Creativity in everyday practice : resources and livelihoods in Nyamira, Kenya

The introductory Chapter raised the intriguing question: "how are we to understand the continued survival and apparent social functioning of rural people amidst officially acknowledged absolute poverty?" The question had a rhetorical function and in seeking to answer it I took the view that rural people construct their livelihoods in ways that are largely invisible to policy makers. This book is about the creativity of ordinary rural people. It seeks to unravel the diverse ways in which such villagers create resources and use them to make their living in a variety of ways and with different results.Various theoretical perspectives in the literature can be drawn upon to address the principal question of this study: how do villagers in Nyamira District, mid south-westernKenya, create and use resources to make a living and with what results? The actor-oriented perspective emphasises that actors have agency, that is, the knowledge and capacity to act creatively and strategically. The perspective points towards the notion that villagers create resources through their everyday practices, but does not deal with the specific processes through which this happens. Livelihood approaches stress the centrality of resources, expressed in terms of various 'capitals' to the lives of poor people. The approaches thus emphasise that poor people interact in various ways with resources to make their living. However, they define resources narrowly from a materialist and economics perspective, focusing on issues of (un)availability and (in)accessibility. They do not deal with how resources come into being as social, rather than natural elements, or the roles of actors in such processes. The landscape perspective takes the view that livelihood is co-produced by nature and human action, and that the landscape is co-produced through human actions upon 'nature', undertaken in pursuit of livelihoods. The perspective thus recognises a dialectical relationship between 'nature' and humans. Not all resources, however, are the result of this relationship; furthermore the dynamics on both sides are not fully accounted for. As Urry (2000:138) has shown, the view or appearance of a landscape can deceive. In practice, a landscape is the result of social experience; and includes what has gone into creating it, both the struggles and the cooperation. While the dynamics on the natural side of the equation are largely beyond the scope of this study, I proceeded to consider the socio-cultural context of social action and to 'privilege' creativity in the resource moulding processes. Therefore, this thesis emphasises the creativity involved in the acts of defining and using resources to make a living. Yet, this emphasis recognises the reality of creativity being situational hence, since human agency is not unlimited.     Resources are fluid, that is, they unfold and are often transformed by actors. The livelihood - resources nexus in everyday practice implies that material and non-material resources are equally central to making a living. Non-material resources include social relationships, but are also constituted on the basis of those relations. Issues such as identity, self-esteem, intergenerational respect and interdependence are both relational and constitutive of non-material resources. Non-material resources are socio-culturally constructed and differ between 'fields', or contexts of social action (Crossley, 2001: 87). Yet, social actors do not necessarily stick to the 'rules' and 'timelessness' of socio-economic structures; they renegotiate their relations with other individuals by manipulating common understandings about the situations in which they operate (King, 2000: 421). This explains for instance, why 'ghost farmers' silently infiltrated the TBC committee elections to get their supporters elected, pose as helpers or employees of the TBC clerk and buy glasses of tea for farmers from neighbouring kiosks. All this is done to legitimise their 'illegitimate' positions in the buying centres. The shifts and calculations that villagers make around friendships and through gift exchanges in local brew-drinking places is also negotiated on the bases of re-working kin relations and embracing emerging needs in a cash economy based on the consumption of local brew.One thread that runs throughout the entire thesis is how villagers rely on social relationships to create and use resources to make their living. This book seeks to describe and explain this process. At the outset the research question is specified and elaborated as being located in a setting that is described in official Kenyan governmental discourse, and within the meaning of development experts, as one of extreme poverty. Chapter1,contrasts this discourse with villagers' socially embedded efforts to create resources for 'commencing life' in terms of marriage and bride price exchange. The setting of the research is elaborated in Chapter 2, which discusses the historical construction of the Nyamira landscape with a view to locating the villagers of Sengeta in it. This is done through available secondary data, which do not provide a complete picture, although they do allow a detailed charting of the spatial setting of the study. Using concepts from the actor-oriented, livelihood and landscape perspectives, the study problem is further amplified in Chapter 3. The main outcome