The Importance of Being Serious: Subjectivity and Adulthood in Kenya

ABSTRACT

While anthropological scholarship on the life course transitions of young people has aimed to contribute to theories of structure and agency, social reproduction and change, it has done so relatively independently from the anthropological literature on subject formation. This paper explores how subjectivity – how people feel, think, and experience – is implicated in grappling with life course transitions. It addresses how ‘being serious’ is considered a critical adult competency and its achievement delineates a key life transition that young women in western Kenya variously resent and value, resist and seek. The analysis illuminates ways in which people grapple with their own subjectivity as a problem as well as a project, and how such problems and projects of subjectivity are problems and projects of social reproduction. I argue that taking account of such subjective transformations can augment political economy analysis of meanings and modes of life.

KEYWORDS:

• Subjectivity
• life transitions
• adulthood
• youth
• social reproduction

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Kathleen Millar for excellent review comments on an early draft of this paper as well as to Adeline Masquelier, Deborah Durham, Dick Powis, Adrienne Strong, Norma Mendoza-Denton, and other participants of the ASAUK 2016 and AAA 2016 panels at which drafts of this paper were presented, and to the anonymous reviewers of this article for their helpful suggestions to improve it.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All names of individuals in this article are pseudonyms to ensure informants’ confidentiality. The village’s name is also a pseudonym for this reason.

2. Women ‘running away from’ their marriages have been documented as a relatively regular feature in studies among Luo communities dating back to the 1930s (Schwartz 2000). This has been a tactic to trigger inter-familial mediated reconciliations. However, similar results are undermined today by the common lack of bridewealth exchanges to cement marriage contracts and thus families’ vested interests in marriages, as well as the absence of extended family members.

3. While the English word ‘serious’ is usually inserted in such charges, some Dholuo speakers describe comparable personal traits of stoicism and perseverance in terms of having ‘a steady heart’ (chuny modhil).

4. Susan Reynolds Whyte and Godfrey Etyang Siu (2014: 28) note that people in Uganda often describe themselves as ‘keeping quiet’ when they have suppressed their criticism of being wronged by others, and how this reflects an ‘ethos of contingency’ as it keeps the relationship amenable to possible future cooperation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation under Grant 8519; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under Grant 756-2011-0810.