Capturing the Land: Kipsigis Narratives of Progress

Abstract

The modern world is composed of unstable landscapes in which boundaries, horizons, and attendant possibilities of living in the world change with dizzying rapidity. Likewise, the experience of modernity is often described in terms of peoples' attenuated attachments to the places they inhabit (Jameson 1991; Harvey 1989; Soja 1989). Such tenuous, at times chimeric, connections between persons and places, to up the ante between subjectivity(ies) and the place-bound artifice of habit and custom, pose some pressing analytical challenges to those who are interested in cultural description.