In the following author interview, Peter Lockwood discusses how land and kinship intertwine, desires that interface between economies of consumption and abandon, how eating consumes patrilineal land’s value and moral codes, and the implications of economic breakdowns for gendered relations. Lockwood’s article is a crucial account of the changing significance of property and labor, which unravels moral and relational worlds as urban infrastructure, lifestyles, desires, and values recreate peri-urban social and ethical economies.

Himani Rathore (HR): This article and your other works richly illustrate how land remains deeply intertwined with kinship, even in economic contexts where land’s value and meaning are changing. You write that dispossession often plays out not “out there” in the market but within family relations. Could you say more about this insight, and how changing landholding and consumptive patterns reshape relationships between families?

Peter Lockwood (PL): What a perceptive question to begin with, as it goes right to the core of my research and why an anthropological perspective is critical to understanding the drivers of urban change in a setting like Nairobi. On the edges of the city, land prices are skyrocketing, and land is quickly changing hands. Smallholders are selling their plots to developers and private individuals. If we look at satellite images of changing land cover over the past two decades to illustrate this point, we might simply call this “urbanization.” People’s displacement by an expanding city can appear as an effect of this process, either through forms of outright dispossession or the way geographers have spoken of how urban residents are “displaced by the market” (Leitner, Sheppard, and Colven 2022)—taking opportunities to sell up and move further beyond city boundaries. 

But in Kiambu smallholders own their land with freehold title deeds and so what I am looking at are acts of what we could think of as “self-alienation.”

Urbanization here isn’t simply the “context” for people’s decisions to sell land—it is the outcome of it. So, when we say people are “displaced by the market,” the “market” is not external but manifest in these decisions, even if such acts of sale are also embedded in specific personal biographies, options, and desires of the sellers.

I argue that we cannot understand the “force” of urbanization without understanding the minutiae of these land-selling decisions within specific life histories and family constellations. These acts of self-alienation cannot be grasped without thinking about what people value, and the changing nature of that question as economic conditions in central Kenya have deteriorated. Kiambu is a place of low wages and land poverty, where the creation of good lives can often appear impossible. The promise of becoming “middle class” and “stable” has been elusive for many Kiambu families. Under such conditions, senior men—who have considerable power over land within their families—have begun to see their smallholdings not as “ancestral” homes to pass on to the next generation, but a resource to be sold to fund business ventures and lifestyles of consumption. 

As you mention, this article focuses on the tensions these sales create between fathers and sons, but there are many other fault lines produced by land’s rising value. In my book (Lockwood 2026), I go into greater detail about gendered disputes over land—especially between brothers and sisters when parents die without clearly defined wills. Brothers often try to exclude their sisters from inheriting land, though far from successfully. In central Kenya, Kikuyu women are generally educated and often embedded in their neighborhoods at the behest of their fathers who ensure their daughters have a place to live at the homestead in case of divorce.

HR: Desires, pleasure, enjoyment, and similar orientations toward a life of consumption play a crucial part in the ethnographic context you discuss. I am thinking here of Jane Bennett’s (2001) characterization of the enchantments and affective attachments that constitute modern, even secular, lives. Your description of land-selling and binge consumption as the only “logical options to those living lives of economic drudgery within a capitalism that recruits desire and promises luxury” (369) is especially striking. How has a focus on desires, pleasures, and other enchantments of a binge economy shaped your understanding of economic change in Kiambu?

PL: Enormously. This was a fieldwork when practically every weekend was spent in local pubs where men of all ages go to drink alcohol, from local businessmen who were seen to have “made it” accumulating bottles of mainstream beers at their tables, to poorer laborers making their way through considerably cheaper bottles of Kenya Cane spirit, to the youths in their 20s who were my companions, drinking cheap cups of “keg” (home-brewed beer) while chewing “muguka” (khat leaves) watching football, sharing stories, and debating politics. These are landscapes of pleasure but also of escape, addiction, and “abandon.” Pubs were spatially and socially separate from the homesteads, places where obligations to dependents could be left at the door.

