Nick Rahier is an environmental anthropologist at Ghent University and the principal investigator of the ERC Starting Grant HEATWAYS. His research explores the intersections of health, pollution, and environmental change in urban Kenya. He is also co-founder of the Heat Research Network. The proposed readings explore how residents of Nakuru, Kenya, navigate toxicity as an inescapable condition of urban life. The first examines how herbalists understand and treat the effects of urban toxicity through contemporary forms of haruspicy. Their herbal practices shed light on broader anxieties about bodily porosity and changing food markets. The second turns to waste pickers at Nakuru’s Gioto dumpsite. It focuses on a specific group of waste pickers referred to as migodi, who excavate the dump’s older strata in search of recyclable materials. Their excavations destratify the dump and bring its sedimented histories into renewed relation with the present. In doing so, waste pickers turn the dump’s material strata and the histories they evoke into grounds for asserting their urban belonging. The readings invite a discussion about how people live with and through toxicity and the everyday practices through which they seek to sustain viable lives and futures in environments increasingly shaped by accelerated change across metabolic and environmental registers.
Readings:
1. “Overheated Stomachs”, a chapter from my recent book City-Heat: Sensing Viable Futures in Nakuru, Kenya (see attached). An earlier version of this chapter was published as: Rahier, N. (2021). “Overheated stomachs: Notes on urban life and toxicity in Nakuru, Kenya.” Africa, 91(3), 453–472. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972021000292
A second recommended reading - “Living the Pharmakon: Waste Pickers and the Politics of Residual Futuring at Gioto Dumpsite in Nakuru, Kenya” - has not yet been published and can be shared upon request to the organsiers.