‘Kachinjaare Coming!’: Encounters Around Medical Research Work in a Kenyan Village

Abstract

AbstractWhen conducting medical field research in a Luo village in western Kenya, my colleagues and I were occasionally suspected of being blood-thieves, locally calledkachinja. The article contextualizes these blood-stealing accusations within the practices of medical research that prompted them, and within the local historical experiences which, I shall argue, they refer to. Further, it examines two social situations, in which blood-stealing accusations were raised against me and people who were in contact with me, in order to show how thekachinjaidiom is used in social practice, as part of long-term social processes as well as of momentary situations, within local patterns of relatedness. These observations show how global structures and processes are articulated and moulded in a particular locality through idioms that carry memories of individual as well as collective, historical experiences, and how they are enacted by people within webs of contemporary local social relations.