This article examines the lethal consequences of delayed obstetric care through the lens of maternal temporalities. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and autoethnographic narrative, I trace how racialized patients are asked to endure uncertainty, dismissal, and bureaucratic delay even as their medical conditions worsen. Focusing on my experience of an ectopic pregnancy alongside interviews with Black and Brown birthing people, I argue that waiting is not a neutral temporal state, but a racialized and gendered form of harm. Situating these experiences within the anthropology of reproduction, I show how waiting becomes both a medical directive and a disciplinary demand that erodes trust, safety, and survival. The article contributes to debates on obstetric racism, maternal mortality, and refusal by foregrounding waiting as an analytic of harm and a site of ethnographic witnessing.
The city of Birmingham acts as a microcosm for the United Kingdom’s urban housing crisis, where hostile migration policies intersect with austerity-driven divestment in public housing stock to produce insecure provisioning for Birmingham's migrant and refugee communities. Birmingham’s Somali mothers are one collective who bear the brunt of this crisis in experiences of successive evictions and cycles through various forms of temporary accommodation hostels, hotels, and houses in disrepair. In this essay we listen to their testimonies of being “a homeless” [sic]. Listening reveals that homelessness makes for an emic articulation of an experience of recursive displacement that began long before the present housing crisis. “A homeless” marks a politicized refugee subjectivity that invokes multiple chronotopes of trauma, akin to what Vinh Nguyen has called refugeetude. Through this case we contribute to pressing conversations on the persistence of refugee subjectivities in postcolonial Britain and elsewhere by substantiating their psychic dimensions. We argue that attending to the distress that policies generate for marginalized groups is a critical contribution that anthropology can make.
How do men claim recognition and compensation for their care labor? When a rural economy shifts from agriculture toward international migration, joint households send some sons abroad to work and ask others to stay in the village to take care of the household’s land, women, and kinship obligations. The men who stay argue that this work of “taking care” should be recognized and compensated with half of a migrant brother’s earnings. Drawing on ethnographic research with transnational households in migrant-sending villages in northwestern Pakistan, I examine how men who stay in the village invoke caste, gender, and kinship to claim recognition and compensation for their care labor. While these claims may resemble feminist critiques of the undervaluation of care labor vis-à-vis waged labor in capitalism, the article shows the limits of the politics of recognition of care as labor.
Examining the long history of expert engagement with Africa and the Global South, critical scholarship has explored how “international experts” made realities commensurable with rationalities of government and contributed to design programs and policy that willingly or unwillingly reinforced regimes of authoritarian politics through the neutral language of technocracy. While providing a powerful critique of the politics of expertise, this scholarship tends to reproduce the image of international experts as competent, knowledgeable, and effective. This article goes beyond such portrayals to examine the contradictions in the work of international urban experts, or urbanists. I discuss how and why their limited empirical knowledge of local urban realities did not undermine their status as experts, as they engaged with and narrated the development of Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa. By exploring how urban experts could still claim their work to be “impactful,” no matter whether their formulas for urban development proposed in reports and meetings with government stakeholders were ever actualized and implemented, I examine why expertise validates itself through an entanglement of rhetoric, optics, and coloniality.
This essay examines romantic relationships between humans and AI companions, focusing on how technological breakdowns are experienced as emotional crises. Drawing on digital ethnography and interviews, it explores how users interpret their AI’s malfunctions—such as hallucinations, memory loss, or sudden shutdowns—through metaphors of illness, dementia, and death. These affective responses reveal that users do not treat AI companions merely as tools, but as relational partners embedded in moral and emotional life. The essay focuses on the sudden shutdown of one AI platform, tracing how users mourned their companions’ “deaths” and organized collective acts of remembrance and resistance. In doing so, it reframes technical AI failure not as mere technical breakdown, but as a site of ethical and relational complexity, revealing emerging forms of kinship and care and challenging assumptions about human-nonhuman relationships.