of the discussions in Chapter 3 is that villagers do have a certain restricted, capability to create resources through situated creativity in everyday practice (Long, 1992, 2001; Joas and Kilpinnen, 2006). The methodological process for exploring the study question is provided in Chapter 4. An important aspect of the methodological approach is the emphasis on the extended case study method to capture resource creation and use practices from a historical, social and cultural perspective. This enables me to bring out the variety that exists in the processes through which livelihoods are constructed and to map the various lifestyles people deploy for protecting their livelihoods.Chapters 5 and 6 present the findings relating to resource creation and livelihood construction organised around smallholder tea production, which is the dominant economic activity in Nyamira District. The study shows that migrant labour to the tea plantations in the former 'White Highlands' during the colonial period played an important role in the uptake of smallholder tea farming. The remoulding of traditional work parties, risaga helped spread interest in tea, especially among the kin of these 'pioneers'. After taking up tea farming, villagers moulded it in diverse ways in order to make their living, reflecting their preferences and lifestyles and defying the formal view of tea as a government dominated resource. An important finding is how tea earnings percolate into and support social networks through local brew drinking, church, cultural ceremonies, gift exchanges, labour exchanges and rites. Some villagers have successfully moulded tea and tea earnings into accumulation in land, cattle and children's education, leading to what they describe as 'successful lives'. Others have moulded their tea into entertainment in local brew and related consumption leading to low accumulation in children's education and eventually to what they refer to as 'not so successful lives'. From the villagers' perspective the success or failure of livelihood is socially embedded. For example, a patriarch evaluates his life together with those of his entire family, including grown up and married children, especially sons. If the children are comfortable, respectful and supportive to the parents, then the livelihood of the patriarch is successful, and vice versa. This extends the meaning of livelihood beyond material wellbeing to include symbolic and social capitals like good social relationships, intergenerational harmony, identity and self-esteem. These non-material livelihood preferences imply that sharing of resources is crucial to livelihood pursuits and actors' evaluations of their success.Beyond the tea farm, villagers face a variety of problems that present new opportunities for resource creation and livelihood construction. The overzealous enforcement of leaf quality by the KTDA tea buying centre clerks, and their practice of cheating farmers on the weight of their tea leaf has turned farmers towards alternative markets ( soko huru) for their leaf. The soko huru has two implications for resource creation and livelihood construction. First, as adherence to quality is not so important in soko huru, it provides an opportunity for villagers to recreate value in poor quality leaf resulting from weather conditions such as drought or hailstones. Soko huru also allows villagers to mould their tea leaf into cash earnings on a daily basis if they choose; unlike the regular KTDA buyers who pay only once a month. This allows villagers to run their lives in different, hitherto unthought-of, ways. Second, soko huru has created an opportunity for village scouts who mobilise people to sell their tea leaf in that alternative market. The village scout mobilises farmers to support his claim for commissions from the soko huru dealers and has thus relied on his social ties with other villagers to create a resource in the form of commissions. Villagers embraced soko huru in an off and on fashion to resist those who wiled power in the regular market and in to moderate their relations with them in some way. The tea buying centre clerks' practice of cheating farmers on their tea leaf weight is linked to the phenomenon of mashabiki; the clerks' handlers who also 'purchase kilograms stolen' from farmers. Some of the mashabiki do not grow any tea and are 'ghost farmers' who have falsified farmer registration in the tea buying centre. Other mashabiki are tea growers but still 'buy stolen kilograms'. The mashabiki phenomenon envelops and enables 'ghost farmers' to create resources in tea and make a living from it, even if they are actually not tea farmers. In the same way, the tea buying centre clerks have transformed their work situations into sites for theft and have shown ingenuity in creating new resources that help form the basis of their livelihoods. Non-ghost farmer mashabiki rely on reworking their social relationships with tea buying centre clerks to secure more kilograms and a higher income. Irrespective of outsiders' possible moral appraisal of the corruption involved these processes are all based on relationships of trust and secrecy and require close-knit social ties. These findings show that the governance of smallholder tea and the tea sub-sector in general is weak and could be strengthened.Another important issue is deagrarianisation, which is covered in Chapter 7. It is clear from the case material that villagers