ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on two years of fieldwork about transformations of relatedness in Uhero, a Luo village in western Kenya and about the concrete, bodily practices that constitute and negotiate social relations in everyday life: practices of touch. Most people of Uhero, JoUhero, understand physical touch and associated forms of material contact as modalities of riwo, a Dholuo verb describing practices that momentarily merge persons or their bodies by sharing substance. Touch in this sense is central to JoUheros concerns how things should be done, in everyday and in ritual situations, to sustain the order of life or chike, and to sustain the growth of life, dongruok. The chapter examines such different imaginations and discourses about bodily intercourse in Uhero, and the concepts of person and relatedness that underlie them. The aim is to retrace how sex has become known as an object of discursive reflection and as the source of a specific, maybe modern, subjectivity.
