N Carrier
Biographic Data
| ID | 46600 |
|---|---|
| NAME | N Carrier |
| GIVEN NAMES | N |
| FAMILY NAME | Carrier |
| SIGNATURE | CARRIER N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bristol |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9020-2516 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 131 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Cannabis and urban livelihoods: Illicit opportunities in Kenya's towns and cities
As an important commodity in Kenya's towns and cities, cannabis' urban livelihoods should be considered alongside rural ones in discussions of cannabis policy futures
Beyond Africa and the War on Drugs: Reassessing Drug Markets Research and Policy
This article reassesses the book Africa and the War on Drugs (2012) and a related special journal issue (2016) in the light of drug market and policy developments since 2012. As part of this reassessment, we question some of the assumptions made in the book and special issue. More specifically, the article first outlines the key arguments of the book and the special issue and then sketches some of the key drug market developments on the continent…
A Potent Chew: Kenyan Khat and the Agency of Drugs
Few other categories of things appear so bound up with questions of agency, power and responsibility as that of 'drugs'. With over a century of global treaties and prohibition of such substances, we are accustomed to thinking of them as potent things that can hold us in their thrall. Social science approaches, in contrast, tend to downplay the agency and power of the drug itself, showing how such agency and power is distributed among wider contex…
Psychoactive Agents: Drugs, Morality, and Responsibility
Special Section Introduction
Business as usual? Cannabis legalisation and agrarian change in Zimbabwe
This article examines the emerging legal cannabis sector in Zimbabwe since 2018, which focuses on medicinal and industrial cannabis with unlicenced uses remaining criminalised, as well as its implications for agrarian change. It shows that the formal sector is set up in a way that prioritises those with substantial resources - marginalising small-scale farmers and illicit cultivators. While this presents the risk of corporate capture, various fac…
Trust as Social Infrastructure in Somali Trading Networks
Based on ethnographic work in Nairobi’s Eastleigh district and elsewhere in Somali East Africa, this chapter scrutinizes the everyday functioning of trust in business transactions at the interface between kinship and religion. Trust, the authors explain, is a normative discourse that promotes mutuality in trade between fellow Somalis and adherents of Islam. These discourses lubricate the flow of capital and goods and create affirmative counter-na…
The everyday life and everyday dreams of Kenyan khat traders
This article traces the everyday and not-so-everyday rhythms and temporalities of the Kenyan khat trade, using ethnographic case studies from various Kenyan towns to explore how the drug fits into and structures the lives of those engaging with it. Retailing khat involves precise rhythms linked to the daily cycle of khat’s supply networks, but also more expansive temporalities. It also involves navigating key aspects of Kenyan urban life, while c…
Places of Otherness
This article looks at two urban landscapes critical for mobility within the Global South: Eastleigh, Kenya, and Xiaobei, China. While different, they are both centers of global trade that attract migrants seeking livelihoods, and are also regarded with great ambivalence within the countries that host them. We explore this ambivalence, showing how it links to fear of the “others” who animate them, and to broader politics in which migrants become c…
Demanding and Commanding Goods: The Eastleigh Transformation Told through the ‘Lives’ of Its Commodities
Being Oromo in Nairobi’s ‘Little Mogadishu’: Superdiversity, Moral Community and the Open Economy
Paul T.W. Baxter: Photographing the Other-Than-Human
This article revisits the work of the late anthropologist, Paul T.W. Baxter, re-reading his photographs and writing on pastoralism in northern Kenya through the prism of contemporary interest in anthropology in the ‘other-than-human’. It contextualises Baxter’s work within a wider school of anthropology of pastoralism, and his photography within wider photographic practice in anthropology and in the region of Kenya where he worked in the 1950s. W…
Mobile people, phones and photography: Somali visual practices in Nairobi's Eastleigh estate
The coming of the mobile phone camera has transformed photography. This article explores this transformation through a case study of photography in Eastleigh, a Nairobi estate that is home to many thousand Somalis, both Kenyan Somalis and refugees from Somalia. It is a trade hub for East Africa, a social and economic hub for the global Somali diaspora, and a place regarded as suspect in a country where Somalis have long been marginalized. This ar…
