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Pipeline is a low-income, high-rise-tenement settlement in Nairobi's marginalized East and one of sub-Saharan Africa's most densely populated estates. An aspirational place where fleeting forms of capitalist consumption reassure migrants of an upward trajectory, it is also a place where their ambitions of long-term economic success and stable romantic relationships are routinely thwarted. This book explores how men who migrate to Nairobi from Western Kenya navigate this tension that is generated by the contrast between their view of Pipeline as a launching pad for their personal and professional careers and the fact that they face constant economic, romantic, and personal backlashes. Drawing on over two years of fieldwork, the book reveals that many male migrants design their future on trajectories of personal and economic growth but have to adjust or indefinitely postpone their plans once they arrive in Kenya's capital. Under the pressure to succeed from romantic partners, spouses, rural kin, and children, they create and participate in homosocial spaces where a sense of brotherhood emerges and their experience of pressure is attenuated. Alongside a deep ethnographic exploration of how male migrants model their financial, physical, and mental well-being in three different masculine spaces - an ethnically homogenous investment group, an interethnic gym, and the semi-digital sphere of self-help books, workshops, and motivational trainings on man- and fatherhood - this book brings a new perspective to our understanding of urban African life and the nature of masculinity. This title is available under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND, with funding from the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Open Access Fund and the German Research Foundation.

Biographical note: Mario Schmidt (Dr. phil.) forscht am Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research, Duisburg. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte sind Ethnologie des Geldes, ethnologische Demokratieforschung, Ethnographie Kenias und Nordamerikas sowie kulinarische Ethnologie.

Mittels einer kritischen Relektüre des »Essai sur le don« von Marcel Mauss erarbeitet Mario Schmidt einen ethnologischen Geldbegriff, der nicht von vornherein durch die Übertragung des historisch gewachsenen und widersprüchlichen Merkmalskatalogs des modernen Geldes die Sicht auf die jeweilige ethnographische Lebenswelt verstellt. Im Zuge einer historischen Rekonstruktion der Lebenswelt des nordöstlichen Nordamerikas des 17. Jahrhunderts analysiert er Wampum und Biberfelle als zirkulierende Fetischgelder, die Ungerechtigkeiten innerhalb der gesamtgesellschaftlichen Wertverteilung verschleiern.

Die Modellierung und Analyse von betrieblichen Stoffstromsystemen gewinnt in der Praxis zunehmend an Bedeutung. Die Methode der Stoffstromnetze erweisen sich hierbei als mächtiges Instrumentarium für die Durchführung verschiedenster Analysen. Durch die saubere methodische Trennung von Mengen- und Wertebene erschließt sich dem Anwender ein ungewöhnlich großes Anwendungsspektrum. Der Beitrag führt in die methodischen Hintergründe der Stoffstromnetze ein und erläutert die Umsetzung in der Software Umberto®. Wesentliche Punkte sind die Leistungsverrechnung und die monetären Bewertungs- und Analysemöglichkeiten von Stoffstromnetzen.

AbstractIn the area surrounding the western Kenyan market town of Kaleko, almost half of the households targeted by the NGO GiveDirectly refused to participate in an unconditional cash transfer programme. Based on interviews and repeated visits to Kaleko over the last ten years, the article illuminates the reasons for the high refusal rate. Instead of understanding it as a technical problem to be fixed, the article situates it in local understandings of the economy as relational. Observing that different actors understood the transfer differently (e.g. as embedded in market exchanges with occult actors, asymmetrical gift relations, or political redistribution schemes), the article concludes that it was difficult for GiveDirectly to control how its cash transfer programme was interpreted locally because it did not accept the paradoxical nature of 'the gift of free money'. If actors oppose money conceptually to the free gift, interpretations of unconditional cash are bound to be multiple and the transfer will remain indeterminable.