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Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- NOTE ON LANGUAGE -- INTRODUCTION The Edge of Islam -- CHAPTER 1 Origin Stories: The Rise of Ethnic Boundaries on the Coast -- CHAPTER 2 Blood Money in Motion: Profit, Personhood, and the Jini Narratives -- CHAPTER 3 Toxic Bodies and Intentional Minds: Hegemony and Ideology in Giriama Conversion Experiences -- CHAPTER 4 Rethinking Syncretism: Religious Pluralism and Code Choice in a Context of Ethnoreligious Tension -- CHAPTER 5 Divination and Madness: The Powers and Dangers of Arabic -- EPILOGUE -- NOTES -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX

This article augments and complicates Nelson's claim that "we talk our way into war and talk our way out of it" ( Dedaić & Nelson 2003 , p. 459). Military endeavors require verbal legitimation, but militarizing participants and wide swaths of the civilian population requires more than just a stated rationale. It requires the complex construction of acquiescent selves and societies through linguistic maneuvers that present themselves with both brute force and subtlety to enable war's necropolitical calculus of who should live and who can, or must, die ( MacLeish 2013 , Mbembe 2003 ). War also involves vexed, stunted, and deadly forms of communication with perceived enemies or civilian populations. And those who are victims of military deeds, including civilians and sometimes service members themselves, are often left with psychic wounds that they cannot talk their way out of, for such wounds resist semantic expression and may emerge through more complex semiotic forms.

For white Kenyans descended from colonial settlers, the question of how to establish their right to belong in Kenya provokes considerable anxiety. Some whites attempt to suture themselves to Kenya through kinship narratives that reach backward in time, as well as laterally across races. Whites' relationship to colonial ancestors indexes a bloodline on Kenyan soil, a version of autochthony that some hope will establish entitlement to land or broader legitimacy as cultural citizens. Many also posit a kind of kinship with their Afro-Kenyan domestic staff based on affective ties and, sometimes, the time-depth of their families' association. Both narratives invoke white Kenyans' sense that they are important stewards or patrons in Kenya, aspiring to write their belonging into Kenyan history and establish themselves as part of the nation. Yet both kinship narratives re-invoke problematic racial hierarchies.

This article analyzes language ideology among whites in Kenya, documenting an historical shift from colonial settlers' condescending attitude toward Kiswahili to an enthusiastic stance among settler descendants, some of whom pride themselves on their Kiswahili abilities and say it is their languge of "connection" to Afro-Kenyans. I situate this change in a context of contemporary white anxiety about national belonging, especially given that colonial misdeeds have been put in the spotlight by events of the last decade. I argue that whites' stance of "linguistic atonement" attempts, with mixed results, to elide racial and class-based distinctions in Kenya, but it is thwarted in part by the fact that whites perpetually link Kiswahili to a register of "slang," banter, and informality, reserving English as a language of authority. I further suggest that settler descendants experience a certain relief in being able to move from the affectively stunted persona they associate with English to a relaxed, warm, and open one in Kiswahili, but that this very mobility between registers could be construed as a new manifestation of white privilege.

This account of a form of spirit possession widely experienced among Giriama people of coastal Kenya challenges prevailing theories of possession as resistance. Giriama are routinely possessed by Muslim spirits which hold their bodies hostage, afflicting them with illness and vomiting until they agree to abandon their customary practices and embrace Islam. Those possessed apparently somatize a hegemonic system of oppressive meanings according to which Giriama ethnicity is essentially different from, and polluting to, Islam. Yet the same individuals who embody hegemony in this way may reflect upon their possession experience by articulating a defiant ideology of resistance against both the possessing spirit and the Muslim ethnic groups that the spirit represents. These observations thus highlight the complexity of the relationship between hegemony and the individual; they also provide a reminder that the idiom of possession does not necessarily articulate with power structures in a predictable and straightforward fashion.

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Successful Aging as a Twenty-first- Century Obsession / Lamb, Sarah / Robbins-Ruszkowski, Jessica / Corwin, Anna I. -- PART I. Gender, Sexuality, and the Allure of Anti-Aging -- 1. Successful Aging, Ageism, and the Maintenance of Age and Gender Relations / Calasanti, Toni / King, Neal -- 2. Opting In or Opting Out? North American Women Share Strategies for Aging Successfully with (and without) Cosmetic Intervention / Brooks, Abigail T. -- 3. Aging Out: Ageism, Heterosexism, and Racism among Aging African American Lesbians and Gay Men / Woody, Imani -- 4. Erectile Dysfunction as Successful Aging in Mexico / Wentzell, Emily -- PART II. Ideals of Independence, Interdependence, and Intimate Sociality in Later Life -- 5. Beyond Independence: Older Chicagoans Living Valued Lives / Buch, Elana D. -- 6. Growing Old with God: An Alternative Vision of Successful Aging among Catholic Nuns / Corwin, Anna I. -- 7. Aspiring to Activity: Universities of the Third Age, Gardening, and Other Forms of Living in Postsocialist Poland / Robbins-Ruszkowski, Jessica -- 8. Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot? Friendship in the Face of Dementia / Taylor, Janelle S. -- PART III. National Policies and Everyday Practices: Individual and Collective Projects of Aging Well -- 9. Getting Old and Keeping Going: The Motivation Technologies of Active Aging in Denmark / Lassen, Aske Juul / Pernille Jespersen, Astrid -- 10. Foolish Vitality: Humor, Risk, and Success in Japan / Danely, Jason -- 11. Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing / Farquhar, Judith / Zhang, Qicheng -- 12. Depreciating Age, Disintegrating Ties: On Being Old in a Century of Declining Elderhood in Kenya / Mcintosh, Janet -- PART IV. Medicine, Morality, and Self: Lessons from Life's Ends -- 13. Successful Selves? Heroic Tales of Alzheimer's Disease and Personhood in Brazil / Leibing, Annette -- 14. Comfortable Aging: Lessons for Living from Eighty-five and Beyond / Loe, Meika -- 15. Ageless Aging or Meaningful Decline? Aspirations of Aging and Dying in the United States and India / Lamb, Sarah -- Epilogue: Successful Aging and Desired Interdependence / Reynolds Whyte, Susan -- Notes on Contributors -- Index