means to providing welfare and pursuing joint economic activity, mutual aid has flourished - despite the failures of neoliberal statecraft, and deepening asymmetries of power and wealth between and within different ethnic groups – and has been largely built up using a language of religious faith.
Observing that many aspects of Christian and indigenous religious life play an integral part in shaping how Kenyans save, lend, distribute, fundraise, and entrust money and value in collective arrangements, Speaking of Trust illuminates and analyses the complex and innovative ways in which Kenyans are reimagining and renegotiating the terms of interdependence across social divides.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI.
A Note on the Gusii and Swahili Languages
Introduction
CHAPTER 1: Competing for Sovereignty
CHAPTER 2: The Politics and Poetics of Transgression
CHAPTER 3: Containing the Anti-Help
CHAPTER 4: The Value of Prudence
CHAPTER 5: Patriarchy at Bay?
CHAPTER 6: Affective Labour in Savings and Microfinance Groups
CHAPTER 7: Microfinance and Christianity
Postlude: A Brave New Africa?
Bibliography
Index
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