Shared Lives: Exploring Practices of Amity Between Grandmothers and Grandchildren in Western Kenya

AbstractThis essay explores the relationships between three Luo grandmothers and their grandchildren with particular attention to forms of address and of sharing as practices of amity. Classic Africanist kinship studies identified these as central to the relations between alternate generations. We argue that they are also crucial to our understanding of some aspects of the notion of ?love? (hera)that old and young Luo describe as constitutive both of grandmotherhood in particular and of sociality in general. We shall intertwine these concerns of the first generation of social anthropologists, in what were then imagined as pre-modern societies, with the concerns that contemporary, modern Luo grandmothers and grandchildren have with love. Love or amity, and their attendant everyday practices of sharing, retain their importance both for the grandmaternal bond and for broader Luo sociality. Rather than providing an unquestioned and unequivocal prescriptive framework, these practices of relatedness are situated within an imaginative field which is often explicitly dichotomised. Some practices stress individual selves and autonomous subjects, while others emphasise the sharedness of the self and the primacy of relations over subjects. Rather than adhering to one or the other of these poles of relatedness and personhood, modern Luo grandmothers and grandchildren create their everyday lives between them, drawing on divergent ideas and practices, while enjoying, where possible, the pleasures of'love?.