St. Andrew's, Turi : Forming Subjects and Affects for Privilege in Kenya

Abstract

This thesis is based on six months of fieldwork at and near St. Andrew's School in the Rift Valley in Kenya from January to July 2012. The ethnographic material that I present and my analyses both concern two related topics.

The first topic is the production and reproduction of social differences in Kenya. A private, formerly racially exclusive European school, St. Andrew's has been a domain of privilege since it was opened in 1931. I first present a historical ethnography of how children of (mostly) propertied European parents in colonial East Africa were separated from the children of poor Europeans as well as Africans in early colonial Kenya. I then comment on how this has changed over the passage of time and provide a detailed ethnographic description of the current practices of separation. I address both spatial and social separation in the form of enclaving and discursive practices that construct others as different.

The second main topic of this thesis is the effect on the students at St. Andrew's of being raised and educated in this context the processes of subject formation at St. Andrew's. I approach this through a Foucaultian anthropology of ethics and recent anthropological theory on affects. I suggest that this must be understood in relation to the vast differences in lifestyle and income between the students families and other Kenyans, and my analysis shows how the students at St. Andrew's are physically and socially removed from the Kenyan national public to be integrated into a partial and hierarchical alternative public through practices such as volunteering.

In my conclusion, I indicate how the two topics can be merged to address how the history of St. Andrew's influences the current student as the inheritors of Kenyan privilege.