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- Convenors:
-
Paolo Gaibazzi
(University of Bologna)
Marco Gardini (University of Pavia)
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- Location:
- 2E10
- Start time:
- 29 June, 2013 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to explore emerging work ethics in Africa and their role in promoting specific subjectivities. Contributions should not only concentrate on discourses and predicaments, but also on the social practices through which 'work ethics' are articulated, inculcated and contested.
Long Abstract:
Meanings of, and values attached to, work have long been a disputed terrain in discourses on social change in Africa. Work emerges as a central issue both for the understanding of emerging economic contexts and power structures, as well as for its crucial role in producing personal and social identities. Colonial representations of African work (esp. laziness) have often enjoyed widespread currency after independence and recur in a number of governmental discourses, including development projects, and have frequently taken roots in societal discourses as well, often emerging as the principal justification for violence and labour exploitation. While certain systems of organization and valorisation of work have proved to be resilient to change, several social and cultural movements have promoted new ideas of labour, entrepreneurship and prosperity as foundations of emerging subjectivities and codes of self-conduct. Indeed, the recent growth of religious movements like Pentecostal Christianity and Islamic Reformism in Africa calls for an investigation of subjective as well as economic implications of certain predicaments of self-transformation. Similarly, as Africans circulate in worldwide circuits of labour, business and education, familiarising with ideas and systems of work, they possibly influence their societies upon return or through long-distance interaction. This panel calls for contributions that explore the legacy and the emerging of work ethic in Africa. Contributions should not only concentrate on discourses and predicaments of work, but also on the social practices and dispositions through which work-related virtues are articulated, inculcated and contested.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paolo Gaibazzi (University of Bologna)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores how Islamic notions of human and divine agency inflect attitudes and practices of work among Gambian workers and entrepreneurs. Furthermore, it analyses such predicaments in relation to entanglements of merchant capitalism and Islamic reform in the country.
Paper long abstract:
The paper explores a long-standing issue in West African and, in particular, Islamic religious systems, namely the tension between divine predestination and human agency as applied to the making of livelihoods. Rather than relying on theological or discursive sources alone, however, the paper investigates how young Muslim Gambians invoke notions of destiny in everyday interactions to frame opportunities and to make sense of their trajectories. In particular, it will be concerned with the way 'fortune', an element of destiny, informs understandings of the spatiality and temporality of working life. It will be shown that, by debating where, when and how to find 'fortune', young workers and entrepreneurs construct work as a key mediator between divine will, their aspirations and their actions. This predicament of work and self is subsequently contextualized in relation to the emergent entanglements between Islamic 'reformism' and the shifting forms of the capitalist economy in West Africa.
Mattia Fumanti (University of St Andrews)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores novel ideas of work and the self in contemporary Namibia as they emerge at the juncture between discourses on self-realization and emerging idioms of fortune.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores novel ideas of work and the self in contemporary Namibia as they emerge at the juncture between discourses on self-realization and emerging idioms of fortune. Rather than locating my ethnography within well-rehearsed arguments on the 'occult economies' in Africa, I want to build instead on a recent anthropological literature that has begun to address the relationship between work and self within the context of emerging neoliberal discourses and practices on gambling, fate and fortune, on what Festa refers to as 'fortunational capitalism'. In particular I am interested in the ways in which contingency, play, fate and luck, and the dreams and hopes for the future that current neoliberalism promotes contribute to the making and remaking of ideas of work and the self. My ethnographic evidence comes from fieldwork conducted amongst young entrepreneurs living in Windhoek, Namibia's booming capital. Ambitious and enterprising these youth have transformed their knowledge of IT and the media into an online and TV competition called Taramo Live. The business with his sleek graphics and catchy tunes is the latest addition to the appearance and consolidation of raffles, mobile phone competitions and prize draws in Southern Africa. In this paper I bring to the fore the ways in which the youth process of self-making relies on composite biographical narratives that are constantly created, imagined and performed within the contingent context of Namibia's 'fortunational capitalism'. Here I will show how novel ideas of work are central to this process of self-making.
Lorenzo D'Angelo (Sapienza University of Rome)
Paper short abstract:
Diamond mining is a complex combination of material production, imaginaries, and life experiences oriented by a specific ethic. My particular focus here is on the ways in which diamond miners’ ethic of “hard work” differentiates from other workers’ ethics and produces specific subjectivities.
Paper long abstract:
In Sierra Leone the artisanal diamond miners often compare diamond mining to gambling. In this way they express the uncertainty that characterizes the search for precious gems, and consequently the perception of insecurity permeating their own lives.
By drawing upon my ethnographic experience in artisanal mines of Sierra Leone (2007-2011), I argue that taking this comparison too literally - as some development experts interested in artisanal diamond mining often do when they equate diamond mining to a "casino economy" - may be misleading. Miners are not risky or pathological subjects. Every day, they come to terms with the difficult compromises of a profession in which the imaginary of a quick and unexpected wealth collides, in practice, with the daily realities of a hard and risky job. For these reasons, my paper considers their work as a complex combination of material production, imaginaries, and life experiences oriented by a specific ethic.
