Ethnographies of Uncertainty in Africa - A Discussion

Paper presented at the book launch workshop « Ethnographies of uncertainty in Africa » Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, 5Feb2015 About Elizabeth Cooper and David Pratten (eds), Ethnographies of uncertainty in Africa, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Ethnographies of Uncertainty in Africa – A Discussion Joël Noret These thoughts have been shaped, if not by uncertainty – I have extensive notes –, certainly by linguistic insecurity, a fact which unfortunately undermines part of the spontaneity of my discussion and much of the possibility of being eloquent – but hopefully not the eventuality of being minimally relevant. So let’s get started. The contours of uncertainty in Africa Ethnographies of uncertainty in Africa is a timely volume which offers suggestive insights on both the conditions of deployment, and the contours of fundamental aspects, of current African experiences and processes of subjectivation. It is here the subjective, lived experience of uncertainty which focuses the attention, the forms and the variety of its unfolding. Experiencing uncertainty is, the introduction recalls, a fundamental component of social relations as well as of the pursuit of projects, which though being integral to them, deploys, temporally speaking, in various ways (and intensity) depending on historical conditions. In contemporary Africa, the introduction argues, even social relationships in which people invest a lot regularly prove to be quite uncertain. Much of social capital has become venture capital, in a sense – with possibilities of reward as well as of failure –, and a form of vulnerability pervades even intimate relationships. This does not prevent people to invest in social relations, but colours these investments – both psychic and economic – with a sense of distance and of permanent defiance. These are fundamental components of the “subjunctive mood” (p. 8), or of the “subjunctive subjectivities” (p. 8) that appear so common throughout African societies today, and are marked by a “doubting”, “provisional” and “testing” disposition. The introduction explicitly states the book’s ambition to scrutinize the ‘productive’ and ‘positive’ aspects of the phenomenon, although the ‘positive’ ends up much less exemplified in the contributors’ chapters than the ‘productive’ dimension – productive being here understood in a morally neutral sense, in the manner of ‘discipline’ by Foucault. There are otherwise other red threads running through the chapters. One important point for instance which the introduction and several chapters explore is the many dispositions that the current uncertain African atmosphere produce, much beyond the production of “occult economies” (Comaroff and Comaroff). Ethnographies of uncertainty brings us back to the mundane terrain and the ordinary ground of everyday life, and to the multifarious effects of uncertainty in current African situations, reminding us that the deployment of uncertainty affects political and economic imaginations, and social representations and practices at large well beyond the religious domain and the sphere of the “occult”. 1 Paper presented at the book launch workshop « Ethnographies of uncertainty in Africa » Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, 5Feb2015 Yet another point which is undoubtedly convincing resides in the commitment, common to several chapters, to deploying a perspective which considers the existential dimension of social experiences, in an attempt at exploring how people make sense of and navigate the sense of uncertainty which pervades the subjective experience they have of the course of their existences, and the existential dimension this enterprise has for them. Evoking a variety of African terrains, the chapters investigate multiple situations of subjective insecurity. For instance, Whyte and Siu suggest that the existences of HIV-infected patients in Uganda depend on both a historical contingency – the massively increased access to ART treatment since the mid-2000s – and various “social contingencies”, that is forms of social capital. Navigating these social contingencies requests from the actors both a heightened vigilance to potential connections and an increased and opportunistic propensity to engage in relations that might secure, or simply increase chances of access to, treatment and minimal health. Cooper shows how the indeterminacy of the criteria giving access to charity support in education, as well as the opacity of the mode of assistance that these organizations offer to Kenyan rural children, leads to a situation in which charities actually produce as much uncertainty as support, and meet limited and ambivalent interest. Di Nunzio shows how, in Addis Ababa inner city, younger and less younger men value the multiplicity of their engagements in income-generating activities, and strive to keep hoping for better futures, even though some of them turn mad from “too much thinking” about the impossibilities of their present and their future. Researching Burundian refugees in Nairobi, Turner explores the subjective experiences of refugees who chose to leave the relatively secured environments of refugee camps to try their chance in Nairobi, a place where they pray and “wait for a miracle”, and strive for education, considering that the East African metropolis is a site of opportunities in which they can have faith in