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Ethnography
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Snake-driven development

Culture, nature and religious conflict in neoliberal Kenya

James H. Smith

University of California Davis, USA

This article examines how different groups of Luo people living in a village in western Kenya fought over, publicized, and sought to harness the power of a returned python-spirit referred to as Omieri. The alleged return of Omieri catalyzed the local imagination concerning a range of issues, and mobilized all of the major social groups and dominant cosmological-ideological perspectives in the region, while also becoming a source of cooperation and local autonomy against the control of the national state and regional elites. In addition to generating conflict, Omieri became a possible means of manufacturing an improved Luo future through appropriate historical remembrance and sacrifice, and reflected the sense of unprecedented but ambiguous potential that permeated Luoland in the months following the epochal presidential elections of December 2002. The case demonstrates how local social preoccupations-including those related to ecological deterioration, religious transformation, gendered and generational conflict, and privatization-are shaped by far-reaching structural transformations, but experienced through local cultural traditions and understandings.

Key Words: local-global interactions • natural resource management • cultural heritage • neoliberalism • Kenya

Ethnography, Vol. 7, No. 4, 423-459 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/1466138106073144
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