Quasilegality: Khat, cannabis and Africa’s drug laws
This article explores the concept of ‘quasilegality’ in relation to two of Africa’s drug crops: khat and cannabis. It argues that the concept is useful in understanding the two substances and their ambiguous relation to the statute books: khat being of varied and ever-changing legal status yet often treated with suspicion even where legal, while cannabis is illegal everywhere in Africa yet often seems de facto legal. The article argues that such …
Illicit livelihoods: Drug crops and development in Africa
This article assesses the impact of drugs on agricultural production, trade and livelihoods more broadly by focusing on cannabis and khat in Lesotho, Nigeria and Kenya. It actively engages with research that has recently begun to explore the links between drugs and development in Africa and challenges some of its key assumptions. It argues that based on the available empirical evidence, the causalities between drugs and underdevelopment are not a…
Reinventing Africa's national heroes: The case of Mekatilili, a Kenyan popular heroine
A nation's heroes are rarely fixed and are frequently reassessed and reinterpreted by new generations. In the case of a number of African countries, the very masculine liberation heroes of yesteryear often prove divisive, emerging from very fraught histories. In this context, there are moves to broaden the pantheon of heroes and make history more inclusive. In Kenya, where the contested history of Mau Mau provides several heroes, Mekatilili wa Me…
Drugs in Africa: Histories and Ethnographies of Use, Trade, and Control
Navigating ethnicity and electoral politics in northern Kenya: The Case of the 2013 Election
In the 2013 elections, northern Kenya – previously seen as peripheral to national politics – took on great significance as a potential 'swing' region, and became the focus of much campaigning and strategizing by presidential and other candidates. It was also seen as a region especially at risk of violence given its history of ethnic politics and the new context of the devolved county system. This paper explores how the north's ethnic dynamics pla…
Missing states? Somali trade networks and the Eastleigh transformation
Since the collapse of the Somali state, Nairobi's Eastleigh estate has played host to thousands of Somali refugees and developed from a quiet residential suburb to a major East African commercial hub. This article examines this transformation, arguing that it builds on pre-existing cross border trade networks, as well as diaspora and Kenyan sources of capital, and regional and global processes that intensified in the early 1990s. The Eastleigh st…
Economic persuasions – Edited by Stephen Gudeman
Khat in Ethiopia: Taking the place of food
Aside from alcohol, khat must now be the most researched psychoactive substance in Africa. This drawing power is due partly to the comparative ease with which it can be studied in Ethiopia, Kenya, and other countries where it is legal, but mainly to the continuing fascination of a stimulant disdained by policy makers as a ‘drug’, yet embraced by hundreds of thousands of farmers from Yemen to Madagascar in the wake of increasing demand. Nowhere is…
Reviving Yaaku: Identity and Indigeneity in Northern Kenya
The Mukogodo of Kenya were once hunter-gatherers speaking a Cushitic language. Over the last century, they were absorbed more and more into the orbit of Maa-speaking pastoralists, adopting pastoralism, as well as Maasai culture and language. In the process, use of their former language declined considerably, and today there are only a few surviving elders who have even a limited grasp of it. Also, Maasai cultural dominance has marginalised the ol…
Worries of the heart: Widows, family, and community in Kenya – By Kenda Mutongi
The Hilux And The ‘Body Thrower’: Khat Transporters In Kenya
The Toyota Hilux pick-up is the vehicle usually used along this crucial section of the miraa network and this chapter, after describing the Nyambene to Nairobi run and those who own and operate the vehicles, draws out perceptions of these pick-ups and their dare-devil drivers. One such dare-devil is nicknamed Nta Mwiri (Body Thrower), as his driving suggests a man prepared to throw his and his passengers' bodies away. This chapter focuses at the …
Khat in the Western Indian Ocean: Regional Linkages and Disjunctures
Cet article présente le qât (khat), phénomène de la culture de l’océan Indien qu’on doit comprendre dans une perspective historique, et en même temps lié à l’actualité. L’histoire du qât soulève en effet des questions d’importance contemporaine : sa popularité croissante, les ressources économiques qu’il procure aux agriculteurs et aux commerçants, une signification culturelle qui en fait un marqueur d’identité, et enfin le mépris, la suspicion e…
