About

Kelly Askew is the Department Chair of Anthropology and Niara Sudarkasa Collegiate Professor of Anthropology and Afroamerican & African Studies at the University of Michigan. She also serves as a Faculty Associate in the Center for Political Studies and holds a courtesy appointment as Professor of Law at the Law School. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University and a B.A. in Music and Anthropology from Yale University. With over three decades of experience working in Tanzania and Kenya, her research focuses on arts, aesthetics, and politics, including post-socialist poetry, post-independence African visual arts, and digitizing African music archives. She also concentrates on critical development studies, particularly rural energy access and the formalization of property rights, as well as indigenous political movements of pastoralists in East Africa. Her publications include books such as 'Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania' and edited volumes like 'The Anthropology of Media' and 'African Postsocialisms.' Her documentary film projects explore themes of indigenous creativity, cultural politics, and social issues, with notable works including 'Maasai Remix,' which has received multiple awards and international recognition.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Geography
• Economics
• Biology
• Agroforestry
• Environmental science
• Archaeology
• Economic growth
• Environmental planning
• Ecology
• Business

Selected publications

• COLLECTIVE LAND RIGHTS RECONSIDERED: INSTITUTIONAL INNOVATIONS FROM TANZANIA

  Nomadic Peoples · 2026-02-28

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Formalisation of land is a strategy advocated by local and international NGOs for pastoralists and hunter-gatherers whose livelihoods depend on mobility and access to traditional territories with seasonal resources. As ever more land is sequestered into fortress conservation, as more underground mineral deposits are identified and as large-scale agriculture expands, even semi-arid landscapes are attracting a wide range of actors. In this article we focus on how pastoralists and hunter-gatherers in Tanzania have attempted to increase security of tenure over their communal land by utilising new institutional forms. We explore how changes in the political, administrative and legal contexts within which these communities live often undermine their efforts to protect their land rights. Finally, through a series of case studies, we show how the strategic adoption of new institutions by these communities has had variable success in advancing security of tenure over their communal lands and livelihoods. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ .

  PublisherDOI

• Titling as Land Reform in Tanzania: Contours, Conflicts and Convergence

  Land · 2025-11-13 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  The “land governance orthodoxy” that has dominated development circles for the past two decades posits that government-issued title deeds are a prerequisite for economic growth in Africa and elsewhere in the Global South. Anything other than formal certification is viewed as inadequate, informal, insecure and inanimate. In this paper, we explore the “institutional pluralism” that characterizes land formalization efforts in rural Tanzania. We find that the multiple (often competing) objectives, procedures, actors, justifications, technologies, and outcomes have produced a crowded and chaotic field of titling initiatives. Despite an investment of around USD 340 million, progress remains painfully slow—at a rate of ~1% per year—such that it will take the rest of this century to reach universal titling. And at what cost? Our study is based on appraisals of policy and project documents and interviews with government officials, donor agencies, project implementers and NGO staff. Discussion of the findings is supported by data from annual budget speeches, national-level statistics and survey data collected by our team from forty Tanzanian villages. We argue that it is time to return to a broader, integrated approach to rural development and recognize that local landholding systems offer high levels of security. Our findings have relevance beyond land formalization to other areas where duplicative efforts implemented in the name of progress might be counterproductive to achieving economic and social development goals.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Assessing Poverty Interventions: Conceptual, Methodological and Empirical Perspectives Relating to Property Rights Formalization in Rural Tanzania

  Modern Economy · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  This paper reports on our approach to the assessment of poverty interventions, specifically that of property rights formalization in rural Tanzania. Property rights formalization, or land titling, has been heavily funded premised in part on its purported ability to reduce poverty. In the view of its proponents, it has the potential to increase income through a rural household’s productive activities. Yet, independent evaluations of this poverty intervention are lacking. We contend that assessment of a poverty intervention should effectively encompass the intervention’s pathways that are expected to lead to poverty reduction. Our approach surveys households by village, the level at which land titling is implemented. We use a household income measure that we call imputed income, which conceptually and empirically captures a rural household’s productive activities. This is a simple and reliable metric that supports independent assessment of poverty reduction interventions, such as titling, by classifying the poor based on productive activities. It thereby lessens the need to use publicly available household income data generated for a different purpose or by agencies that might have a vested interest in demonstrating policy success or failure. To gauge the merit of our household income measure, we compare it to three other commonly used measures: reported income, consumption expenditure and household assets. The value of our approach is then demonstrated by relating change in poverty to change in title-deed ownership using ten years of data from ~2000 households in 40 villages in rural Tanzania. Our approach is a contribution to methodologies that evaluate poverty interventions and not to poverty measurement.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• On critical African postsocialisms

  Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory · 2024-09-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Relative to Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America, scant attention has been paid to the fate of formerly socialist states in Africa. One reason is that postcolonialism has served as the default analytic frame for everything Africa-related. Another reason is the persistence of Three-Worlds ideology with postcolonialism associated with the Third World and postsocialism with the Second. A third reason stems from the claim that African states could not properly be socialist in the absence of capitalism or class struggle. Katherine Verdery’s scholarship on socialism and postsocialism in Eastern Europe, however, has served as inspiration for the emergence of critical scholarship on African postsocialisms. This growing field takes seriously commitments to and afterlives of socialist ideology and policy across the continent while also examining their successes, failures, contradictions, and effects in the present.