a better future. Uncertainty? But let’s now come to the heart of the discussion. There are actually two main thoughts I would like to share today. The first one (1) is whether situations of subjective uncertainty really deserve to be analytically connoted in this way by students of Africa. In fact, most of the situations evoked in the book can also be considered as quite predictable, and marked by structural marginality and deprivation as much as by ‘uncertainty’. So this first thought basically questions the relevance of uncertainty – a local subjective experience – as key analytical keystone, and asks whether ‘uncertainty’ is not sometimes a euphemism, and actually a kind of euphemizing mask of structural violence. The second remark (2) suggests that the phenomenological approach to uncertainty which emerges in some chapters, in which much attention is devoted to the description of the experience of uncertainty and the social practices it feeds, without however fully accounting for their conditions of production, finally leaves the issue of the objective, institutional conditions of production of uncertainty unquestioned. This therefore leaves aside an important dimension of the forces shaping African subjectivities, and reflects the accounts of social actors without really restituting their broader political, economic and social conditions of production, which ends up in a form of depoliticization of social reality. 2 Paper presented at the book launch workshop « Ethnographies of uncertainty in Africa » Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, 5Feb2015 1. So, as for my first argument, which bears on some possible dead angles of the category of uncertainty, I have had the impression throughout the book of meeting quite a lot of predictable situations, marked much more by forms of structural insecurity and marginality than by uncertainty per se. Most of the Kenyan rural children enrolled in charity programmes that Cooper evokes will not receive any significant gift from their ‘sponsors’, and the course of their existences and their quests for education will probably remain quite fragile. Similarly, there is little doubt that most Addis Ababa young and less young men stuck in precarious jobs will continue to experience these conditions in the following years, even though they might sometimes think they are ‘on the move’, which is otherwise not always the case, as some of them at least experience their condition as profoundly oppressive, to the point that they literally turn mad. I certainly do not want to argue that anthropologists should bypass local categories of thought, and the ways in which people account for their experience is always important to take into consideration. Here, the fact that so many people in Africa think of their situations as uncertain, insecure and/or unpredictable is definitely a relevant dimension of the social situations in which they participate, but anthropology can also hardly have the project of a hermeneutics of peoples’ discourse as only theoretical or analytical horizon. In Addis Ababa, sticking to the local discourses through which social agents think of themselves as ‘on the move’ is almost inevitably taking the risk to euphemize the unequal structures of chances to which they are confronted. Therefore, more generally, my point is that an emphasis on the subjective experience of uncertainty runs the risk of euphemizing the structural divisions of the social space in presenting society in a more fluid way than it might actually be. The same point can be made about Burundian refugees in Nairobi. Is their present not more insecure and precarious than undetermined and uncertain? Are their present as well as their future not quite certain and determined in many respects? In what is their situation uncertain and unpredictable? In my reading of the article, their future looks more predictably precarious than uncertain… Urban life in particular becomes the site par excellence of this trope which suggests that present-day African existences are marked by indeterminacy. In Turner’s chapter for instance, one sometimes slips from a focus on uncertainty as subjective experience to uncertainty as a characteristic of urban life, and life in Nairobi itself is “temporary, indeterminate, and unpredictable” (p. 175) – a series of adjectives that somewhat echoes Clifford writing, in his famous introduction to Writing Culture, that « culture is contested, temporal, and emergent ». But if we try to take some distance with the local entries on social dynamics that ethnography suggests and shift the scale of our observations to look at statistical evidences, for instance, the picture might be slightly different – to briefly evoke just one example, the Gini coefficient, one among other possible indicators of inequality, is comfortably installed above 0.4 in Kenya, and rather points in the direction of a quite unequal distribution of “uncertainty” across Kenyan society. Taking different methodological points of entry, the « transmission of poverty » (to quote the title of another paper by Cooper), and more broadly of inequality, might appear as a major structuring force of African urban lives – just as it is in other African and non-African social spaces. 