Paper short abstract:

Theories of epidemiological, metabolic and demographic transition often figure non communicable diseases including diabetes, heart disease and respiratory disease as the "dark side" of economic growth. Local understandings of "new diseases" in Dakar disrupt and extend this simplistic narrative.

Paper long abstract:

Theories of epidemiological, metabolic and demographic transition often figure non communicable diseases including diabetes, heart disease and respiratory disease as the "dark side" of economic growth. As pathologies associated with accelerated growth, urbanisation, overconsumption, and environmental exposure, these diseases are colloquially associated with growth, expansion and rapid social change. This paper examines how unruly and sick bodies are interpreted in Dakar and the complex impact of what are often called "new diseases" on the city. Dakarois critically assess qualities and quantities of food relying on taste to navigate diseases that appear to strike at the heart of family life and threaten to disrupt communal rhythms of cooking and sharing food. Ethnographic research on everyday urban eating opens up perspectives on local imaginaries of growth and moral contentions about appropriate and fitting consumption.

I argue that local responses to "new diseases" and beliefs about their origins illuminate the current context as a complex crisis of interlocking scarcity and surfeit.

Paper short abstract:

This paper troubles growth by analyzing a Ugandan way of imagining and enacting sociocultural change that we here call bundling.

Paper long abstract:

Even a casual observer within contemporary south-central Uganda would notice the widespread amassing of often identical commercial services and goods in a small shared area, like fruit vendors, gas stations, street food, or motorcycle taxis. In this paper, we bring the dynamics of this phenomenon into view under the heuristic rubric "bundling," and conceptualize it in relation to a pervasive social aesthetics. Rejecting inadequate explanatory frames from economics, which would see bundling as either "irrational" or as a risk-minimization behavior, we take the phenomenon seriously as an alternative form of social change and exchange, and one that is also quite distinct from liberal and neoliberal imaginaries of the unlimited flow of goods, people, things and services. Bundling, we argue, is the result of a social aesthetics wherein both material value and personal relationships are imagined to arise through the accumulation of like persons and things, assembled and ordered in spatial proximity and symmetry. Tracing some concrete examples of bundling, we show that it is an agonistic conviviality, involving cooperation and competition. Bundling, we also show, has a long history and highly elaborated conceptual and practical repertoire that shapes actions at multiple scales, from the person to the household to the state. Finally, we show that bundling, though widespread in south-central Uganda, is not simply self-evident or taken-for-granted there but is rather critically interrogated along discernible stratifications of socioeconomic class and education.

Paper short abstract:

State-sponsored modernist projects in Ethiopia's lower Omo valley embody and privilege one idea of progress. We explore the impact of these projects on local people, some of whom have very different understandings of well-being and prosperity.

Paper long abstract:

In Ethiopia's lower Omo valley competing ideas of well-being, growth and prosperity collide as state-sponsored agro-industrial sugar plantations and hydro-engineering projects turn a once marginalised periphery into a bustling capitalist frontier. The government presents these projects as essential for national growth and the elimination of poverty and food insecurity. In this paper, we explore the differential impacts of recent development projects in the region, showing how they affect the multiple and competing dimensions of wealth (in people, in farm produce, in livestock, and in money) that are important to different actors in this setting. Focusing on one district in area, our data come from ethnographic studies of local conceptions of wealth and poverty and from a retrospective household survey tailored to reflect these locally relevant measures of prosperity. Among the indigenous agro-pastoralists, ideas of prosperity reflect the prevailing pastoralist ideology, with livestock and family size of greatest importance. Their educated relatives, the indigenous elite, now also value access to monetary income, consumer goods and education as indispensable aspects of well-being and prosperity. They speculate in land and aspire to rental income in the district capital, a once insignificant administrative outpost rapidly being transformed into a standard Ethiopian municipality. Finally, an influx of migrants from the highlands of Ethiopia constitute a third group: young people without families seeking business opportunities on the expanding frontier. For each of these groups, we trace the impact of recent development and infrastructure projects through their own understanding of progress.

Paper short abstract:

Population growth is often pictured as negatively affecting the environment, the economy and the livelihoods in Africa. We contrast this negative discourse with local perspectives on growth and the ways societies adjust to growing families.

Paper long abstract:

Population growth is often pictured as negatively affecting the environment, the economy and individual well-being in Africa. However, in spite of international concerns, fertility remains high in some parts of the continent, and political discourses encouraging large families are still on the agenda in places.

Multidisciplinary field research programmes have shown the complexity of the interlinkages between population dynamics, agricultural production and social change.

Through two in-depth studies, we wish to illustrate the social and economic changes that occur in rural areas undergoing high population growth. In Kisii, Kenya, and Vakinankaratra, Madagascar, economic diversification and spatial mobility systems are of growing importance. Intergenerational and gender relationships are changing as well, as can be seen in marriage and inheritance rules. Except in the event of abrupt economic or political change, societies have a capacity to transform, to innovate and overstep social norms in order to make the best of changing settings.

Although at macro level, population growth needs to be anticipated, at micro level it might not have a negative impact. We wish to trigger a discussion on the implications of population growth in the context of developing Africa, one type of growth among others with its load of representations, taking into account different levels of analysis and actual change over time.