This groundbreaking book addresses issues of the keenest interest to anthropologists, specialists on Africa, and those concerned with international aid and development. Drawing on extensive research among the Luo people in western Kenya and abroad over many years, Parker Shipton provides an insightful general ethnography. In particular, he focuses closely on nonmonetary forms of exchange and entrustment, moving beyond anthropology’s traditional understanding of gifts, loans, and reciprocity. He proposes a new view of the social and symbolic dimensions of economy over the full life course, including transfers between generations. He shows why the enduring cultural values and aspirations of East African people―and others around the world―complicate issues of credit, debt, and compensation. The book examines how the Luo assess obligations to intimates and strangers, including the dead and the not-yet-born. Borrowing, lending, and serial passing along have ritual, religious, and emotional dimensions no less than economic ones, Shipton shows, and insight into these connections demands a broad rethinking of all international aid plans and programs.

The Nature of Entrustment: Intimacy, Exchange, and the Sacred in Africa (Yale Agrarian Studies Series)

Shipton, Parker MacDonald

Science & Math

Yale University Press

This fascinating interdisciplinary book is about land, belonging, and the mortgage―and how people of different cultural backgrounds understand them in Africa. Drawing on years of ethnographic observation, Parker Shipton discusses how people in Africa’s interior feel about their attachment to family, to clan land, and to ancestral graves on the land. He goes on to explain why systems of property, finance, and mortgaging imposed by outsiders threaten Africa’s rural people. 
The book looks briefly at European and North American theories on private property and the mortgage, then shows how these theories have played out as attempted economic reforms in Africa. They affect not just personal ownership and possession, he suggests, but also the complex relationships that add up to civil order and episodic disorder over a longer history. Focusing particular attention on the Luo people of Kenya, Shipton challenges assumptions about rural economic development and calls for a broader understanding of local realities in Africa and beyond.

Mortgaging the Ancestors: Ideologies of Attachment in Africa (Yale Agrarian Studies Series)

Business & Money

International

Credit Between Cultures: Farmers, Financiers, and Misunderstanding in Africa (Yale Agrarian Studies Series)

Parker Shipton brings a variety of perspectives—cultural,  economic, political, and religious-philosophical—and years of field experience to this fascinating study about people who borrow and lend in the interior of Africa. His conclusions challenge the conventional wisdom of the past half century (including perennial World Bank orthodoxy) about the need for credit among African farming people.

Economics

Parker Shipton brings a variety of perspectives—cultural, economic, political, and religious-philosophical—and years of field experience to this fascinating study about people who borrow and lend in the interior of Africa. His conclusions challenge the conventional wisdom of the past half century (including perennial World Bank orthodoxy) about the need for credit among African farming people.

“fascinating little book adds to the study of culture to political economy” MacGaffey ~Journal of Anthropological Research “presents fascinating material on beliefs about money in some Luo-speaking communities of Kenya… an insightful analysis… a case that will generate fruitful discussions for years to come” Ferguson ~American Ethnologist BITTER MONEY unites symbolic and economic analysis in exploring the beliefs about forbidden exchanges among the Luo of Kenya and other African peoples. Shipton's multi-paradigmatic theoretical explanation briefly summarizes a century of anthropological thought about African exchange, while integrating ways of understanding rural African economy, politics, and culture.

Bitter Money: Cultural Economy and Some African Meanings of Forbidden Commodities (American Ethnological Society Monograph Series)

American Anthropological Association

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Shipton, Parker MacDonald. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Shipton, Parker MacDonald

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Shipton, Parker MacDonald. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Nature of Entrustment: Intimacy, Exchange, and the Sacred in Africa (Yale Agrarian Studies Series)

Mortgaging the Ancestors: Ideologies of Attachment in Africa (Yale Agrarian Studies Series)

Credit Between Cultures: Farmers, Financiers, and Misunderstanding in Africa (Yale Agrarian Studies Series)

Credit Between Cultures: Farmers, Financiers, and Misunderstanding in Africa (Yale Agrarian Studies Series)

Bitter Money: Cultural Economy and Some African Meanings of Forbidden Commodities (American Ethnological Society Monograph Series)