2. My second point now questions the relevance of a form of phenomenological thread which emerges in a few chapters, which seem to have as a central focus the description of the modalities and the contours of the experience of uncertainty and the social practices which are grounded in it. Indeed, following such an approach always runs the risk of leaving unanalysed the conditions of production of the social experiences under scrutiny, therefore reducing social theory to a form of “account of the accounts” (Garfinkel) of the social actors. I think however that social sciences can (and in a sense must) do better than providing such “constructs of the second degree” (Schütz). 3 Paper presented at the book launch workshop « Ethnographies of uncertainty in Africa » Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, 5Feb2015 Which implies the need to question both the conditions of the production of uncertainty as well as the forms of its deployment in social life. This step however seems sometimes to be side-lined in the ethnographies of uncertainty proposed in the book. Accounting, for instance, for the experience of HIV-infected patients in Uganda, Whyte and Siu certainly expose the “historical”, objective contingency upon which the lives of these people depend today, that is the greater availability of Anti-Retroviral Treatments in Uganda since the mid2000s. But they then almost immediately switch to the experiences of social contingency which frame much of the patients’ daily lives, without paying much attention to the institutional, political conditions of these experiences of contingency upon personal relations, often located both among their close kin and health centres’ employees. The conditions of the making of the “ethos of contingency” which they delineate, that is – to put a long story short – the political conditions of the weakness of institutions in contemporary Uganda, are however left to the reader to reconstitute. The same might be more or less valid for Di Nunzio’s and Turner’s chapters. Building on research conducted among Addis Ababa’s ‘young’ men (Di Nunzio) and Nairobi Burundian refugees (Turner), these chapters describe regimes of subjectivity which give a key role to good or bad luck, or to the will of God, in the local interpretations people have of their chances. But yet, the conditions of production of these local subjectivities, that is for instance the conditions of the prevalence of understandings of one’s social trajectory in terms of individual causalities, are similarly largely left for the reader to imagine… Instead the chapters rather focus on the contours of the local understandings of being ‘on the move’ (in Addis Ababa, Di Nunzio) or of what it represents to ‘wait for a miracle’ (in Nairobi, Turner). Here, Cooper’s chapter, which very clearly analyses the conditions of production of the feeling of deceptiveness that the workings of charities engaged in rural Kenya induce, seems to take the analysis one step further. As these charities advertise direct and individual sponsorship between donors and children, but actually use the money of sponsors to develop community based projects, and not actual individual sponsorship of children. In fact, the operating modes of charities actually foster a disillusioned sense of dispossession of one’s future and a ‘subjunctive mood’ marked by both scepticism and opportunism in the face of institutions that prove unpredictable and unreliable. Uncertainty is here very nicely put into perspective, as “a by-product of a particular political economy” (p. 36), in Cooper’s phrase. In other words, if we are to avoid the reduction of social theory to a form of social phenomenology, which I think is an important issue in contemporary social science, we must certainly not overlook the importance that accounting for emic perceptions and discourses can have. Simultaneously, we should not separate these from an attempt at explaining what the economic or political conditions that produce them are, or in which historical moments they are grounded, as for instance, to take another African situation illustration, Mbembe and Roitman have shown about the post-cold war moment and the conditions of the “crisis of the subject” in early 1990s Cameroon. Social sciences should not renounce to the means of objectivation that statistical evidence, historical research or the observation of practice (as it can differ from discourses) constitute, which remain powerful tools to highlight social regularities and, more generally speaking, parts of their social experiences of which the social actors are not necessarily apt to account for. I can therefore only agree with Cooper again, when she states that an ethnography of uncertainty should not be satisfied with a phenomenology of the experience of uncertainty but be equally attentive to delineate how it is actually produced, unequally distributed and by which means. 4 Paper presented at the book launch workshop « Ethnographies of uncertainty in Africa » Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, 5Feb2015 *** To conclude then, Ethnographies of uncertainty undoubtedly offers a series of important insights on current African experiences of contingency and subjunctivity, and especially on its mundane and ordinary deployments in African societies, which are otherwise so easily forgotten and unwittingly concealed. On a personal note, I would yet advocate that the issue of uncertainty remains more systematically addressed in close articulation with that of inequality, and that more systematic efforts be produced towards the analysis of the conditions of production and distribution of uncertain experiences. 5