Amiel Bize

Overview

Amiel Bize is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cornell. She is an economic anthropologist focused on capitalist margins, with research interests that include climate risk and global finance; agrarian and post-agrarian rural life; and the meanings and materializations of value. She has written about conceptual objects like traffic, truck stops, storage, leftovers, and fallen wood, and her current book project uses these, among others, as jumping-off points for considering post-agrarian rural life in East Africa. Two new projects extend her thinking in new directions. First, an investigation of gleaning—an ancient form of redistribution, organized around harvest leftovers—considers the ongoing significance of the concept of remainder in moral-economic life. Second, a project on climate change, development finance, and pastoralist political movements in northern Kenya examines the recent convergence of development practice and global finance. Here, Amiel will study how specific financialized development products (climate-sensitive index insurance and carbon credit schemes) encounter the political and social reality of northern Kenya’s arid lands. 

Research Focus

As a Faculty Fellow at the Society for the Humanities, Amiel will continue work on her book manuscript, Indeterminate Value. The book explores the entanglement of capitalism and its others from the vantage of farmers living the end of agrarian life in rural Kenya. In the early 2000s, significant shifts were underway in this space: smallholder farmers, once central to the country’s capitalist development, were giving up agrarian occupations. Former farmers started roadside nightclubs where truck drivers and villagers drank together. Land recently sewn with crops was turned over to rental housing or sold to buy motorcycle taxis. Sex workers hid from their rural families during the day, while their nighttime labor channeled wealth to landlords and fueled the real estate economy. One-time producers became gleaners: salvaging at accident sites, gathering illicit forest products, siphoning fuel remainders. The search for livelihoods in the “post-agrarian” economy was both transgressive and dynamic in ways that ask us to rethink given ideas about the rural and about capitalist development. 

The book explores the movement across capitalist and other-than-capitalist practice that characterized rural western Kenya through the core concept of “indeterminate value.” The term is adapted from an early text by Karl Marx in which he argues that certain resources (like fallen wood or forest berries), were naturally “indeterminate” in ways that resisted ownership and, historically, allowed them to be claimed by the poor. Indeterminate Value draws inspiration from Marx’s attention to the specific material qualities of different resources and ways these shape a textured world of overlapping claims—but it diverts from Marx’s sense that this texture belongs to the precapitalist past. Speaking back to Marx from the situated and sensual world of rural western Kenya, the book develops the idea of indeterminacy as a methodological and conceptual tool for carefully tracking the way that values move into and out of market and property logics. In so doing, it also questions the inevitability of capitalist trajectories.