Paper short abstract:

The residents of the slum, dwelling in bad living conditions, often break official norms. Still, they attribute positive meaning to these practices. The paper analyses the example of public burning of thieves - constructing the meaning of this act and ethical problems connected to it.

Paper long abstract:

Kibera slum in Nairobi is a very complex society. Among others, it is created by local practices, which are perceived as illegal actions in an official and external aspect, but the local community of Kibera interpretes them in a positive way. What is the reason for that?

To answer this question, we will examine a dramatic situation: a public executions consisting in burning a thief (namely, caught red-handed, alive, course).

The analyse will oppose the western researcher's point of view and the emic point of view.

The analysis of this situation had three aims:

(1) deconstruction of legal practices/illegal practices opposition from the anthropological point of view,

(2) the related, so called moral behaviour of Kibera's dwellers taking the law into their own hands in realities of poverty,

(3) position of researcher towards the behaviours, which were seen by her as culturally inappropriate.

All this could be expressed in the following question: is it possible to suspend "own cultural view"? If not, what can be done to execute ethical anthropologies? And what should a researcher know to take up the diagnosis of this type of phenomena?