Khat in Colonial Kenya: A History of Prohibition and Control
Efforts to institute a system for the control and prohibition of khat in Kenya are examined in this article. Prohibition was introduced in the 1940s after an advocacy campaign led by prominent colonial officials. The legislation imposed a racialized view of the effect of khat, seeking to protect an allegedly ‘vulnerable’ community in the north of the country while allowing khat to be consumed and traded in other areas, including Meru where ‘tradi…
Navigating ethnicity and electoral politics in northern Kenya: The Case of the 2013 Election
In the 2013 elections, northern Kenya – previously seen as peripheral to national politics – took on great significance as a potential 'swing' region, and became the focus of much campaigning and strategizing by presidential and other candidates. It was also seen as a region especially at risk of violence given its history of ethnic politics and the new context of the devolved county system. This paper explores how the north's ethnic dynamics pla…
Missing states? Somali trade networks and the Eastleigh transformation
Since the collapse of the Somali state, Nairobi's Eastleigh estate has played host to thousands of Somali refugees and developed from a quiet residential suburb to a major East African commercial hub. This article examines this transformation, arguing that it builds on pre-existing cross border trade networks, as well as diaspora and Kenyan sources of capital, and regional and global processes that intensified in the early 1990s. The Eastleigh st…
The Need for Speed: Contrasting Timeframes in the Social Life of Kenyan Miraa
This article contrasts two very different timeframes in the 'social life' of the plant stimulant miraa - known elsewhere as khat - in Kenya and beyond. One timeframe is connected with the old miraa trees growing in the Nyambene Hills District of central Kenya: these are known as mbaine, and are greatly respected for their age and link to the past. The miraa from these trees is put to much ceremonial use by the Meru inhabitants of the Nyambenes. T…
Miraa is cool: The cultural importance of miraa(khat)for Tigania and Igembe youth in Kenya
Miraa (as khat is most commonly known in Kenya) is grown intensively in the Nyambene Hills district of Kenya by the Tigania and Igembe (sub-groups of the Meru). It is of prime economic importance for the region, and Nyambene-grown miraa feeds a growing international, as well as national, market. While it is a controversial substance – condemned as a ‘drug’ by many – Tigania and Igembe have much pride in the substance, emphasising not just its eco…
Illicit livelihoods: Drug crops and development in Africa
This article assesses the impact of drugs on agricultural production, trade and livelihoods more broadly by focusing on cannabis and khat in Lesotho, Nigeria and Kenya. It actively engages with research that has recently begun to explore the links between drugs and development in Africa and challenges some of its key assumptions. It argues that based on the available empirical evidence, the causalities between drugs and underdevelopment are not a…
Khat in Colonial Kenya: A History of Prohibition and Control
Efforts to institute a system for the control and prohibition of khat in Kenya are examined in this article. Prohibition was introduced in the 1940s after an advocacy campaign led by prominent colonial officials. The legislation imposed a racialized view of the effect of khat, seeking to protect an allegedly ‘vulnerable’ community in the north of the country while allowing khat to be consumed and traded in other areas, including Meru where ‘tradi…
Business as usual? Cannabis legalisation and agrarian change in Zimbabwe
This article examines the emerging legal cannabis sector in Zimbabwe since 2018, which focuses on medicinal and industrial cannabis with unlicenced uses remaining criminalised, as well as its implications for agrarian change. It shows that the formal sector is set up in a way that prioritises those with substantial resources - marginalising small-scale farmers and illicit cultivators. While this presents the risk of corporate capture, various fac…
Quasilegality: Khat, cannabis and Africa’s drug laws
This article explores the concept of ‘quasilegality’ in relation to two of Africa’s drug crops: khat and cannabis. It argues that the concept is useful in understanding the two substances and their ambiguous relation to the statute books: khat being of varied and ever-changing legal status yet often treated with suspicion even where legal, while cannabis is illegal everywhere in Africa yet often seems de facto legal. The article argues that such …
Reinventing Africa's national heroes: The case of Mekatilili, a Kenyan popular heroine
