Brad Weiss

Buying her grave: money movement and AIDS in north-west Tanzania.

Of particular interest in this analysis are the forms and operations through which value is generated and transacted in the course of rapid socio-cultural transformation. Money is essential to this order of value not only as an object whose formal properties introduce distinctive (if not new) possibilities in the local political economy but also as a feature of the circulation extraction and introduction of value processes of control which are fundamental to the articulation of this local economy with a wider world. Focusing on such questions of value will further allow us to explore this articulation within the wider context of Haya meanings and potentialities. For the expansion and deployment of value are always concretely embedded in a lived world of action and experience. This lived world incorporates a range of orientations and qualities including forms of mobility and directionality speed and pace fixity and dispersal. Such a dynamic order of space and time is (re)generated in the flow of objects and -as this bit of conversation suggests - in the variety of pursuits that people undertake to control them. Thus I argue that our analyses must consider the processes that produce persons and empower objects and the concrete forms and qualities that persons objects and the relations between them can assume. In so doing we can better assess the ways in which sexual transactions and economic seductions are culturally constructed and represented in Haya experience and action. (excerpt)

Good-for-Nothing Haya Names: Powers of Recollection in Northwest Tanzania

Abstract This article explores names and naming practices in Haya communities of Northwest Tanzania. Certain Haya names evoke past experiences and circumstances that surround the birth of a child, as well as the social reputation of the childs parents, I argue that this act of recollection embedded in such names can best be understood as an effort to displace past reputations, and overcome the disparaging views of ones consociates. From this perspective, Haya names can be understood as modes of remembering designed to both recall and undermine past memories; as well as forms of social agency through which people actively attempt to engage in and transform their social conditions.

Hope Is Cut: youth, unemployment, and the future in urban Ethiopia (review)

how age-based inequalities, including generation-based norms of conduct, can constrain the strategies of young orphaned people in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. By emphasizing their youthfulness and even suffering, some young people were better able to secure material and social support from family members, whereas those who resisted their seniors fared worse by these measures. Meanwhile, Lorenzo Bordonaro employs other theorists’ notions of ‘tactical agency’2 and ‘thin agency’3 in appraising how the limited viability of alternatives underpins young people’s decisions to move between homes and streets in Mindelo, Cape Verde. The analytical separation between agency and structure is more explicitly problematized in Tatek Abebe’s chapter concerning rural Ethiopian children’s experiences of work and schooling. Abebe’s study of children’s participation in the collective livelihood strategies of their households illuminates how agency and interdependence may be conceptualized as composite, as well as how children’s strategies are situated in local political economies of labour and livelihoods. Such contributions augment the empirical basis for conceptualizing agency among children and young people, and thereby provide some material for further theoretical contemplation. Informing the design and practice of child-centred research is the other intended contribution of this collection. The authors’ descriptions of their methodological and ethical considerations and practices highlight the many different kinds of challenges that researchers may encounter. Several of the authors discuss how particular child-centred methods were resisted by adults or children, whereas other methods proved efficacious in the different settings, thus underscoring the need for researchers’ constant reflexivity during data collection and analysis. Such contextualized accounts of methodological experimentation provide different kinds of insights than can be obtained from any kind of manual.

Objects and Bodies Some Phenomenological Implications of Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

Grounded in collective interactions that are often quite contentious, knowledge is formulated in the world (objectified), and tangibly experienced (embodied) by the agents engaged in these interactions. As a means of acting on the world in order to transform it, knowledge is implicitly powerful. Yet, the consequences of that power are only realized through the context in which they are carried out. Thus, the ambiguous character of such knowledge must be evaluated by social agents in the course of their activities. By drawing attention to these dimensions of knowledge as power which enable social agents to act on, and so transform, themselves as they transform the world, this essay broadly considers the implications of the dialectics of objectification and embodiment so ably detailed by Lambek.