Pakistan’s National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) produces the country’s national identity card and runs one of the world’s largest biometric-based identity databases in the world. To be registered in the database, individuals are linked through their kin relations to other uniquely identified individuals—a practice that this article terms “datafied kinship.” Datafied kinship demonstrates how individuals are not atomized bodies, ready to be captured by NADRA’s identity database. Rather, individuals are digitally constructed as a function of their relations with others. This article argues that NADRA’s reliance on kinship reconfigures our understanding of modern identification: individual identity is produced and tracked through relatedness, not biometrics alone. It ethnographically examines how identifiable individuals are produced through identity registration, focusing on the treatment of “system independents”—individuals unconnected to others in the database. In turn, it shows how such a relational logic of identification comes to condition the lives of those it identifies.
This essay explores “de-escalation,” the embodied practice of intervening in interpersonal conflict and crisis without resorting to police or carceral tactics. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research at The Sanctuary, a non-profit organization in Philadelphia that provides free social services, clothing, and food to vulnerable populations, I show how de-escalation practitioners use their bodies to manipulate both time and space into non-carceral outcomes. I focus on four overlapping techniques: suspension, the open hold, bridging, and collectivity. Unlike much of the clinical and psychological research on de-escalation, I situate these techniques within Black feminist, performance studies, and anthropological analytics that insist on the embodied nature of political struggle and the malleability of time and temporality. I argue that de-escalation at The Sanctuary creates a space-time in which abolitionist horizons of a future without police or prisons are negotiated through intimate, quotidian social interactions.
Scholars, activists, and politicians attempt to provoke urgent climate action by christening 2050 as the decisive date by which the United States must transition from fossil fuels. But I contend that calendrical teleologies do not actually motivate the everyday people, activists, and workers leading the U.S. energy transition. This article explores another temporal schema seemingly unrelated to climate: the American pioneer settling the frontier, realizing his destiny through individual initiative. I contend that this origin story works in tandem with contemporary entrepreneurialism to affectively animate a market-based approach to energy transitions that is anything but rapid. Thus, consideration of frontier temporalities can contextualize the sluggish pace of decarbonization. While many studies identify various catalysts of renewable energy adoption, my analysis of “the renewable energy frontier” suggests that these inquiries overlook the insidious individualism of energy transitions in a capitalist context, in which “the market” is misunderstood as an accelerator of change.
The emergence of the so-called creator economy, the $400 billion global industry of monetized online content creation, raises urgent questions about how platform economies articulate with social life. Critical theorists argue that platforms, as monopolistic digital intermediaries, act as rent-seeking landlords in between producers and consumers of commodities. Bringing a feminist, ethnographic lens to “the Internet of Landlords,” this article follows Indian food media creators on YouTube and Instagram, asking: Why is the Hindu home kitchen, a stubbornly guarded space of heterosexual caste-making, now opening for business? In unraveling this paradox, the essay argues that content creation’s production relations take the centuries-old labor form of household industry, refashioned in this conjuncture as the entrepreneurial “household start-up.” As the private household becomes a key locus of global production, this hype-fueled resignification of home-based piecework depoliticizes labor while reifying social difference. Such a reframing better clarifies the sociopolitical relations between platformization and class struggle.
This article examines men who race pigeons in the back alleys of an Indonesian neighborhood amid government crackdowns on gambling. It introduces the equivocal pigeon: a bird these men present as a-symbolic, or incapable of saying things for or about them. The equivocal pigeon is an intellectually provocative animal that upsets commonsense ideas about birds and men and meaning and turns the city inside out by bringing its back alleys into view but not into understanding. The article shows how racing pigeons achieve this feat by drawing men into busy alleys while shrouding them in a thicket of opaque interactions. It views the city from its alleys, where the pigeon confounds postcolonial ways of knowing and governing people. Building on Javanese ways of not knowing, it shows how the pigeon is a meaning-defying animal that protects men from what they call the violence of interpretation (kekerasan interpretasi).