A nation's heroes are rarely fixed and are frequently reassessed and reinterpreted by new generations. In the case of a number of African countries, the very masculine liberation heroes of yesteryear often prove divisive, emerging from very fraught histories. In this context, there are moves to broaden the pantheon of heroes and make history more inclusive. In Kenya, where the contested history of Mau Mau provides several heroes, Mekatilili wa Me…
Reviving Yaaku: Identity and Indigeneity in Northern Kenya
The Mukogodo of Kenya were once hunter-gatherers speaking a Cushitic language. Over the last century, they were absorbed more and more into the orbit of Maa-speaking pastoralists, adopting pastoralism, as well as Maasai culture and language. In the process, use of their former language declined considerably, and today there are only a few surviving elders who have even a limited grasp of it. Also, Maasai cultural dominance has marginalised the ol…
Mobile people, phones and photography: Somali visual practices in Nairobi's Eastleigh estate
The coming of the mobile phone camera has transformed photography. This article explores this transformation through a case study of photography in Eastleigh, a Nairobi estate that is home to many thousand Somalis, both Kenyan Somalis and refugees from Somalia. It is a trade hub for East Africa, a social and economic hub for the global Somali diaspora, and a place regarded as suspect in a country where Somalis have long been marginalized. This ar…
Khat in the Western Indian Ocean: Regional Linkages and Disjunctures
Cet article présente le qât (khat), phénomène de la culture de l’océan Indien qu’on doit comprendre dans une perspective historique, et en même temps lié à l’actualité. L’histoire du qât soulève en effet des questions d’importance contemporaine : sa popularité croissante, les ressources économiques qu’il procure aux agriculteurs et aux commerçants, une signification culturelle qui en fait un marqueur d’identité, et enfin le mépris, la suspicion e…
Bundles of choice: Variety and the creation and manipulation of Kenyan Khat's value
This article examines the enormous variety evident in the 'social life' of Kenyan khat (miraa) and the role of this variety in the creation and manipulation of value. The article, after a discussion of the literature on value and its relevance to miraa, describes variables used in distinguishing the many different types of miraa, describes how consumers associate themselves with certain varieties and suggests why some varieties are more valued - …
The everyday life and everyday dreams of Kenyan khat traders
This article traces the everyday and not-so-everyday rhythms and temporalities of the Kenyan khat trade, using ethnographic case studies from various Kenyan towns to explore how the drug fits into and structures the lives of those engaging with it. Retailing khat involves precise rhythms linked to the daily cycle of khat’s supply networks, but also more expansive temporalities. It also involves navigating key aspects of Kenyan urban life, while c…
Beyond Africa and the War on Drugs: Reassessing Drug Markets Research and Policy
This article reassesses the book Africa and the War on Drugs (2012) and a related special journal issue (2016) in the light of drug market and policy developments since 2012. As part of this reassessment, we question some of the assumptions made in the book and special issue. More specifically, the article first outlines the key arguments of the book and the special issue and then sketches some of the key drug market developments on the continent…
The Need for Speed: Contrasting Timeframes in the Social Life of Kenyan Miraa
This article contrasts two very different timeframes in the 'social life' of the plant stimulant miraa - known elsewhere as khat - in Kenya and beyond. One timeframe is connected with the old miraa trees growing in the Nyambene Hills District of central Kenya: these are known as mbaine, and are greatly respected for their age and link to the past. The miraa from these trees is put to much ceremonial use by the Meru inhabitants of the Nyambenes. T…
Miraa is cool: The cultural importance of miraa(khat)for Tigania and Igembe youth in Kenya
Miraa (as khat is most commonly known in Kenya) is grown intensively in the Nyambene Hills district of Kenya by the Tigania and Igembe (sub-groups of the Meru). It is of prime economic importance for the region, and Nyambene-grown miraa feeds a growing international, as well as national, market. While it is a controversial substance – condemned as a ‘drug’ by many – Tigania and Igembe have much pride in the substance, emphasising not just its eco…
Bundles of choice: Variety and the creation and manipulation of Kenyan Khat's value