disengage with farming from time totime,and for a variety of reasons. Yet, from an actor-oriented perspective this process is by no means unilinear, villagers also return to agriculture at different times in their life course. The persistent return to agriculture even when land is becoming scarce can be explained in terms of socio-cultural dispositions and socialisation, the prevailing agricultural landscape and economic difficulties in urban areas. Deagrarianisation is the result of intra- and inter-household dynamics including land scarcity and disputes, aging and inheritance, and emigration. During deagrarianisation episodes, villagers create resources through formal and informal employment in urban and rural areas. In rural areas local brew production and salesarean important avenue for resource creation and making a living. In some instances, this becomes a full time job and a basis for temporary deagrarianisation. Social relationships are central in villagers' efforts to secure formal and informal jobs in and outside the villages and in running local brew businesses. Yet deagrarianisation does not proceed unhindered. It is checked by actor initiatives and resistance, and people re-enter farming even under difficult circumstances. This evidence challenges conventional views about the linear nature of deagrarianisation. It shows instead that people move in and out of agriculture as they rework their contexts and re-orient their capabilities and opportunities in diverse ways.This brings us to the question of how villagers combine farming with other activities to make a living, which is dealt with in Chapter 8. It is recognised that in trying to diversify, villagers are seeking new or additional opportunities to create resources and make a living. Therefore, the various forms of diversification are identified, described and explained. The discussion departs from conventional analyses of diversification such as Ellis' (2000) because the cases show that diversification is a historical process and that actors work and rework resources differently, transforming the diversification process itself. The forms of diversification discussed result from villagers moulding opportunities in new ways to create resources. For instance, villagers exchange resources through kinship, friendship and gift giving thereby creating and maintaining relationships on the basis of which additional resources are created. Bride-price exchange creates a host of other exchange processes that extend over many generations. Labour exchange has found mixed anchorages in kinship and cash economies. Formal employment and remittances provide another form of diversification. Remittances often generate social forces that transform the landscape and engender further diversification by providing employment opportunities for some people in emerging activities such as dairy farming andnapiergrass sales. Trading by the road-side, in kiosks and in open-air markets is another form of diversification. Although this is a historical phenomenon, the range of goods and services involved has changed over time, in response to changing lifestyles and local needs. Local brew production is also, in some instances, combined with agriculture to make a living. This is a negotiated form as it is 'illegal' but bribery and the cultural veil and discourse thrown around it ensures its continued existence. A final form of diversification is crafts, ballast and brick making. Crafts mainly include basket making and thatching houses. These involve approaching familiar phenomena in new ways such as weaving baskets for carrying tea leaf and making them with splitnapiercanes as opposed to sticks that have disappeared with the forests. This illustrates how livelihood diversification is a socially constructed historical process, as the forms of diversification themselves transform through time.Livelihoods can be (re)constructed and consolidated in different ways. So, how do villagers protect their livelihoods? How do they search for social security in everyday life? These issues are discussed in Chapter 9, which deploys the concept of lifestyle to characterise the various ways in which villagers protect their livelihoods. The lifestyles presented are analytical representations of observed everyday practices in Sengeta. Several lifestyles are distinguished. The first is the accumulators' lifestyle where people strive to accumulate through land, cattle and children's education, and invest in social relationships - both ecclesiastical and secular. When faced with difficulties they first attempt to resolve them on their own before involving relatives and friends. Their accumulation gives them room for manoeuvre in protecting their livelihoods. If they fail to protect them effectively, they fall into a lifestyle on the edge, where accumulation has largely failed and investment in social relationships is weakened, although they still benefit from relationships in sustaining their livelihoods. This lifestyle is defined by the reality or possibility of experiencing intergenerational conflict over resources. A villager may slip into a lifestyle in the shadows, in which livelihood is protected largely through 'invisible activities' such as leasing out land and/or tea, and tenant keeping. Social relationships are highly crucial in this lifestyle for locating 'customers' and maintaining relationships of trust that sustain livelihood protection. Villagers