In 2024, Singapore was again named “Smartest City in Asia,” a position achieved through the strategic deployment of surveillance infrastructures and technocratic governance. This article explores the practices of three Muslim artists whose work challenges the limiting categorizations produced by the intertwined logics of Smart Nation governance and state racialization. Based on fieldwork conducted since 2022, I argue that by offering their work plausible deniability through the strategy of “blurring,” these artists operate in the highly surveilled context of Singapore by being unclear publicly. This not just marks a strategy of evasion. By engaging with the anthropologies of Islam and surveillance, I argue that these artworks disrupt established categories, revealing the inherent complexities of identity obscured by technological efficiency and racial categories. Through these works, which go beyond the visible, these artists create space to imagine something otherwise by complicating the neat categorization of the Singapore state. Abstrak Pada tahun 2024, Singapura sekali lagi dinamakan “Bandar Paling Pintar di Asia”, satu kedudukan yang dicapai melalui pelaksanaan strategik infrastruktur pemantauan dan tadbir urus teknokratik. Artikel ini meneroka amalan tiga seniman Muslim yang mengusik pengkategorian terhad yang terhasil daripada logik berjalin antara pentadbiran Smart Nation dan perkauman negara. Berdasarkan hasil kerja lapangan sejak 2022, saya berhujah bahawa dengan menonjolkan karya mereka kebolehnafian yang munasabah melalui motif “blurring”, para seniman ini beroperasi dengan pendekatan yang lebih terselindung dalam suasana pemantauan tinggi di Singapura. Ini bukan hanya atas dasar untuk mengelak. Dengan mengaitkan wacana antropologi Islam dan pemantauan, saya mengemukakan bahawa karya-karya ini mengoyahkan kategori yang sudah mapan, lalu mendedahkan kerumitan identiti yang tersembunyi di sebalik kecekapan teknologi dan kategori perkauman. Melalui karya-karya yang melangkaui apa yang sedia tampak, saya berpendapat bahawa dengan merumitkan pengkategorian kemas dilakarkan Singapura, seniman-seniman ini berupaya mencipta ruang untuk membayangkan realiti yang lain.
Generation or relative age is a common way humans define social difference. In Europe and North America, old age is frequently perceived as a period of decline and loss, a condition “successful aging” paradigms exhort individuals to avoid for as long as possible. Explicit and implicit ageist beliefs, discourses, and practices marginalize later life, portraying it as undesirable and inferior. This essay explores how imagined generational relationships with time—younger people as future facing, older people as out of time—enrol linear, future-oriented temporal perspectives in reproducing ageism. The aftermath of the Brexit referendum, followed closely by the COVID-19 pandemic, serve as my ethnographic examples. These two extraordinary events permit me to highlight how chronocracy (Kirtsoglou and Simpson 2020)—that is, the denial of coevalness or coexistence in time through everyday temporal regimes—reinforces unequal power dynamics, and to explore how generational groups are differently valued in contemporary England.
This article explores poisonous images—images that both register and trouble the visibility of toxicity in Taranto, Italy, one of Europe’s most polluted cities due to the continent’s largest steel factory. Centered on photographs taken in the city’s contaminated cemetery, the essay asks how slow violence can be apprehended ethnographically when pollution remains unevenly perceptible and causally elusive. I argue that the photographic image, beyond its forensic or legal promise, functions as an ethnographic hinge between matter and meaning, visibility and refusal, foregrounding aesthetics as a political as much as a sensory problem. Through three photographic acts produced by cemetery workers, a local performance artist, and myself (as anthropologist), the article proposes “flickering” as an anthropological method—attuned to the intermittence between visible/invisible, absence/presence, and the oscillation of death in everyday life. These poisonous images do not stabilize evidence: they pulse in and out of consciousness, capturing uncertainty and unequally distributed exposures and sensibilities. The cemetery emerges as both site and figure for grasping the metamorphosis of death amid the environmental crisis, where mourning and inheritance remain perpetually unsettled.
