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- Convenors:
-
Yvan Droz
(IHEID)
Hervé Maupeu (UFR Droit)
Marie-Aude Fouéré (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS))
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- NB003
- Start time:
- 30 June, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
Throughout Africa, youth is seeking new paths towards an accomplished adulthood. Alternative modes of accomplishment find a foothold among the youth, through engagement in vigilante groups or in religious movements. How such changes modify the production of contemporary masculinity and femininity?
Long Abstract:
Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, as in other parts of the world, scholars recognize that the passage from youth into adulthood can provoke a crisis. In pre-colonial times, when one lacked the material resources needed for asserting their adult status (e.g. by paying bridewealth), such crises were often resolved through alternative modes of action (e.g. raiding wealth and women; conquering new lands). Today, however, in many places in Africa, it is increasingly harder to accomplish oneself following a traditional ethos of self-accomplishment. This is due both to practical reasons (e.g. exponential increase in bridewealth) and to changing social values. Indeed, fast-paced socio-economic transformations and multiple challenges (e.g. urban migration, joblessness, corruption, etc.), together with the demographic growth of a significant youth bulge, complicate what it means to become an adult woman or man, and the ways to reach this status. Many young people feel torn between value systems, as they find that old paths for self-accomplishment and social recognition are blocked even as new ones are just as unattainable.
This interdisciplinary panel will engage with the hypothesis that, throughout East Africa, young men and women are seeking new paths towards an accomplished adulthood. We will consider how alternative worlds of content and modes of social approval find a foothold among the frustrated youth, notably through engagement in vigilante groups or in new religious movements. We will consider how such changes weigh in on the definition and production of contemporary masculinity and femininity, as well as on household structures (e.g. growth of monoparental families).
Accepted papers:
Session 1Fenneke Reysoo (Graduate Institute, Geneva)
Paper short abstract:
A widespread social change is taking place in major cities of the world with far-reaching political, economic and cultural consequences, namely the rise of living alone. Do African young women and men also opt for singleton life-styles in their second adolescence?
Paper long abstract:
A widespread social change is taking place in major cities of the world with far-reaching political, economic and cultural consequences: the rise of living alone. Living on your own questions something fundamental about what we value today.
Statistics on Africa show that the group of "never married persons" 40--49 years are numerically on the rise (especially women). In some African countries (especially North Africa and Southern Africa) women are either resisting marriage or no good fits for men to marry. Higher educational levels of women, their participation in the labor market as professionals, their subsequent financial independence, freedom of mobility and social networks of their own are main determinants and at the same time are among the factors that make them less suitable for marriage in prevailing systems of gendered hierarchies in which men (and their parents) prefer to engage with subservient wives and daughters-in-law (hypergamy). The Nigerian feminist C.N. Adichie underlines the many stigmas attached to unmarried women who live on their own in Lagos. Female scholars from the Graduate Institute who return as professionals to their African countries confirm that it is "not done" to live in an apartment of their own.
This paper explores in how far one-person households and singleton lifestyles are a critique of prevailing conceptions of family, patrimony, and self-accomplishment of men and women in African.
My paper questions: Do African young women and men also opt for singleton life-styles in their second adolescence? And if not, why?
Do African young women and men also opt for singleton life-styles in their second adolescence?
Lyndsay McLean (University of Sussex)
Paper short abstract:
Peer-to-peer research undertaken by adolescents and young women in fragile urban Kinshasa demonstrates the complexities of processes of 'empowerment' and how young women exercise agency to navigate precarious circumstances to survive economically and socially and maintain their reputation as ‘good girls’.
Paper long abstract:
In mid-2015, a team of 15 Congolese 'girl researchers' were recruited, trained and mentored by the DFID-funded La Pépinière programme. They conducted peer-to-peer research to explore the experiences, perceptions and aspirations of adolescent girls and young women living in Kinshasa, DRC, in relation to their economic and social empowerment. In this fragile urban context, there are high, and sometimes contradictory, expectations of girls and young women emanating from a mixture of traditional values, religious edicts and modern ideals. Girls and young women must carefully navigate precarious circumstances to survive economically and socially and maintain their reputation as 'good girls'. For most girls and young women in this context, 'empowerment' is viewed as a dual process of gaining economic autonomy and of remaining fully integrated and respected in society by meeting social expectations. The paper argues that it is essential for development programmes to be be grounded in women and girls' own realities and aspirations and a comprehensive understanding of how specific young women in specific contexts see the process of empowerment and exercise agency even in very constrained circumstances. The participatory engagement described here is a way to understand these realities and inform programmes to facilitate women and girls' own agency and journeys of empowerment, rather than to aggravate the risks they face, which are often magnified in rapidly changing urban contexts such as Kinshasa.