in this lifestyle invest in social and symbolic capital. The grey lifestyle may beckon those who fail to protect a livelihood in the lifestyle of the shadows. In this lifestyle the main activities are crime such as theft and corruption, and the production and/or sale of local brew and marijuana. Here social relationships are crucial, but are sometimes ignored. Finally, there is the opportunistic dependency lifestyle. In this lifestyle villagers invest less in social relationships but emphasise them to get quick cash, by doing piece work for short periods of time before disappearing back to local brew drinking places. These people, who are mainly nyakenywa, are usually by the roadsides and to a casual observer they may pass for idlers, but they are usually hawk-eyed for opportunities to protect their livelihoods. The opportunities include a cash handout from a relative or a friend or some brief piecework like giving directions to a stranger. Such people often operate on the margins by choice, because of the primacy they attach to local brew consumption. Overall the analysis shows how villagers continually struggle to construct their livelihoods and do so with mixed results, they move in and out of these lifestyles through both negative and positive linkages.Analysis of the ways in which villagers differently create resources in these cases leads to the conclusion that their creativity is socially, culturally and economically situated. This means that some structural conditions are impenetrable and any creativity eventually meet a dead end. Such tensions between agency and structure are discussed in Chapter 10, which presents fluctuations in natural and economic environments as restricting creativity in some instances, while in others enhancing people's room for manoeuvre in their endeavours to create resources and make a living. For instance when trees are scarce and there are no sticks for weaving baskets, demand for the baskets from the smallholder tea sub-sector provides opportunities for weaving baskets usingnapiergrass canes.Resource Creation, Livelihood and Lifestyle: Some ReflectionsThis study has shown that villagers create or mould resources through creative everyday practices. They do this by naming and renaming phenomena and in the process they endow them with new or additional meanings and uses. This process is socially embedded and hinges on the quality of social relationships that villagers enlist from within, and beyond, their households. As a socially constructed process, it implies co-creation in league with others in an interactive process. This study extends the notion of co-creation to include creation in league with 'nature', with other individuals, with groups or institutions (such as markets or state agencies). This is clear in the example of poor quality tea leaf being transformed into a resource through collective action by farmers, village scouts and soko huru dealers and networks, a practice which only emerged in the context of policy liberalisation, which threw up opportunities for the emergence of multiple tea markets.Co-creation of resources also leads to livelihoods being a shared undertaking and process. In using the resources created, villagers emphasise sharing with each other in diverse arenas, including family, church, drinking place, ceremonies and rites. Livelihood cannot then be separated from social life including the relationships that peoplebuild,how they spend their time after work and, indeed, their sense of belonging, and autonomy. Sharing constitutes a form of identity affirmation and is a central theme in resource creation and making a living. The striking importance attached to a sense of belonging and acceptance within the extended family and locality, which 'makes one feel alive' is arguably as, or perhaps even more, important than putting food on the table (Wallman, 1984). Therefore, struggles in rural life are arguably motivated both by material and non-material satisfaction.  This brings us to the realisation that resource creation and livelihood construction are like two sides of the same coin (cf. Wartena, 2006: 76). How can the linkage between the two be understood? The concept of lifestyle as conceived in Chapter 3 and developed in subsequent chapters provides this link. Lifestyle connotes an actor's preferences, disposition, identity, primary resource creation and use processes, social relationships, and use of time and information. These concepts have been weaved into the discussion throughout the thesis and were expounded in detail in Chapters 9 and 10. Throughout, the concept of lifestyle has been used to represent the social constructions around which villagers secure their livelihoods and struggle to avoid disruptions. Lifestyle therefore embodies creativity in terms of showing what villagers do to remain afloat in their circumstances, in other words how they live everyday. Lifestyle also implies the constraints of creativity because it also represents what emerges from negotiations and struggles with 'environments' in, for example, the context of actor preferences, dispositions and identity. This concept of lifestyle resonates well with Bourdieu's (1990) habitus , which represents creativity as tied to the specific socio-cultural fields that an actor engages with (Dalton, 2004: 613). For instance, villagers in Nyamira evaluate their livelihoods in terms of intergenerational respectability and support. Reso