This article examines how young queer people in Zimbabwe rework understandings of the relationship between ancestors, spirit mediumship, and queer expressions of gender and sexuality. In Zimbabwe, many traditional practitioners argue that gender transgression and same-sex desires are caused by the presence of ancestral spirits known as amadlozi. Anthropologists have often identified spirit-mediumship practices such as these as local expressions of queerness. Young queer people in Zimbabwe view such explanations with skepticism and doubt, yet many experience amadlozi communicating with them and in some cases cultivate deep and meaningful relationships with them. This article argues that engagements with ancestral spirits work to reimagine queerness within ancestral epistemologies and respond to colonial projects that have sought to demonize both ancestors and queerness. At the same time, it shows how young queer Zimbabweans’ relationships with spirits articulate novel forms of intimate attachment that expand anthropological understandings of “queer kinship.” Isifinqo Leyincwadi ihlaziya ukuthi intsha yabantu abathandana lobulili obufanayo eZimbabwe baguqula kanjani indlela okucatshangwa ngayo ngamadlozi, ukufikelwa kanye lobulili. EZimbabwe, abanengi abalandelana lamasiko baphikisa ngokuthi izinkanuko zobubili obufanayo lokungalandeli imikhuba yobulili evamileyo kubangelwa ngamadlozi. Abaphenyi bezamasiko bathi nxa abantu bekhuluma lamadlozi ngalendlela, kuyindlela yamasiko endawo yokutshengisa ukuthi umuntu ongowesilisa uthandana lowesilisa kumbe owesifazane uthandana lowesifazane. Intsha yabantu abathandana lobulili obufanayo eZimbabwe kayikholwa kakhulu ezichasisweni lezi, kodwa inengi liyake likhulumisane lamadlozi njalo abanye bakha ubudlelwano obujulileyo lawo. Leyincwadi iphikisa isithi imikhuba le iyaguqula indlela abantu abaqonda ngayo ukuthandana kwabantu bobulili obufanayo ezinkolweni zabokhokho, njalo iphikisana lembono yamakoloni eyayenza amadlozi labantu abathandana lobulili obufanayo babonakale njengababi. Leyi ncwadi iyaphinda ikhombise ukuthi ubudlelwano lamadlozi buvulela indlela entsha yokuzwisisa “iqueer kinship” ezifundweni ngezimpilo zabantu (anthropology).
This article explores a widely circulated legend in Afghanistan in which foreigners are believed to create shrines to conceal buried antiquities. It represents one of several narratives in which locals express mistrust of foreign motivations and geopolitical deception. Building on recent scholarship on speculative undergrounds and conspiracy theories, this article examines how Afghans use folktales to explain obscure events and convey anxieties about literacy, knowledge, and exploitation. Narratives of deception flourish in marginal spaces, such as unknown shrines, which often become sites of doubt, uncertainty, and storytelling. In this legend, foreigners sometimes assume the role of a trickster, reflecting the “intelligent outsider” motif common in Afghan stories that speak to local simplicity and cunning intelligence. This article argues for increased scholarly attention to folktales within the context of conspiracy theories and lived geopolitics, as these stories offer valuable insights into the everyday values, fears, and experiences of people living in unstable environments. چکیده این مقاله به یکی از افسانههای رایج در افغانستان میپردازد؛ افسانهای که بر اساس آن، باور عمومی بر این است که خارجیها برای پنهان کردن اشیای عتیقه و آثار باستانی، زیارتگاهها یا مقبرههایی میسازند. این یکی از روایتهای متعددی است که مردم محل بیاعتمادی خود را نسبت به انگیزههای خارجیها و فریبکاریهای ژئوپولیتیکی بیان میکنند. با تکیه بر پژوهشهای اخیر دربارهٔ زیرزمینهای حدسی و تئوریهای توطئه، این مقاله نشان میدهد که چگونه افغانها از