  PublisherDOI

• The World Bank and Rural Land Titling in Africa: The Case of Tanzania

  Development and Change · 2024 · 8 citations

  • Geography
  • Economic growth
  • Business

  ABSTRACT In 2021, the World Bank, in association with the Tanzanian Ministry of Lands, Housing and Human Settlements Development, added yet another chapter to the long and contentious history of land tenure reform in Tanzania. It approved US$ 150 million for the second phase of a village‐wide individual titling pilot programme that employs new technologies for surveying under the rubric of a private sector competitiveness project. This article assesses the nature, evolution and impact of the World Bank project in Tanzania within the context of its broader titling agenda in Africa. It provides an overview of the formation of the World Bank's land policy agenda in Africa, followed by an evaluation of the titling project in Tanzania. The final part of the article critically examines the arrival of new actors and players in Tanzania and assesses the new World Bank project.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Chapter 4 Modes of Dispossession of Indigenous Lands and Territories in Africa

  Berghahn Books · 2022-09-27

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Modes of Dispossession of Indigenous Lands and Territories in Africa

  Berghahn Books · 2021 · 16 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Geography
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Frank Gunderson. The Legacy of Tanzanian Musicians Muhidin Gurumo and Hassan Bitchuka: Rhumba Kiserebuka! Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. liii, 299 pp., list of figures, maps, audio examples, glossary, appendices, discography, bibliography, indices. ISBN 978-1498564397 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1498564410 (paperback), and ISBN 978-1498564403 (e-book).

  Yearbook for Traditional Music · 2020-11-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Frank Gunderson. The Legacy of Tanzanian Musicians Muhidin Gurumo and Hassan Bitchuka: Rhumba Kiserebuka! Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. liii, 299 pp., list of figures, maps, audio examples, glossary, appendices, discography, bibliography, indices. ISBN 978-1498564397 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1498564410 (paperback), and ISBN 978-1498564403 (e-book). - Volume 52

  PublisherDOI

• Negotiated outcomes in low-resourced courts

  Routledge eBooks · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science

  In the 1990s, countries across Africa embarked on major land reform programmes to facilitate land markets, promote individualization of land tenure and fast-track land titling, and to increase foreign investment in land – all in the name of alleviating poverty and promoting economic development. This chapter examines the special courts known as ‘land tribunals’ that were established by the Land Disputes Courts Act No. 2. It describes their functions, key characteristics, and operating procedures. The chapter devotes to three land disputes that were heard at different levels of the new system: one observed at the Ward Tribunal level, one at the District Tribunal level, and one at the High Court level. It first describes the decade-old new system, which has received scant scholarly attention, and then provide an ethnographic analysis of how these tribunals operate, how disputes come to be heard in these settings, how officials perform their responsibilities, how disputants respond to the proceedings.

  PublisherDOI

• Where There Is No Formal Social Welfare System for an Indigenous People

  2020-11-04

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract This chapter on “Where There Is No Formal Social Welfare System for an Indigenous People: Entrepreneurship, Watchmen, and the Reinvention of the Maasai Warrior” addresses the transformation of the Maasai moranism (warrior society). As a marginalized indigenous group, the Maasai have not benefitted from any important social welfare or safety net programs. The chapter interrogates the evolution of an entrepreneurial spirit among young Maasai men who have joined the ranks of the massive informal sector to become watchmen (security guards) in cities and small townships in both Kenya and Tanzania. The chapter draws from ethnographic narratives about the “fierceness” of the Maasai in global capitalist expansion and their economic marginalization. The overriding question is: In what ways is the proliferation of the phenomenon of Maasai watchmen a reaction to the community’s marginalization?

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Transformations in Property Rights and Poverty in Rural Tanzania

  NSF · $380k · 2009–2013

Frequent coauthors

• Jane I. Guyer

  293 shared

• Murray Last

  207 shared

• Célestin Monga

  207 shared

• Leslie Bank

  207 shared

• Filip De Boeck

  207 shared

• Peter Geschiere

  207 shared

• Mwenda Ntarangwi

  206 shared

• Alan Barnard

  206 shared

Awards & honors

• African Studies Association Herskovits Award finalist for Pe…
• 1st place at the ETNOFilm Festival (Croatia, 2013) for The C…
• Special Jury Award at the Zanzibar International Film Festiv…
• Dikalo Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary Film at the…
• Jury Favorite Michigan Made Feature at the Central Michigan…