Katarzyna Grabska (Peace Research Institute Oslo)
Paper short abstract:
Eritrean adolescent girls’ migration to Khartoum exposes the interplay between aspiration and desire of becoming an adult linked to a specific geographical location, dreams of being else-where, impossibilities of returning, and realities of uncertainties and being-stuck inbetween.
Paper long abstract:
Eritrean adolescent girls' migration to Khartoum exposes the interplay between aspiration and desire of becoming an adult linked to a specific geographical location, dreams of being else-where, impossibilities of returning, and realities of uncertainties and being-stuck inbetween. This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork among Eritrean adolescent refugee girls and young women in Khartoum (2014-2016), who see Sudan as a transit place to an imagined 'better place' elsewhere. Aspirations and desires of moving elsewhere shape the experiences of and the different transitions associated with one's life course. The 'coming of age' and seeking self-accomplishment is of critical importance, where aspirations of being elsewhere and the impossibilities of achieving this goal shape the modalities and the forms of adult femininity. These transitions are also gendered, both in space and across spaces. The paper is driven by narratives of adolescent refugee girls who reflect on their migratory experiences and transitory adolescence experienced temporarily and spatially. Using insights from feminist narrative research, I examine how migration in itself becomes a modus operandi of a transition to adulthood for girls, and how it shapes the moral discourse around being a 'good' girl or woman. Through hope for mobility and the experience of waiting while faced with protracted uncertainty, I analyse how gender norms and identities are reshaped as a result.
Muriel Champy (Aix-Marseille Université)
Paper short abstract:
The analysis of the tormented itineraries of young men in and out of the street in a life cycle perspective provides new insights on the nature of male adulthood and on the means to attain this status.
Paper long abstract:
In West Africa, mobility historically represents a possibility for young men to conquer autonomy and resources while dodging the rigidities of their native community. Contrasting with the usual analyses formulated in terms of victimhood, I have realized that the street children and youth in Burkina Faso also tend to place their street experience in the continuity with the mobility of their older counterparts who have chosen "adventure" as a shortcut to money and respectability. Looking at their tormented itineraries in and out of the street in a life cycle perspective thus provides original insights on the nature of male adulthood and on the means to attain this status.
As they grow older, the erratic and deviant lifestyle of the street indeed becomes unilaterally condemned by society while the autonomy they achieved on the street is no longer sufficient to maintain their self-esteem. Since they can no longer play on the irresponsibility of childhood or on the normality of juvenile mobility, they usually start looking for a way out. It appears here that they cannot attain a respected status solely with the ephemeral money of the street but have to demonstrate the ability to provide for their lineage, to inscribe their "own name" in its genealogy and to guarantee the generational perpetuation. In particular, the analysis of the evolution of the monthly earnings and spending of several former street youth as well as their participation — or lack of — in the gift economy will help us identify some nodal points for the definition of social adulthood.
Yonatan N. Gez (Iscte - University Institute Lisbon)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how Kenya's popular Born Again movement, with its promise of profound personal transformation, introduces new ideals for self-accomplishment.
Paper long abstract:
Among Kenyan Pentecostals, the emphasis on accepting Salvation and becoming Born Again is thought of as entailing, in a real—spiritual—sense, an experience of rebirth that is imagined in terms of discontinuity with the past and redemption from its sometimes-haunting qualities (Engelke, 2010; Meyer, 1998; 2004). For example, Pentecostals may turn away from traditional practices such as the payment of bride price. They are expected to embody values of wholesome living, including marital faithfulness, decency, non-violence and abstinence from alcohol (Maxwell, 1998). These values are especially appealing to women, who wish for reliable and faithful partners, while men are perceived as the heads of the household and the natural breadwinners. This conception of masculinity has been characterized as "soft patriarchy" by Wilcox (2004): "Pentecostalism makes a meaningful contribution by shaping 'soft masculinities', that is, concepts of manhood defined by values such as sexual abstinence, marital faithfulness, family involvement" (van Klinken, 2011, p. 111). For example, the new Kenyan Marriage Bill, which passed in March 2014 and which recognizes five different types of marriage, clearly identifies a "Christian marriage" as monogamous while allowing for polygamy within "customary marriage". In my paper, I will show how the Kenyan Born Again movement provides a space and cultural context that allow an alternative path towards adulthood, guided by values that are in tension with traditional ones (e.g. owning land, paying bridewealth, being a dominant polygamous male).