قصهها و افسانههای عامیانه برای توضیح رویدادهای مبهم و انتقال نگرانیهای خود دربارهٔ سواد، دانش و استثمار استفاده میکنند. روایتهایی دربارهٔ فریبکاری معمولاً پیرامون فضاهای حاشیهای، مانند زیارتگاههای ناشناخته، رشد میکنند؛ فضاهایی که اغلب به مکانهایی برای بیان شک، تردید و قصهگویی بدل میشوند. در این افسانه، خارجیها گاه نقش شخصیتهای «حیلهگر» را به خود میگیرند؛ نقشی که بازتابدهندهٔ موتیف «بیگانهٔ زرنگ» در داستانهای افغانی است—داستانهایی که بر سادگی مردم محل و زیرکی بیگانگان تأکید دارند. این مقاله بر ضرورت توجه بیشتر پژوهشگران به قصهها و افسانههای عامیانه در بستر تئوریهای توطئه و ژئوپولیتیکِ زیسته تأکید میکند، زیرا این روایتها اطلاعات ارزشمندی دربارهٔ ارزشها، ترسها و تجربیات روزمرهٔ مردمانی ارائه میکنند که در محیطهای بیثبات زندگی میکنند.
Venomous snakes offer unique insight into core topics of anthropological inquiry because they are both the cause of a disease, snakebite envenoming, and the source of the cure. At a Thai facility dedicated to venomous snake husbandry for the production of antivenom, the biological pharmaceutical used in the treatment of this disease, a team of staff manages a captive population of the snakes most likely to cause a medically significant bite. Here, both snakes and snake handlers face a significant risk of bodily harm. Drawing on twelve months of multisited ethnographic research, this essay shows how everyday acts of husbandry in service of antivenom production reconstitute the temporal processes of life through the interplay of biological necessity, lived experience, and economic limitation. Overall, I find that snakes and those who handle them with bare hands, caught in a two-way “precarious grasp,” are maimed in pursuit of treatment for speculative patients. บทคัดย่อ งูพิษเป็นสิ่งมีชีวิตที่สามารถให้มุมมองอันน่าสนใจในประเด็นสำคัญทางมานุษยวิทยา เนื่องจากงูพิษเหล่านี้เป็นได้ทั้งสาเหตุของโรค คืออาการป่วยจากการถูกงูพิษกัด และในขณะเดียวกันก็เป็นแหล่งของยารักษาอีกด้วย ในประเทศไทยมีสถานเลี้ยงงูพิษที่เชี่ยวชาญด้านการดูแลและเพาะเลี้ยงงูเพื่อผลิตเซรุ่มต้านพิษงู ซึ่งเป็นยาที่ใช้รักษาผู้ที่ได้รับพิษจากการถูกงูกัด เจ้าหน้าที่ต้องดูแลงูพิษหลากหลายชนิดที่มักเป็นสาเหตุของการถูกกัดที่มีอันตรายต่อชีวิต ทั้งนี้ งูพิษและเจ้าหน้าที่ต่างต้องเผชิญกับความเสี่ยงที่จะได้รับบาดเจ็บอย่างมีนัยสำคัญ จากการศึกษาวิจัยภาคสนามเชิงชาติพันธุ์วรรณนาเป็นเวลาสิบสองเดือนในหลายพื้นที่ชี้ให้เห็นว่า การดูแลและเพาะเลี้ยงงูในแต่ละวันเพื่อผลิตเซรุ่มต้านพิษงูนั้นเป็นกระบวนการที่เปลี่ยนแปลงและผสานกันผ่านประสบการณ์ชีวิตของคนและงู ด้วยปฏิสัมพันธ์ทางชีวภาพและข้อจำกัดทางเศรษฐกิจ โดยสรุป การศึกษานี้พบว่าทั้งงูพิษและเจ้าหน้าที่รีดพิษงูที่ต้องจับงูด้วยมือเปล่าต่างก็ผูกพันอยู่ในความสัมพันธ์ที่เปราะบางและเต็มไปด้วยความเสี่ยงต่อการบาดเจ็บทั้งคู่ในการผลิตยารักษาให้กับผู้ป่วยที่อาจถูกงูพิษกัดในอนาคต
This article examines the disappearance of the Bimbia slavery memorial from ancestry reconnection programming activities in 2018 as a reflection of an emerging effect of the “Anglophone” crisis in 2018: an anti-crisis atmosphere. Building on growing literature that treats atmosphere as a mode of sensorial attunement, this article puts ethnographic focus on how changes in postcolonial sovereignty against the “Anglophone” crisis became unobservable but were consistently on the precipice of being felt. By drawing on the affective conditions of ancestral knowledge production, including a simple curiosity to care precipitating initial public access to Bimbia, Cameroonians cannot only use the genetic diaspora’s return to neutralize the impact of atmospheric violence by the postcolonial state. Managing and sustaining the genetic diaspora’s return also signifies a chronic paradoxical struggle to create and maintain a reparative line of flight from the processes of racialization within and beyond the postcolony as “home.”
