Angelique Haugerud

Who is rich? Who is poor? How does one survive or escape poverty? What do “rich” and “poor” mean in very different societies? These are the questions that have occupied Angelique Haugerud for three decades – most of that time in Kenya, but more recently in the United States.

Haugerud first went to Kenya as a student and set to work getting to know the people who would help answer her questions. Actually, she started with a more basic question than who was rich and who was poor: How do people survive?

Initially, Haugerud went to the local land registry office - the Kenyan equivalent of the county clerk's office - and got the names of people listed as landowners in her area. "If you want to know who is rich and who is poor, you have to look at land tenure," she says now.

She selected study participants by lot at a public meeting “so that residents would know the process was random.” She then went from farm to farm, house to house, family to family - hundreds of people from more than 80 families, eventually. Returning more than a dozen times to Kenya, she has watched those people and their country struggle with the aftermath of colonialism, with the problems of development, and with globalism. She has seen Kenya go from a period of hope, praised by Westerners as a model for the rest of Africa, to periods of increasing economic and political volatility. More than that, she has watched the people she first met in the 1970s, their children and grandchildren, cope with all these things.

Her work in Kenya led her to write two books and edit two others. The Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya (Cambridge University Press, 1995), caught Kenya just as its image as a model for Africa started to fade. Beyond Market Myths: A Long-Term Study of Wealth, Culture, and Power in Kenya, a book which builds on The Culture of Politics in ModernKenya, is to be published in 2011.

Haugerud discovered that the modern, western, state and business institutions that seemed to be doing well in the first decade or so after independence weakened over the next few decades. Family relationships and patron-client ties, however, helped people to survive and also shaped governance.

In her books about Kenya, Haugerud focuses on land, migration and wealth. The people whose lives she has followed come from Embu District, near Mt. Kenya. She uses their lives - work histories, migration histories, stories of disputes among and between families over land tenure – as the prism through which to examine the effects of the great events of the past three decades on everyday life.

Haugerud's current project, The Comedy of Wealth, asks many of the same questions, but focuses on issues of cultural politics and wealth in the United States. Here, her detailed ethnography focuses on a group of satirical activists who used humor to lampoon wealthy and powerful people, and to call attention to the outsized role of money in politics and the  growing gap between rich and poor in the United States.

Unlike her Kenyan study participants, Americans often consider class distinctions to be muted, and even if they are not well off, a striking share of Americans have faith in upward mobility. "Americans often think of themselves as ‘pre-rich,’” Haugerud said.