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Summary

Chapter 8 explores several traditions of citizenship that all reject the liberal idea of citizenship founded in consumption and markets as well as the ethno-nationalist idea of citizenship based upon a “public” perceived as an organic unity. The public is apprehended instead as a place where strangers come together, and citizenship as an activity that occurs in those public places. In other words, the public is a city, and the citizen is a participant in a vibrant and diverse civic life rather than either a passive consumer or subsumed within a solidaristic entity. Unlike the liberal idea of local citizenship that privileges mobility solely for the white middle class, these alternative traditions seek to empower communities of color to chart their own destinies by asserting their rights to the city’s places.

Drawing upon the dynamic interrelationship between human agency and space, this article sheds light on the constitution of and relation between “place” and “path” among the pastoral Pokot of East Pokot District in the Kenyan North Rift Valley. It discusses the transformation from a more mobile pastoralist model of spatialization, which relies on a flexible network approach combining paths and places, toward a more “place-making,” postpastoralist model linked to increasing sedentariness, privatization of land, a clearer definition of external and internal boundaries, and a rapid emergence of schools, churches, and other physical structures.

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8 - A Return to Urban Citizenship?

Summary

Inscribing Identity and Agency on the Landscape: Of Pathways, Places, and the Transition of the Public Sphere in East Pokot, Kenya

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8 - A Return to Urban Citizenship?

Summary

Inscribing Identity and Agency on the Landscape: Of Pathways, Places, and the Transition of the Public Sphere in East Pokot, Kenya