Latour Goes to Nairobi

Actually, that title sounds like an action comedy, maybe costarring Bruno, Foucault as a disembodied voice that gives orders in his cell phone, and the sassy Chris Carter as sidekick. Sorry to disappoint anyone who might have been expecting that :).

I found myself thinking about ANT last week, on my trip to Nairobi. Honestly, what I found myself doing was shoving it to the back of my consciousness, as this glint of academia to stay segregated from the rugged reality around me. Said reality got the most rugged in Kibera, the slum on the edge of Nairobi that's the largest slum in sub-Saharan Africa, containing somewhere between one and two million people (no one really knows). I always thought of a slum in the St. Louis sense, meaning rundown brick houses with unemployed residents hanging out on porches, and the ever-present, internal injunction to leave before it got dark.

Kibera is like a city imported from another planet, one where the streets are bare clay and raw sewage, shrinking from drive-able paths to alleys where you have to clamber down stones and the walls are close enough to catch you if you fall. Those walls are all either corrugated tin, clay fortified by sticks, or the rare concrete with fossilized oozes of mortar, and they bristle children's faces through the windows that are never glass, only holes. The children there clamber along, and grab your hand to be pulled wherever you might be going, and chirp "how are you?," the one phrase in English they may know. The adults sit in any kind of shade, some in tatters, some in bright suits, and I knew I was really through the looking glass when I saw a group of them standing around the back of a pickup truck, and my dad told me they'd been loading a body wrapped in a sheet.

Every once in awhile, as I was walking there, or teaching the kids at the school we visited how to make paper airplanes, or trying to breathe without letting in the everpresent smell of Kibera, I'd wonder how I could possibly relate all of this to ANT. What does post-social theory have to do with the girl slightly larger than a toddler, crammed behind a wooden desk, who is six and may get to college if she survives? Thinking about it more now, I can start to see connections: these are people whose society is taken for granted as asymmetrical, and resources are actors in their lives, and they live without the old sense of hierarchy--the chiefs that run different parts of Kibera seem to do so with the understanding that the people are really in charge.

Herbert, husband of the principal of the school, said that the government's attempts to make the slum less visible to the world, by bulldozing portions of it, or otherwise trying to reduce it in size, only has the effect of making people mad. They have some autonomy by virtue of having almost nothing. It's not an enviable position of luxurious anarchy; it does, however, make some of Latour's techniques make more sense. The focus on heterogeneity, on avoiding essentialism, becomes absolutely clear when, in the middle of this absolute poverty, you find a movie theater, built out of tin, without a door, with Bollywood music piping out to those walking through the alley outside.

Court's thoughts about Foucault, and how he relates to Latour, also help my thinking about Kibera. Latour could definitely see Foucault as overdetermined, as too much of a brand name to throw around, and want to create a new space for understanding the social. Likewise, my experience there, where there's little built-in bureaucracy and more a world of ephemeral connections, makes a reconceptualization of the social, past the Foucauldian emphasis on power as its own entity, absolutely necessary.