Many observers of Kenya’s complicated history see causes for concern, from the use of public office for private gain to a constitutional structure historically lopsided towards the executive branch. Yet efforts from critics and academics to diagnose the country’s problems do not often consider what these fiscal and political issues mean to ordinary Kenyans. How do Kenyans express their own political understanding, make sense of governance, and articulate what they expect from their leaders?
 
In For Money and Elders, Robert W. Blunt addresses these questions by turning to the political, economic, and religious signs in circulation in Kenya today. He examines how Kenyans attempt to make sense of political instability caused by the uncertainty of authority behind everything from currency to title deeds. When the symbolic order of a society is up for grabs, he shows, violence may seem like an expedient way to enforce the authority of signs. Drawing on fertile concepts of sovereignty, elderhood, counterfeiting, acephaly, and more, Blunt explores phenomena as diverse as the destabilization of ritual “oaths,” public anxieties about Satanism with the advent of democratic reform, and mistrust of official signs. The result is a fascinating glimpse into Kenya’s past and present and a penetrating reflection on meanings of violence in African politics.

A medium in which Dawson's Creek is displacing the "aging" Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place has little room for older Americans. Mass communications professor Riggs studies the other side of the television screen: "creative ways in which older Americans are using television today." Her book gathers several ethnographic studies: on older women's reaction to Murder, She Wrote; on the vital place of C-SPAN, PBS, and other nontraditional fiction and nonfiction TV among the upper-class residents of a midwestern retirement community; on involvement in public-access television by older Milwaukee African Americans; and on ways minority and immigrant elders interacted with TV. Americans, Riggs notes, "have linked television viewing among the aged with deadly passivity, hinting that elders who spend hours each day with the tube have ceded over their lives." In fact, she argues, elders from different classes, genders, races, and social circumstances choose the shows they watch deliberately and thoughtfully and as a key element in their interaction with the world around them.