Paper short abstract:

Focusing on a young family living on the northern fringe of Nairobi city, this paper illuminates the shifting meanings and manifestations of 'pressure' over time. In a cost of living crisis, 'pressure' to be successful is soon replaced by economic pressure to generate cash to solve domestic crises.

Paper long abstract:

This paper argues that tropes of ‘getting by’ in the city lack sufficient specificity to properly describe the sorts of economic struggles experienced by those who derive their wages from the informal economy. ‘Pressure’ and its multiple manifestations offers an alternative means through which to glimpse the normative pressures for success placed upon young men establishing their own households and families, but also the way in which economic pressure shifts over time – how minor crises in the domestic life of a household (illness, for instance) – produce knock-on effects that intensify the economic pressure to plug financial gaps by courting the assistance of potential patrons. Drawing on the travails of a particular household in peri-urban Kiambu, just beyond the borders of Nairobi city, the paper argues that a concept like ‘pressure’ can usefully identify the wider normative emphasis on economic success characteristic of contemporary Kenya. But in a cost of living crisis, one that is global as much as local, pressure’s material connotation returns home to roost. Rather than an analytical concept divorced from history, reified for anthropological abstraction, the paper argues that the advantage of ‘pressure’ is in its historicity - as a means of identifying local response to broader changing economic dynamics, recalling Wale Adebanwi’s notion of ‘a political economy of everyday life’.