Central to the understanding of this ethic is a repertoire of religious metaphors that informs miners' working and ritual practices. My particular focus here is on the ways in which diamond miners' ethic of "hard work" differentiates from other workers' ethic (i.e. stone miners). In noting that miners are not passive subjects, but rather agents who resist, collude or reproduce the dynamics of capitalism in different creative ways, this paper claims that the "miner-gambler" is the result and, at the same time, the representation of the capitalistic contradictions inside the commodity chain of diamonds.
Elisabetta Campagnola (University of Toronto)
Paper short abstract:
My aim is to make introductory observations about the concept of work from an actor oriented point of view and the structural dynamics associated with it in the context of tanzanite mines (Tanzania) where I conducted a preliminary visit in 2010.
Paper long abstract:
A mine is a typical postcolonial place, where individual lives are governed and where the capital invested and the gemstone market assume a global dimension.
But who are the workers? How do they imagine, organize and produce their own individual life? What is the reality they are actually living in the mines?
In this context the people doing the high risk jobs are mostly youth. At first glance, the young workers are not employed as wage laborers, nor do they seem forced to stay. Thought it appears as a free individual decision aimed to change the workers' own difficult living conditions, the reality is that international organizations classify mine labour as hazardous work that exerts an enormous physical and psychological pressure.
What keeps these young laborers performing this high-risk job?
At first sight, the work appears to be motivated by the value of risk and its imaginary: to risk means to possibly succeed and mining becomes like an extremely dangerous game that could lead to finding the life-changing gem. But once there, workers are captured in the power-dominance interactions embedded in the specific mode of production that arises from the local history of this place.
Leaving aside the view of young social actors as passive and dependent subjectivities, after presenting the field spatially and historically and through a discussion of preliminary interviews and the literature, I will explain the premises for a further analysis of the youths' goals and strategies in the wider historical context.
Gavin Macarthur
Paper short abstract:
Based on original ethnographic data, this paper considers the practical risks, concerns and philosophical problems with the application of ‘Western’ occupational health and safety concepts, structures and practices in collaborative socioeconomic development work in Tanzania.
Paper long abstract:
In 2010, the US government-funded Millennium Challenge Account Tanzania commissioned a review of the occupational health and safety (OHS) management systems at TANESCO, the Tanzanian national electricity supply company. In particular, MCA-T required that TANESCO update its existing OHS policy and contractor's safety guidelines to ensure compliance with international best practices in occupational health and safety.
With a background in sociocultural anthropology, I was hired by a British OHS contractor to lead a team of researchers, engineers and health and safety consultants in the collection of survey- and interview-based data from TANESCO employees and management at a number of sites across Tanzania. My team also collected data from local and regional authorities, state emergency and security services and community representatives, as well as representatives of large corporations, NGOs, state-level authorities/agencies and other high-level stakeholders.
My de facto fieldwork provided me with an ethnographic platform from which to consider the values, objectives and methods of workers engaged in collaborative socioeconomic development at the junction of international relations, social science, and private sector business ideology and practices in East Africa. My data also provides valuable insight upon the risks inherent in such work. Drawing on project-specific data and personal ethnographic observations, my paper will review the positions of all the parties involved, and consider the ethics - expressed in terms of 'benefit-sharing' and 'social value' - of this public sector development project.
Giovanna Cavatorta (University of Catania)
Paper short abstract:
This proposal deals with the different works ethics played by male migrants returning from Italy and facing reinsertion into Senegal. Looking at how the need to regain a remunerative activity in Senegal works allows exploring what is perceived tolerable or not in terms of self-autonomy.
Paper long abstract:
This contribution is based on an on-going fieldwork carried in Senegal, namely in Pikine and in Touba, with returnees from Italy. The fact of coming back living in Senegal constitutes a challenge due the difficulties those men undergone in finding an activity that can grant them an income in a context that is changed during their years of absence from the country.
Often the departing to Europe had constituted a moment of rupture and emancipation from apprenticeship, allowing the access to a relative autonomy (even if strictly structured by the racialized labour market in Italy) in the choice of which work do and how many hours do it.
By paying attention to the negotiation those men, come back to Senegal with little wealth or not wealth at all, have to do in order to find a "bearable" work, also in relation to the expectations of the other members of the household, are representations on social honourableness which are at stake.
The absence of sufficient capital to start an adequate entrepreneurial activity leads them to address themselves to the under-paid choice of subordinated labour, to street-selling or just to the "resting". It is actually what is undergoing at larger to lower-educated inhabitants of Senegalese cities but, by focusing in particular to the gaze of the ones forced to come back, we could better seize which work-related values are at stake.