The Conclusion recaps the conceptual themes of the book, emphasising the need for scholars to renew their focus upon the intertwined nature of kinship, class, and capital not only in the empirical study of capitalism on the African continent, but in anthropology where the study of kinship has veered away from questions of inheritance and property since the 1980s, a subject to which it is only now returning. It recaptures the book’s emphasis on the erosion of moral economies under conditions of land’s commodification, and the way this shapes the pauperisation of junior kin.

The Introduction sets the scene for the book’s chapters and analysis. On the northern periphery of Nairobi, in southern Kiambu County, the city’s expansion into a landscape of poor smallholders is bringing new opportunities, dilemmas, and conflicts. Profoundly shaped by Kenya’s colonial history, Kiambu’s ‘workers with patches of land’ struggle to sustain their households while the skyrocketing price of land ratchets up gendered and generational tensions over their meagre plots, with consequences for class futures. Land sale by senior men turns would-be inheritors, their young adult sons, into landless and land-poor paupers, heightening their exposure to economic precarity. The Introduction sets out how these dynamics are lived at the site of kinship, and how moral principles of patrilineal obligation and land retention fail in the face of market opportunity. Within this context, the Introduction sets out the book’s exploration of how Kiambu’s young men struggle to sustain hopes for middle-class lifestyles as the economic ground shifts beneath their feet.

This interleaf comprises a journey through peri-urban Kiambu, a glimpse of its terrain and inhabitants, as well as an arrival at the homesteads of Ituura, where the book’s narrative is set.

Chapter 3 shows how older men, established patriarchs, wrestle with the temptation to sell their land and live lives of ‘fun’, abandoning their obligations to pass on wealth to future generations. Speaking to a rich regional literature on fatherhood and provider masculinity, it unveils a local politics of masculine responsibility, focusing on the question of land sale and fatherly obligation. Adult men from the Ituura neighbourhood who work for wages in the informal economy to support their families are shown to condemn other ‘bad’ men who sell their family land to live ‘comfortable’ lives of short-term consumption. The discourses of self-styled moral men valorise their self-disciplined control of a desire to consume wealth against the grain of immorality they perceive in the neighbourhood and beyond, especially by retaining their ancestral land. Complicating these heroic narratives of economic striving, the chapter explores the life circumstances that force land sale, as well as a growing cynicism amongst working-aged men towards the obligations of patrilineal kinship.

Chapter 7 describes the fortunes of Mwaura three years on from the original fieldwork. It draws attention to heightened anxieties about social breakdown illuminated by the author’s host family’s own breaking apart, and two deaths – one of a neighbourhood youth, and another of a neighbourhood elder, the same young man’s father. This ethnographic epilogue crystallises key issues brought out throughout the book: male struggles with alcoholism, anxieties about downward social mobility, the damaging effects of family breakdown, and contestation over landed futures.

The conclusion draws together the themes of the chapters, returning to the analogy between marriage and anthropology as encounters with difference. Weaving together the stories of two protagonists encountered in the Introduction with the themes of ethical imagination and temporality, it draws out the broader significance of the everyday labour of moral imagination in kinship relations, and of marriage as a crucible of long-term social transformation. The discussion reflects on the importance of attending anthropologically to seemingly insignificant, everyday, domestic encounters and judgements, and to their cumulative effects.

The arguments of the book are laid out, beginning with questions that probe the apparent obviousness of marriage as an institution. What does marriage do? How can we account for both its historical persistence and its cultural and historical variability as an institution? Rather than see it as an essentially conservative and normative institution, this book argues that marriage is, on the contrary, a crucible of transformation – of personal, familial and wider political relations. This is partly a result of the unique position it holds as an intimate relation but also a political, legal and religious one. The conventionality of marriage provides a deceptive cloak of conformity masking the elasticity of what may be acceptable to spouses, families and communities. The argument is grounded in an ethnography of marriage in contemporary Penang but draws on a range of comparative materials from anthropology, literature, films and other sources. The main themes of the book are introduced: marriage as continuity of patterns in earlier generations and, simultaneously, as divergence from these; an overview of the anthropology of marriage and its lacunae; marriage as ethical labour in and on time; and marriage as an everyday work of moral imagination. The chapters are outlined.

Chapter 6 analyses how kinship is both a relationship over time creating the next generation, and one that is spatially promiscuous, adapting the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss. The riverbank villages had become strengthened by their hinterland networks but also by their own internal connections by the mid eighteenth century. The reforms of the Portuguese Crown in the 1750s supported this process with greater resources, control, and scrutiny. Each community, or village, continued to hold its own ethnic profile through the endurance of viable kin units and marriages within and across ethnic identities.