However, you realize that these men might be neighbors, perhaps even from the same extended patrilineal family, and you see how these differentiated landscapes of pleasure and abandon in local pubs reflect the socioeconomic stratifications of neighborhood life in Kiambu. 

These are palpable landscape of “winners and losers” where poorer men and wealthier men from the same patriline who might drink together might also live next door to one another, some in large homes and others in corrugated iron houses. I argue that for poorer men who are struggling, consuming alcohol in the company of wealthier men was a way of accessing the pleasures otherwise denied to them by lives of economic drudgery. 

For instance, poorer men who sell land sometimes appeared drinking alongside local “big shot” businessmen. I argue that they quite liked that they could use the windfall cash from land sale to mix with these local notables. 

In earlier writing (Lockwood 2020), I developed similar ideas about “simulation”—that drinking along these lines was not only about a desire to “project” status to others, but to inhabit a feeling of economic abundance—to be able to spend without care. In this paper, I argue that the desires of poorer men to feel “on a level,” as Mwaura, the son of my hosts, often put it, with these influential figures is a driver of land sales as windfall cash conferred enormous liquidity on these men’s budgets.

More generally, I think this is a broader dynamic in contemporary capitalism that is particularly manifest in the yet-to-be-middle-income economies of Africa, like Kenya, where the lifestyles of the wealthy are defined by the capacity to consume and are also highly visible to those without means. Luxurious lifestyles of consumption—of driving Prados, going to the shopping mall, drinking alcohol, and going to night clubs—when visibly performed are enchanting in the terms used by Bennett insofar as others have that ability to consume—and you might not! In a popular economic landscape that valorizes conspicuous consumption, ordinary Kenyans might look to means outside of work to feel a modicum of this lifestyle, otherwise denied.

HR: Throughout the article, you invoke the practice and moralization of “eating” to indicate the new forms of consumption and binge economy that consume land’s economic value and values in Kiambu. “Eating” does a great deal of conceptual work in rendering tangible how value and values are theorized and wielded by different generations of men. When existing modes of social reproduction are consumed or eaten how do younger men like Mwaura imagine social futures and obligations? In what ways did you encounter these orientations toward the future during your research?

PL: I should probably clarify my argument here. As you point out, in my argument, “eating” plays a dual role. Consumption is shown to be destructive in tangible material terms (converting land into cash into alcohol to be drunk). This is articulated in local discourse about “eating”—the idea that selling land is unproductive and cannot generate any further wealth. But I also think of consumption as mechanism of value change, a way to think about how some moral values (for instance, of obligation) are destroyed in the very acts of consumption that land sale-fueled-binge drinking embodies. In the closing stages of the article, I draw on the work of Nancy Munn (1986) to argue that “eating” or “drinking” land as an orientation toward short-term “fun” is a powerful signal to others that the values underpinning the patrilineal moral economy are now redundant. Instead, consumption has become the new way to live in a world of destitution, albeit at the conscious expense of long-term obligation. 

To your question, the challenge for younger men is figuring out whether at all one can orient oneself toward the future in the first place. There are those like Mwaura who lost their inheritances when their fathers sold family land and are now contemplating a landless future. There is also the challenge of “hanging on” to the “ideal-typical” vision of masculine obligation while one’s elders are reneging on its basic moral principles. This is something I expand upon at the end of my book. There, I show that those without the same expectations of inheritance perhaps found it easier to accept they had to “start from the bottom” by working toward the future through precarious, informal sector work. Others began to lose hope in a future where a freestanding house, a family, children, and education could ever be achieved. In some cases, this led to serious alcoholism and, sadly, death.  

HR: Building on my last question, I am struck by the resonances between your discussion of “economies of abandon,” and contemporary conversations around “post-work” society and practices such as “lying flat” and “quiet quitting.” Feminist and critical scholars have argued that breakdown of systems of work is not merely an economic disruption but also a challenge to social and moral worlds organized around work or the “work society” (Weeks 2011).  How do you see your work speaking to emergent conversations in anthropological scholarship about work, post-work, and the reconfiguration of inherited obligations? 