This article examines the enormous variety evident in the 'social life' of Kenyan khat (miraa) and the role of this variety in the creation and manipulation of value. The article, after a discussion of the literature on value and its relevance to miraa, describes variables used in distinguishing the many different types of miraa, describes how consumers associate themselves with certain varieties and suggests why some varieties are more valued - …
The Hilux And The ‘Body Thrower’: Khat Transporters In Kenya
The Toyota Hilux pick-up is the vehicle usually used along this crucial section of the miraa network and this chapter, after describing the Nyambene to Nairobi run and those who own and operate the vehicles, draws out perceptions of these pick-ups and their dare-devil drivers. One such dare-devil is nicknamed Nta Mwiri (Body Thrower), as his driving suggests a man prepared to throw his and his passengers' bodies away. This chapter focuses at the …
Khat in the Western Indian Ocean: Regional Linkages and Disjunctures
Cet article présente le qât (khat), phénomène de la culture de l’océan Indien qu’on doit comprendre dans une perspective historique, et en même temps lié à l’actualité. L’histoire du qât soulève en effet des questions d’importance contemporaine : sa popularité croissante, les ressources économiques qu’il procure aux agriculteurs et aux commerçants, une signification culturelle qui en fait un marqueur d’identité, et enfin le mépris, la suspicion e…
Khat in Colonial Kenya: A History of Prohibition and Control
Efforts to institute a system for the control and prohibition of khat in Kenya are examined in this article. Prohibition was introduced in the 1940s after an advocacy campaign led by prominent colonial officials. The legislation imposed a racialized view of the effect of khat, seeking to protect an allegedly ‘vulnerable’ community in the north of the country while allowing khat to be consumed and traded in other areas, including Meru where ‘tradi…
Economy's tension: The dialectics of community and market - By Stephen Gudeman
research is complemented a rich historical perspective, taking in both the exclusionary trends of the nineteenth century and their partial rehabilitation since 1945.This is a totalizing ethnography of the best kind.If the events of the last year have revealed the limits of attempts to reduce 'public' society to 'private' economy, this enthralling study shows how much anthropologists can contribute to a renewed theoretical engagement with the conc…
Worries of the heart: Widows, family, and community in Kenya – By Kenda Mutongi
Economic persuasions – Edited by Stephen Gudeman
Khat in Ethiopia: Taking the place of food
Aside from alcohol, khat must now be the most researched psychoactive substance in Africa. This drawing power is due partly to the comparative ease with which it can be studied in Ethiopia, Kenya, and other countries where it is legal, but mainly to the continuing fascination of a stimulant disdained by policy makers as a ‘drug’, yet embraced by hundreds of thousands of farmers from Yemen to Madagascar in the wake of increasing demand. Nowhere is…
Reviving Yaaku: Identity and Indigeneity in Northern Kenya
The Mukogodo of Kenya were once hunter-gatherers speaking a Cushitic language. Over the last century, they were absorbed more and more into the orbit of Maa-speaking pastoralists, adopting pastoralism, as well as Maasai culture and language. In the process, use of their former language declined considerably, and today there are only a few surviving elders who have even a limited grasp of it. Also, Maasai cultural dominance has marginalised the ol…
Missing states? Somali trade networks and the Eastleigh transformation
Since the collapse of the Somali state, Nairobi's Eastleigh estate has played host to thousands of Somali refugees and developed from a quiet residential suburb to a major East African commercial hub. This article examines this transformation, arguing that it builds on pre-existing cross border trade networks, as well as diaspora and Kenyan sources of capital, and regional and global processes that intensified in the early 1990s. The Eastleigh st…
Drugs in Africa: Histories and Ethnographies of Use, Trade, and Control
Navigating ethnicity and electoral politics in northern Kenya: The Case of the 2013 Election
In the 2013 elections, northern Kenya – previously seen as peripheral to national politics – took on great significance as a potential 'swing' region, and became the focus of much campaigning and strategizing by presidential and other candidates. It was also seen as a region especially at risk of violence given its history of ethnic politics and the new context of the devolved county system. This paper explores how the north's ethnic dynamics pla…
Illicit livelihoods: Drug crops and development in Africa