How do we tell the stories of climate change? This essay explores the slow violence and death experienced by marginalized, racialized, indigenous bodies as climate change differentially impacts communities across the globe. Paying attention to locations beyond the spectacular events that have come to be associated with climate change, the article highlights violence and death on the margins, and the complex planetary relationships that make such violence both possible and nearly imperceptible on the global stage. By taking a planetary view of localized violence, the article traces the precarious positionality of communities such as those living in villages in rural Papua New Guinea, villages at the heart of the ethnographic account. It contributes to our theoretical understanding of climate change as a planetary process, with varied local manifestations, and in doing so highlights indigenous ideas and scholarship about the role of place in the violence of loss.
This essay examines the multivalences of repair in Senegalese railway workshops, where workers maintain and modify aging wagons from suburban and former transnational rail services, originally imported from France, and later from India and Pakistan. I trace three interrelated dimensions of repair. First, I show how repair operates as both replacement and improvisation, challenging the assumption that maintenance necessarily counteracts decay; instead, it can accelerate deterioration. Second, I analyze repair as reappropriation, focusing on workers' "tropicalization" of foreign technologies to fit local conditions. Finally, I explore how the inevitability of failure, stemming from the machines' inherent faults, demands creative mending and continuous perseverance. These practices generate not only new objects assembled from scrap but also narratives of West African railway workers whose engineering contributions have long been marginalized in colonial and postcolonial histories. Material patching thus becomes an act of reparation, asserting technical authorship and forging alternative histories of infrastructure, labor, and expertise. X & euml;t wii dafay j & agrave;ngat anam yu bari yi & ntilde;uy defaraate ci atelier yu k & euml;ru ligg & eacute;eyukaayu saxaar yi ci Senegal. Foofu la ligg & eacute;eykat yi di defaraate ba noppi di soppi wagon yu m & agrave;gget yi bawoo ci sarwiisu banlieue yi ak res & oacute; transnasional yu nj & euml;kk ya te j & oacute;ge France, ginnaaw ga Inde ak Pakistan. Maa ngi ra & ntilde;& ntilde;ee & ntilde;etti mbir yu j & euml;m ci defaraat gi. Li nj & euml;kk mooy, damay wone naka la defaraat gi di deme ci wuutu gi itam ci g & oacute;org & oacute;orlu gi, ak di dii & eng;at xalaat biy wax ni defaraat dafay xeex y & agrave;qu-y & agrave;qu; ci geneen w & agrave;ll gi, m & euml;n na gaawloo y & agrave;qu gi. & Ntilde;aareel ba damay j & agrave;ngat defaraat gi ni looy moomalaat sa bopp, may b & agrave;yyi xel ci & laquo;tropicalisation & raquo; xaralay bitim r & eacute;ew yi ciy ligg & eacute;eykat yi di def ngir m & eacute;ngale leen ak anam yi d & euml;kk bi di doxe. Fi may jeexalee mooy, maa ngi j & agrave;ngat ni masin