Paper short abstract:

How do people living in Asmara make sense of, adapt to, connect with, and quietly contest features of the social organization of their lives? Drawing on recent observational work, I explore how people use photographs for what interpretations reveal about the social settings in which they are used.

Paper long abstract:

Focusing on what people do both reveals the challenges and opportunities that shape everyday lives while diverting ideological accounts of the same. Stretching beyond the symbolic is a rhetorical strategy people in Asmara employ: not referring to particular political figures by name. This reveals and obscures features and functioning of their society, and their experiences as citizens. I posit that this practice, among others, speaks to the usefulness of innovating, methodologically and theoretically, to access and explore elided connections between past and present of lives lived in Eritrea. How we 'look at', talk about, and give meaning to photographs, through which we activate them as art, memorial, witness, testimonial, and so on, relies on interpretative practices. I draw from McCoy (1995) to explicate the "social organization in which individual acts of interpretation are possible and occur", and consider the effects of interpretations. Like Low (1996, 2003), who does not reify the city, I do not reify the photograph. Instead, it is in analyzing how people engage with it that "insights into the linkages of macro processes with the … fabric of human experience . . ." are made visible. This paper provides an important empirical basis and an analytic entry point for specific and broader considerations of questions relating to ethics, belonging, agency, citizenship, and claims making in Eritrea. I argue that this is a particularly germane, timely, and compelling way to explore and develop understandings about the continuities and discontinuities between the present and contemporary past in Eritrea.