Abstract
George Paul Meiu uses “ethno-erotic economies” to conceptualize how sexualities, deeply entangled with socio-historically crafted embodiments of ethnicity and culture, engender global market value. Situating ethno-erotic economies as specific anchored instances of what Ara Wilson (2004) calls “intimate economies” and expanding what Noelle Stout (2014) calls “erotic economies”, Meiu analyzes a particular ethno-erotic economy in rural northwestern postcolonial Kenya where Samburu Morans, or “warriors,” travel seasonally to the Kenyan coast to make money in pursuit of a better life. Representing stereotypes of their ethnicity, culture, and sexuality, Morans have generated relatively large sums of wealth. Heterosexual transactional sex some Morans have with older European women, are also moments of potentiality to pursue short- and long-term intimacies. As Meiu demonstrates, for the Samburu, this exchange has produced new claims of belonging and new forms of exclusion, empowerment, inequality, and respectability.
In the first two chapters Meiu uses historical anthropological analysis to center projects of colonization, such as race, ethnicity, culture, and broader projects of otherness, in relation to the Samburu, highlighting how the sexual alterity of Morans is a historical product of the 20th century. In Chapters 3 and 4, Meiu provides evidence on how such an ethno-erotic economy for Morans works. At the beaches of Mombasa, where thousands in Kenya’s tourist economy flock, Morans find time with European women, who in some cases pursue them sexually. Meiu details one such encounter in which a German woman pulls up one man’s loincloth to “check” if Morans wear underwear (p. 108). Such encounters with older white women, while precarious, carry the potential to generate capital for Morans in the short-term from transactional sex or in the long-term through marriage. While intimate and economic attachment with white women is unsuccessful for most Morans, for those who are successful, capital appears “suddenly and spectacularly” in its circulation back to the Samburu homeland causing people from well beyond Samburu, as Meiu writes, “to desire and deride it, fear it and fantasize about it” (p. 177). In Chapter 4, Meiu looks at how “money of sweat” and “short-cut money”—such as the “money of Mombasa” generated on the coast—is used and negotiated by Morans to gain new forms of respect. In Chapters 5 and 6, Meiu turns to how exchanges in the ethno-erotic economy have altered temporality in Samburu. Traditional rural elders increasingly used ritual expertise as a commodity to characterize the practices of Moran “beach boys”, asserting their belonging with “short-cut money”, as inherently transgressive. However, collective belonging, through rituals (such as the Lopiro ceremony detailed in Chapter 6), have been used to tame the anxieties and internal tensions Samburu had of their increasing collective political and economic marginalization.
In this book, Meiu successfully achieves his goal of analyzing the dialectical relationship between global commodification of Moran ethnosexuality and the ways in which the Samburu fashion their belonging in Northern Kenya (p. 39). Through his memorable writing and illuminating ethnographic evidence, Meiu develops a much-needed queer critique of heterosexual practices in a postcolonial context. In doing so, he centers sexuality as an analytic for understanding the political economy of the intimate. Rather than focusing exclusively on sites of transactional sex exchange (between the tourist and the Moran), Meiu demonstrates more broadly how such exchanges have reverberating impact well beyond the patron–client relationship in shaping collective marginality, collective belonging, and thus, the subjectivities, identities, and social worlds of the Samburu (p. 33).
Meiu makes clear his critique of the classical Marxist division of economic production from social reproduction, asserting that ethno-erotic economies cannot be reduced merely to sex-for-money transactions (p. 33). Instead, he sees many ethno-erotic economies in Kenya and beyond (p. 34–35) asserting the analytical purchase of his theory, and chooses to focus on the Samburu and why the ‘money of Mombasa’ makes it more difficult for Morans to claim belonging in the Samburu social world (p. 243). I see the theoretical possibilities of ethno-erotic economies for sexuality studies in its ability to make sense of the deeply entangled projects of ethnicity, race, and sexuality that are embodied and intimately exchanged by humans in global capitalism. At times I wondered how a closer analysis of differing discourses of race in relation to ethnicity (or what I understand to be the ethno- in ethno-erotic economies), for Morans, Samburu, Kenyans, and Europeans may further contribute to Meiu’s fruitful ethnographic analysis on belonging.
Meiu provides an important anthropological contribution to contemporary sexuality studies by showing what may be learned from examining individual and collective belonging in a global order, which increasingly commodifies the intimate. An entertaining but never sensational read, this analytically rigorous book would be useful for any advanced undergraduate or graduate course on sexuality or global capital.