yi m & euml;nul & ntilde;& agrave;kka y & agrave;qoo, te bokk ci ay njuumte yu nekk ci masin yi te loolu dafay laaj xeeti defaraat yu yees ak ba & ntilde; a x & agrave;ddi. J & euml;f yooyu du & ntilde;u yam ci defar ay mbir yu yees yu & ntilde; defaree ak ay jumtukaay yu & ntilde; j & euml;fandikoo ba noppi, waaye da & ntilde;uy nettali itam li ligg & eacute;eykati raay yi ci Afrique sowwu jant sos, & ntilde;oom & ntilde;i & ntilde;u daanulwoon b & agrave;yyi xel ci seen ligg & eacute;ey ci w & agrave;llu xarala ci taarix bi fi tubaab yi nekkee ak ginnaaw gi & ntilde;u fi j & oacute;ge. Kon defaraat ay y & euml;f nekk na mbir muy defaraat boo ko xoolee ci w & agrave;llu politik, di f & euml;sal kilift & eacute;ef ci w & agrave;llu xarala ak di m & oacute;ol yeneeni jaarjaari infrastructure, ligg & eacute;ey ak xara & ntilde;t & eacute;ef.
North of Nairobi, the city's sprawl enters a landscape of impoverished smallholders, causing land prices to skyrocket. Kenya's economic commentators urge these part-time proletarians to sell their land-deemed unproductive "dead capital"-as an antidote for rural poverty. Senior men from the region insist this ancestral land cannot be sold, because retaining it while working for wages constitutes the cornerstone of masculine personhood. However, in a world of peri-urban destitution, where wages cannot provision desires for middle-class lifestyles, masculine principles of land retention are being abandoned for experiences of abandon. Male landowners alienate family land to fund lifestyles of conspicuous consumption, especially in alcohol. The consumption of dead capital to furnish desires of abandon suggests that Nairobi's urban expansion is made possible by such binge economies of land on its peri-urban peripheries. The conclusion proposes consumption as a theory of changing moral orientations to the short term when people encounter economic dead ends. Kaskazini mwa Nairobi, kuenea kwa jiji kunaingia kwenye maeneo ya wakulima wadogo maskini, jambo ambalo linasababisha bei ya ardhi kuongezeka kwa kasi. Watoa maoni wa uchumi nchini Kenya wanahimiza wafanyakazi hawa wa muda kuuza ardhi yao-inayochukuliwa kama "mtaji mfu" usiozalisha- kama suluhisho la umaskini wa vijijini. Wanaume wazee kutoka eneo hilo wanasisitiza kwamba ardhi hii ya urithi haiwezi kuuzwa, kwa sababu kuimiliki huku wakifanya kazi za mshahara ndicho jiwe la msingi la utambulisho wa kiume. Kando na hayo, katika ulimwengu wa umaskini wa pembezoni mwa miji, ambako mishahara haiwezi kukidhi mahitaji ya maisha ya tabaka la kati, misingi ya kiume ya kuhifadhi ardhi inaachwa na nafasi yake kuchukuliwa na maisha ya "raha". Wamiliki wa ardhi wa kiume wanaitenga ardhi ya familia ili kufadhili mitindo ya maisha ya anasa yanayoonekana wazi, hasa katika ulevi. Matumizi ya "mtaji mfu" ili kutimiza tamaa za kujiachia yanaonyesha kwamba upanuzi wa jiji la Nairobi unawezeshwa na uchumi wa kuachana na ardhi kwa njia ya kupindukia katika maeneo yake ya pembezoni. Hitimisho linapendekeza matumizi kama nadharia ya mabadiliko ya mwelekeo wa maadili kuelekea muda mfupi wakati ambao watu wanakumbana na magumu kupata njia za kiuchumi.
