1 00:00:00,080 --> 00:00:03,780 Beyond arts and pleasure to be here. 2 00:00:03,780 --> 00:00:13,800 That's why I wrote, I can tell you chunk of the book happens to be like a very early draught of the book itself as a detailed dissertation. 3 00:00:13,800 --> 00:00:22,140 And so whenever I present some kind of always quite nervous and always have in mind a piece of advice, 4 00:00:22,140 --> 00:00:29,520 and David, give me as a as a supervisor, David, you might not remember it's way in Uppsala ECOS. 5 00:00:29,520 --> 00:00:34,800 I was very nervous and you told me, think yourself as a rock star. 6 00:00:34,800 --> 00:00:38,490 And I don't think myself as a rock star. 7 00:00:38,490 --> 00:00:43,380 It's, I think myself rather as an unknown country music singer. 8 00:00:43,380 --> 00:00:50,760 But on that note, I will do some of my oldies as some of my new bits from my new album. 9 00:00:50,760 --> 00:01:00,390 Hope you like it! So I recorded the life histories of Ibrahim and highly. 10 00:01:00,390 --> 00:01:05,700 I will introduce him in a bit. Ibrahim is 39 and 49, 11 00:01:05,700 --> 00:01:13,410 is 49 through dedicated sessions of a span of nearly nine years and often thought 12 00:01:13,410 --> 00:01:18,240 that I was able to create an extensive timeline of the life experiences. 13 00:01:18,240 --> 00:01:24,810 However, any session I had with them often end up completely reshuffling the succession before and after. 14 00:01:24,810 --> 00:01:29,760 Had previously sought it in one of our sessions in 2013. 15 00:01:29,760 --> 00:01:40,830 Faced with my visible frustration, Ibrahim's might mean a very mischievous look and admitted they actually had had a very intense and long life. 16 00:01:40,830 --> 00:01:48,690 So when I recounted my own life to Ibrahim and highly and people you will hear about today, I needed to face the father in my own personal history, 17 00:01:48,690 --> 00:01:57,480 namely revolving around schooling and for a period of political activists have been neither long nor intense in the eyes of my informants. 18 00:01:57,480 --> 00:02:04,950 Indeed, I had ever had led a very short life. Ibrahim, instead, the person you see is not his real name, but is real. 19 00:02:04,950 --> 00:02:10,170 This is him. Please don't take pictures of the picture. 20 00:02:10,170 --> 00:02:16,590 So brains life has been quite long and intense. When I met he briefly in 2010, he was in his early 30s. 21 00:02:16,590 --> 00:02:22,890 It recently got a job as car attendants or as people, saying at the top of a parking guy in a co-operative. 22 00:02:22,890 --> 00:02:29,130 The local government office and established for the unemployed youth at his initiative was not a localised one, 23 00:02:29,130 --> 00:02:33,330 was part of a broader attempt by the government to recapture the youth that supported 24 00:02:33,330 --> 00:02:39,840 opposition parties in 2005 election and participated in riots and demonstrations that year. 25 00:02:39,840 --> 00:02:44,740 On top of his job, Ibrahim made extra money by brokering the sales of second hand mobile phones. 26 00:02:44,740 --> 00:02:45,360 But in the past, 27 00:02:45,360 --> 00:02:53,730 that there had multiple engagement with both wage labour and infamously economy had been a street fighter skill for hustler and a thief a manager. 28 00:02:53,730 --> 00:03:05,280 Video houses a construction worker, a guard, an assistant carpenter, stonework a crucial time successful shoe seller idea. 29 00:03:05,280 --> 00:03:10,050 The second, the protagonist of the book, also claimed to have lived the very intense life. 30 00:03:10,050 --> 00:03:17,460 He had been a student until 14 years of age. Then a pickpocket, a burglar and daily labourer construction sites. 31 00:03:17,460 --> 00:03:25,770 With the collapse of the socialist regime, the Derg in the 1990 1991, he tried to make his way out of the country at the age of 22. 32 00:03:25,770 --> 00:03:33,810 He spent nine months as a refugee in Kenya, trying to pass himself as a fake Folashade and if you can, due to be repatriated in Israel. 33 00:03:33,810 --> 00:03:40,260 But then when you realise this is not going to work, you return to others and you see a succession of possible lives followed. 34 00:03:40,260 --> 00:03:43,120 You work as a manager with your houses, then you go [INAUDIBLE]. 35 00:03:43,120 --> 00:03:50,580 Because he was showing porno movies at the time, it was illegal, then enlisted as a soldier in 1998 2000. 36 00:03:50,580 --> 00:03:53,610 If you have an Eritrean war and after the war ended, 37 00:03:53,610 --> 00:04:00,660 it wasn't to this and they started as a veteran need to help him to, you know, have a job and new opportunities. 38 00:04:00,660 --> 00:04:03,810 So he found himself hustling on the streets again. 