This chapter looks at local priests and their kinship relations, as recorded chiefly in archives from what is today France. The historiographical focus in this area has been on priests and their wives, but this chapter instead begins with priests and their parents, with a special focus on their mothers. The chapter then turns to priests and their children and wives, and the evidence for how priests made arrangements for these relatives, before turning to their uncles and nephews. The chapter concludes with a study of priests’ families as church owners. Overall, it argues that priests’ kinship ties were not noticeably different from those of the laity, with the possible exception of relations with their mothers, and that change in how these priests feature in charters from the mid eleventh century could be due to shifts in documentary practice.

Examining the entangled relations between commodities and kin in Indigenous literature, this chapter presents an Indigenous/non-Indigenous research collaboration in the form of dialogue. The first part of the chapter analyses how two Indigenous memoirs, Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed (1973) and Jesse Thistle’s From the Ashes (2019), critique western commodification by elaborating on concepts of relationality and responsibility. The second part of the chapter analyses the processes of commodification of Indigenous lives for western consumption in the context of climate change, drawing on Cherie Dimaline’s novel The Marrow Thieves (2017) and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s essay collection titled Braiding Sweetgrass (2013). The chapter’s broader contention is that the genre of Indigenous memoir, which often represents Indigenous bodies as ‘anti-commodity’, adds to conceptualisations that aim to redefine relationships of respect and reciprocity between humans and more-than-human beings.

Various biomolecular methods increasingly augment foundational methodologies for the study of pastoralism, including isotopic analyses, analyses of ancient human and animal DNA, identification of milk proteins, and residue analyses that identify animal carcass fat and milk fat. Although the results of biomolecular analyses can significantly expand the evidentiary basis for the archaeology of pastoralism and have in many ways revolutionized the field, they are not some sort of panacea that can easily solve all of the conceptual, interpretive, empirical, and disciplinary problems laid out in Chapter 1.

This chapter explores logbooks by non-elite seafarers as a hybrid mode that combines the model of the ship’s official log with the practice of the ordinary terrestrial diary – a form that flourished throughout the nineteenth century. Bringing together original archival research into sea journals with critical approaches to the diary stemming from life writing studies, the analysis reframes the logbook beyond its traditional categorisation as a document of work, in order to position it as a more personal text that allowed for the maintenance of bonds of family and kinship across oceans. The chapter proposes that logbooks were linked to the terrestrial world in other ways too, emerging as a popular literary motif from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, through to fictions by Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad in the late Victorian period. Tracing their evidentiary and narrative potential, logbooks – both real and fictive – are positioned as circulating objects that travelled across social, spatial, and generic borders.

This chapter reads presentations of maternal loss and infanticide in colonial and contemporary texts to demonstrate how kinship and structures of feeling can expand a potential Latinx archive beyond the borders and timeframes of the US nation-state. It looks to La Llorona, a ghost of Latin American and Latinx legend, to bring two bodies of texts and temporal moments into contact: (1) Chicanx works from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that look to the colonial past, and (2) early modern codices and colonial documents that reach towards an uncertain future. This chapter does not suggest that these two periods meet seamlessly. Instead, it shows how present-day texts and authors who engage La Llorona’s past wrestle with the historical specificity of Mesoamerican codices and colonial documents that present their own timelines and hopes for the future. Ultimately, this chapter contends that La Llorona’s past demands attention to historical loss and discontinuity. La Llorona helps reveal the productive possibilities of a Latinx archive that emphasizes affiliation rather than origins, one best based on resonance and irresolution.

Chapter 5 focuses on NGO-assisted judicial inquiries with rescued women in the magistrate’s chambers at the Mumbai Special Court. These inquiries, prescribed by the ITPA, seek details about rescued women’s backgrounds and entry into the sex trade. Based on the information women provide, magistrates make decisions about their custody – either sending them back to their families or to shelters and economic rehabilitation programs. Per the ITPA, these decisions are based not on the consent or preferences of rescued adult women, but on the evaluations magistrates make. The chapter demonstrates how inquiries do not merely seek information, but use the tactics of counseling and censure to evaluate identity and kinship. It shows how inquiries are framed both by accusations of immorality and by concerns about victimhood, and how women respond with narratives centered on poverty and kinship. By focusing on this site and process, the chapter illuminates how female judges and NGO workers combine state paternalism, moral reform, sexual humanitarianism, and immigration control in the governance of prostitution. The chapter also shows how Bangladeshi women are targeted by, and navigate, a culture of suspicion and regime of documentation that brings anti-trafficking, anti-prostitution, and anti-immigration imperatives together.