Anthropology After Dark

Sherry Ortner has recently described Marxian and Foucauldian inspired anthropological concerns for power, domination, and inequality as “dark anthropology.” In juxtaposition, Joel Robbins has challenged anthropologists to explore ideas of the good life, conceptions of value, and ethics in different ethnographic contexts; what he calls an “anthropology of the good.” Between these poles, this paper attempts an anthropology of the “good enough” to examine beliefs and practices that may partially, and counterintuitively, ground local conceptions of trust in the gray areas of social life. The phenomenon of “nightrunning” amongst the Bukusu of western Kenya, I argue, undergirds a noctural economy of lending and borrowing—rather than theft and victimhood—of reproductive potential; nightrunners remove their clothing at night to “bang their buttocks” against their neighbors’ closed doors and throw rocks at their roofs to prevent them from “sleeping,” a euphemism for sexual intercourse. Due to the way Bukusu understand nightrunners to be sterile unless they “run,” while annoying, they are nonetheless considered deserving of sympathy. Key here is that Bukusu do not necessarily see such seemingly absorptive nocturnal activity as witchcraft. While the identities of nightrunners are protected by the darkness of night—a chronotope which usually indexes witchcraft and political corruption—Bukusu claim that nightrunners are categorically people that one knows “in the light of day.” The paper explores how practices like nightrunning might help us rethink social intimacy and trust.