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Caught in The Act of Living: socialities, history and positionality in an ethnography of Addis Ababa's street life – a response
Ist Teil von
Africa, 2021-01, Vol.91 (1), p.117-120
Ort / Verlag
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2021
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Alma/SFX Local Collection
Beschreibungen/Notizen
Partly, this was in recognition of the many accounts that could be and, more importantly, have been written about poverty and exclusion in urban Ethiopia, and on women's experiences of exclusion, such as Laketch Dirasse's sociological work4 and Bethlehem Tekola's excellent account on sex workers.5 I carried out my research aware that my account would inevitably be a partial one, and a complement to the accounts of other scholars. Over my ten years researching the streets of inner-city Addis Ababa, I witnessed Haile and Ibrahim and others express claims to NGOs and government institutions that remained unaddressed – from giving money to each member of the parking guy cooperatives to launching individual ventures in the ‘informal economy’, to replacing doomed life-skill training programmes with employment-oriented initiatives focused on cooking or driving. The succession of generations of young men engaging in the street economy made history, creating an urban constituency that made projects of control and development rarely final or fully successful, but always in need of being constantly reiterated, reworked and, often, violently enforced. The Act of Living is instead a plea for shifting the ways in which we think about poverty and exclusion: the first step towards a conversation about inequalities and potential policies of redistribution.