Mortgaging the Ancestors: Ideologies of Attachment in Africa by Parker Shipton

Book Reviews work less well in undergraduate courses. For researchers into youths, gender, cities, popular culture, globalization, and African topics, however, this ethnography provides im- mensely valuable data and conceptual frameworks for fu- ture analyses. Mortgaging the Ancestors: Ideologies of Attachment in Africa. Parker Shipton. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. 327 pp. BILL MAURER University of California, Irvine “It is an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world in which Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre do their ghost walking as social characters and at the same time as mere things.” Thus Marx, in Capital, quoted by Parker Shipton near the beginning of this fascinating book (p. 48). Cover- ing the history of land, belonging, and lineage among the Luo people of western Kenya, this book concerns itself with the curious dynamics of freehold tenure in rural develop- ment policy and practice. Their hands bound by the mort- gage, Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre do their ghost walking in the name of the old and still influential theory that all things must be property, all property must be liquid, and all liquidity must be leveraged in the name of greater productivity and, thus, human progress. Shipton deftly reveals the evolutionist doctrine guiding this theory, and takes us on a tour of the various dead men still walking the halls of despots, technocrats, and nonprofit do-gooders alike, from John Locke to Alfred Marshall and the architects of the World Bank. But other ghosts figure in the Luo con- ceptions of land that get caught up in this theory of produc- tivity: the dead who are buried on the plot of land outside the house, securing the position of the living in a kin group as well as warranting their enduring claim to territory and membership, a claim now up for foreclosure because of the new pragmatics of mortgage financing. The title of the book is meant quite literally in this sec- ond volume of a planned three-volume magnum opus. The first, The Nature of Entrustment (2007), was the winner of the 2008 Melville J. Herskovits Award of the African Stud- ies Association and is a fascinating exploration of moral economies of compensation and exchange across gener- ations. The third, Credit Between Cultures, is expected in 2010. The trilogy poses trenchant critiques of development policy—especially policies whose aim is to enhance rural people’s access to credit and savings—but also provides a richly sympathetic ethnography of people in East Africa try- ing to maintain their own sense of life and livelihood. For those of you who have not been keeping up with Ship- ton’s work over the years, you’ve been missing out. Fortu- American Ethnologist nately, the book under review gathers up some of the di- verse strands of his research. It also adds to the anthro- pological literature on topics ranging from descent theory to the anthropology of finance. Shipton has a keen grasp of the hoary debates in our field, a knack for explaining them clearly and concisely, and a gift for channeling these ghosts stalking our discipline and finding that they still have relevant things to say about the most pressing issues of the day. The cover image of rolling grassy hills, a small thatched roof house and, slightly off-center, a cement or stone grave marker beautifully evokes the attachments of the Luo to the land. So it is fascinating to learn that such burial practices are a recent phenomenon, that people in this densely pop- ulated region have become “not less ‘clannish,’ but more,” and that grave placement and marking has come to stake a claim to descent and to “anchor . . . social identity for liv- ing persons and groups” (pp. 86–87). At issue is the very nature of modernity, of bureaucratic rationality enhancing “primitive” attachments to kin and land right at the mo- ment where the mortgaging of those attachments becomes possible. Shipton traces colonial-era efforts to, as one colo- nial writer put it, “throw the money about” (p. 139) to create a more politically palatable rural middle class and offset the rebellious tensions of the Mau Mau and other anti- colonial movements. Cadastral surveys and formal titling allowed land to be “freed up,” to start ghost walking with capital, which led Luo and others more firmly to try to se- cure their own ghosts to what became their “property,” in- vigorating some relationships of kin and ethnicity and ob- viating others. But titling and mortgages opened the new possibility of “absolute loss of ownership” (p. 142), a fright- ening outcome in a world where previously rights were cross-cutting and diverse, where one person could claim a right to hoe, another to swap, a third to transfer or relo- cate a wife to the land. Fields may have been bounded with sisal or other markers. But seasonal factors, the role of ani- mals in redistributing “plant energy and nutrients” (p. 71), and overlapping—but not necessarily competing—claims (pp. 71–72) themselves get foreclosed with the possibility of absolute ownership and absolute loss entailed in the mort- gage form. Pointing out the morbid roots of the mortgage, Shipton traces the history of the freehold mortgage process and its inimical relationship to dry land agriculture, where sea- sonal oscillations involve a temporal cycle at odds with the regularity demanded of the amortization table. He also shows how land tenure and finance are bound up in European ideas about savagery and civilization. His ac- count of the 1950s Swynnerton Plan, the first nationwide attempt in Africa to comprehensively title all land as in- dividual property (p. 143), echoes his telling of the tale of the American Dawes Act and the 19th-century traces of the moral ambiguity of the mortgage in “civilizing” the “savage”