Robert Blunt

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.

This article attempts to unsettle treatments of sovereignty that assume an intrin- sic relationship between violence and the law even while critiquing the capacity of the law to ground social order through violence. In such discussions, the police become the embodiment of the force of law without content, especially in totalitarian contexts. In contrast, this article explores other conceptions of the police and by extension, sovereignty, at work in Kenya through an examination of police/citizen interactions at a marked political moment – the end of the 24-year rule of Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi in 2002. Through a particular example of the complicated conviviality that pervades state/society relations in many patrimonial political contexts – in this case between a policeman, a bus driver, and the bus diver’s wife – I attempt to reframe normative conceptions about the police and of enforcement in the context of Kenya’s failing patrimonial economy of circulation and capture in the early 2000s.