PL: Completely. Arguments for moving beyond “work” could not have more importance in African economies like those of Kenya which have had enormous booms in their young populations, steady economic growth, but hardly the expansion of employment we have seen in, say, China or India. The result is that Kenya has an enormous number of “surplus people,” as Tania Li has put it (2010), after Marx, struggling to find jobs. In Kenya, like other African countries, there is a huge number of university graduates, and yet hardly enough demand for highly skilled labor. These economic forces push Kenyans and other Africans to migrate—across the Mediterranean, to the Gulf States, and beyond. One solution would be a universal basic income, and this is something that the late James Ferguson (2013) argued for in his analysis of South Africa’s problem of mass unemployment. The trouble, as he recognized, is that moving on from a “productivist” mentality, a “work society” (Weeks 2011), would require enormous social and political change. 

My article raises the prospect that my interlocutors in Kiambu are also turning away from work, primarily out of a bleak consciousness that wages are too low to create the middle-class lifestyles they aspire towards. However, instead of a full-scale reckoning with the ideology of work, Kiambu men are shown to instead abandon their futures, drinking alcohol in excess, and some turning away from obligation. The backdrop is a landscape of post-agrarian destitution tangibly eroding hopes that work will really create better futures at all. As I show, selling “ancestral land” becomes the solution for senior men, guaranteeing a modicum of that otherwise off-limits lifestyle of conspicuous consumption. 

The material headroom and intellectual resources to mount a full-on critique of work ideology is missing here. Instead, the turn away from work happens through private acts of what I have called “abandon.” I would argue that this is because economic failures are experienced personally. Weeks called this “the privatization of work”—that one’s economic life is one’s own responsibility and one’s failure is one’s own cross to bear. Instead of questioning work itself, men question their own willingness to “struggle” in its world, often in tones of black irony—for instance, the burial party in the article where they argue that they ought to sell their land and go on holiday to Mombasa. There is no collective solution, only personal acts and costs of rebellion. This may sound pessimistic, but prospects of my interlocutors turning their struggles into a political questioning of work akin to Weeks’s intervention, seems some ways off.

HR: Lastly, what kinds of conversation, themes, or questions would you hope this work opens up in an undergraduate anthropology classroom?

PL: The article’s core themes are about how family relationships are organized around property ownership and inheritance—in this case a shared sense of custodianship around “ancestral” land and how these relations are breaking down as that property becomes commodified. I can imagine this work opening up a comparative discussion with reference to other ethnographic works that examine the economic forces that shape kinship, sometimes strengthening it (Rao 2005), at other times pulling its constitutive relations (Peters 2002) and underlying moral principles apart. Looking closely at inheritance disputes in Kiambu does provide a bracing reminder that families have their own economic and social contracts that are liable to be rewritten. Unlike my account of family fragmentation and breakdown, Caitlin Zaloom’s (2019) recent work shows how American families desperately pool resources so that their children can go to college, a consequence of what she calls the “student finance complex” that, since the 1990s, increasingly places the burden of funding on parents rather than the state.

In a broader sense, this work is about the way people’s values and future horizons are changing in relation to changing economic circumstances. Are there other areas of life where we can see that dynamic play out? Here I wanted to bring practices of “lying flat” in China and “quiet quitting” in the West into the conversation because I think there is a sense of generational exhaustion with the demands of work. I see this as an outcome of the end of the old “Fordist” social contract—that work could enable a stable middle-class life. This is where I think my work speaks to Hadas Weiss’s writing on the illusions of middle-class prosperity and meritocracy that we hold on to, even in the face of mounting evidence that we do not live in a meritocratic world that rewards effort. At the risk of sweeping generalization, it can sometimes appear to me that if Millennials are exhausted with the realities of this collective delusion, then Gen-Z appear much more savvy about the limits and absurdities of work ideology. I would love to hear from students how they see the relationship between work and the future in their lives and those of their peers, and how they might compare these to experiences of other generations, and even within their own generation.