This article assesses the impact of drugs on agricultural production, trade and livelihoods more broadly by focusing on cannabis and khat in Lesotho, Nigeria and Kenya. It actively engages with research that has recently begun to explore the links between drugs and development in Africa and challenges some of its key assumptions. It argues that based on the available empirical evidence, the causalities between drugs and underdevelopment are not a…
Reinventing Africa's national heroes: The case of Mekatilili, a Kenyan popular heroine
A nation's heroes are rarely fixed and are frequently reassessed and reinterpreted by new generations. In the case of a number of African countries, the very masculine liberation heroes of yesteryear often prove divisive, emerging from very fraught histories. In this context, there are moves to broaden the pantheon of heroes and make history more inclusive. In Kenya, where the contested history of Mau Mau provides several heroes, Mekatilili wa Me…
Quasilegality: Khat, cannabis and Africa’s drug laws
This article explores the concept of ‘quasilegality’ in relation to two of Africa’s drug crops: khat and cannabis. It argues that the concept is useful in understanding the two substances and their ambiguous relation to the statute books: khat being of varied and ever-changing legal status yet often treated with suspicion even where legal, while cannabis is illegal everywhere in Africa yet often seems de facto legal. The article argues that such …
Demanding and Commanding Goods: The Eastleigh Transformation Told through the ‘Lives’ of Its Commodities
Being Oromo in Nairobi’s ‘Little Mogadishu’: Superdiversity, Moral Community and the Open Economy
Paul T.W. Baxter: Photographing the Other-Than-Human
This article revisits the work of the late anthropologist, Paul T.W. Baxter, re-reading his photographs and writing on pastoralism in northern Kenya through the prism of contemporary interest in anthropology in the ‘other-than-human’. It contextualises Baxter’s work within a wider school of anthropology of pastoralism, and his photography within wider photographic practice in anthropology and in the region of Kenya where he worked in the 1950s. W…
Mobile people, phones and photography: Somali visual practices in Nairobi's Eastleigh estate
The coming of the mobile phone camera has transformed photography. This article explores this transformation through a case study of photography in Eastleigh, a Nairobi estate that is home to many thousand Somalis, both Kenyan Somalis and refugees from Somalia. It is a trade hub for East Africa, a social and economic hub for the global Somali diaspora, and a place regarded as suspect in a country where Somalis have long been marginalized. This ar…
Places of Otherness
This article looks at two urban landscapes critical for mobility within the Global South: Eastleigh, Kenya, and Xiaobei, China. While different, they are both centers of global trade that attract migrants seeking livelihoods, and are also regarded with great ambivalence within the countries that host them. We explore this ambivalence, showing how it links to fear of the “others” who animate them, and to broader politics in which migrants become c…
The everyday life and everyday dreams of Kenyan khat traders
This article traces the everyday and not-so-everyday rhythms and temporalities of the Kenyan khat trade, using ethnographic case studies from various Kenyan towns to explore how the drug fits into and structures the lives of those engaging with it. Retailing khat involves precise rhythms linked to the daily cycle of khat’s supply networks, but also more expansive temporalities. It also involves navigating key aspects of Kenyan urban life, while c…
Trust as Social Infrastructure in Somali Trading Networks
Based on ethnographic work in Nairobi’s Eastleigh district and elsewhere in Somali East Africa, this chapter scrutinizes the everyday functioning of trust in business transactions at the interface between kinship and religion. Trust, the authors explain, is a normative discourse that promotes mutuality in trade between fellow Somalis and adherents of Islam. These discourses lubricate the flow of capital and goods and create affirmative counter-na…
Beyond Africa and the War on Drugs: Reassessing Drug Markets Research and Policy
This article reassesses the book Africa and the War on Drugs (2012) and a related special journal issue (2016) in the light of drug market and policy developments since 2012. As part of this reassessment, we question some of the assumptions made in the book and special issue. More specifically, the article first outlines the key arguments of the book and the special issue and then sketches some of the key drug market developments on the continent…
Political science (20 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Law (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Geography (9 works) · Khat (9 works) · Psychology (8 works) · African history and culture studies (7 works) · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories (7 works) · Kenya (7 works)