“This book is the anthropology of African politics for a new generation. As students of African states are slowly beginning to realize that their toolkit of analytic concepts is not only inadequate to explain the realities of political life on the continent but bordering on racist, Blunt brings us a penetrating analysis of how the powers backing political authority actually form, are contested, and are hollowed out over a long span of Kenyan history. Anchored in a deep connection over many years with the people of whom he writes, facilitated by the mastery of their language, and respectful of the ancestors in the discipline who opened the way, For Money and Elders will be a book for the ages.”

Adam Ashforth, author of The Trials of Mrs. K.

“For Money and Elders is a first-rate work of scholarship that offers a strikingly original and compelling account of the role of the Kikuyu in Kenya’s colonial history, focusing on the complex ways in which crucial ritual, religious, and political dynamics from the pre-colonial and colonial period have played out in the post-Kenyatta era. Blunt masterfully combines an acute understanding of long-term cultural and institutional dynamics with brilliant, finely-grained readings of local cosmologies and ritual practices to develop an important and exciting new political anthropology of the Kenyan state and postcolonial governance.”

Ruth Marshall, University of Toronto

“What happens when political elites and elders turn out to be dishonest and self-dealing rather than the ritual and political guarantors of truth they are meant to be? Blunt shows how in Kikuyu and Kenyan societies, such failures have led to attempts by ordinary people to impose certainty through often violent means. For Money and Elders provides the means to understand how money, seniority, religion, and violence all combine to create toxic political cultures that nonetheless have the ability to perpetuate themselves. Though argued through fine-grained ethnographic material from Kenya, his important work is equally applicable to contemporary realities in the US and many other parts of the world.”

Mike McGovern, author of A Socialist Peace?