39 00:04:03,810 --> 00:04:12,180 And after then, after a few years, was invited to join a government supported cooperative producing concrete blocks for construction sites. 40 00:04:12,180 --> 00:04:14,580 And this work lasted for a lot of for a while. 41 00:04:14,580 --> 00:04:20,550 Until then, the co-operative closed because government was not giving them contracts, and eventually when I met him, 42 00:04:20,550 --> 00:04:28,920 he was enjoying it, just joined the cooperative parking guys to support himself and his son. 43 00:04:28,920 --> 00:04:35,130 So how can we examine, narrates and understands a life? 44 00:04:35,130 --> 00:04:37,770 And how, as anthropologist and scholar, 45 00:04:37,770 --> 00:04:44,940 can we appreciate the complex intertwining of becoming meaning politics and history and everyday life we are often after? 46 00:04:44,940 --> 00:04:53,310 By taking life and living like such, those ones of highly ibrahim as a matter of an ethnographic investigation, 47 00:04:53,310 --> 00:05:00,130 and Hannah Arendt expressed their concerns with actual ability of the philosopher, the scholar or rather. 48 00:05:00,130 --> 00:05:05,470 The storyteller to say something meaningful. She writes on who somebody is. 49 00:05:05,470 --> 00:05:13,180 Our vocabulary, she wrote, leads us a strange to say something of what is and know somebody or that somebody is so a 50 00:05:13,180 --> 00:05:18,610 solution is to make sense of the tension that exists between the uniqueness of a life story. 51 00:05:18,610 --> 00:05:25,120 As the birth of a newcomer, she wrote, contains the seeds of a new beginning and the fact that the potentialities of such a new 52 00:05:25,120 --> 00:05:31,510 beginning are affected and situated by a range of relationships in which life is experienced. 53 00:05:31,510 --> 00:05:36,010 So ethnography has a valuable tradition in writing of life trajectories and exploring the 54 00:05:36,010 --> 00:05:41,670 tensions between individualities and social relationships and historical constraints. 55 00:05:41,670 --> 00:05:46,810 However, what to make of the lived experience is still a very open question. 56 00:05:46,810 --> 00:05:52,330 You now argue that we need to go back to our Unha in question on definition of somebody is looking 57 00:05:52,330 --> 00:05:58,570 at how people conceptualise and experience the intimate relations within life and the self. 58 00:05:58,570 --> 00:06:00,760 So my four months used two terms to make sense of. 59 00:06:00,760 --> 00:06:11,370 This one is Bari, which is a unique character of an individual and knowing one's unique character where there is no amount of introspection. 60 00:06:11,370 --> 00:06:18,970 It comes to the Baris knowable through others, in particular to the ways other people describe you and how you relate to them. 61 00:06:18,970 --> 00:06:23,860 The bias that is what people have become through their experiences of life, 62 00:06:23,860 --> 00:06:29,230 and you are what you have lived both so you can become what you have not lived yet. 63 00:06:29,230 --> 00:06:37,870 So being is not an essence or stable position, but is realised in practise and framework to a process of endless becoming. 64 00:06:37,870 --> 00:06:44,560 So it this understanding of its not just existential philosophy or psychology, but an understanding of life, 65 00:06:44,560 --> 00:06:48,490 is that there's a long history in Ethiopia, especially in the Northern Ireland, 66 00:06:48,490 --> 00:06:54,280 where many communities have conceptualised the life of an individual as a continuum of social 67 00:06:54,280 --> 00:07:01,630 experiences and nor as a sort of well-defined succession of off stage of life stages. 68 00:07:01,630 --> 00:07:09,250 So in the experience of my four months to seeing life as a continuum also resulted in appreciating life as an open moments. 69 00:07:09,250 --> 00:07:12,490 So this argument again sounds like an existential philosophy. 70 00:07:12,490 --> 00:07:21,580 But as Jean and John Komarov pointed out, vernacular understanding of life and personhood minded converge with traditional philosophical thoughts. 71 00:07:21,580 --> 00:07:27,400 Any brain did call off afternoon's talking about his life experiences as our philosophy days. 72 00:07:27,400 --> 00:07:34,000 Nevertheless, seeing life as an open moment is not just a matter of intellectual sophistication is also an ethnographic fact. 73 00:07:34,000 --> 00:07:40,480 In particular, the ways of searching for an open ends can be seen experience understood by those we 74 00:07:40,480 --> 00:07:47,050 write about as something central in the way they understand their own experience. 75 00:07:47,050 --> 00:07:51,100 So how do we accounts for this? People search for openness. 76 00:07:51,100 --> 00:08:00,520 How do we turn our phonographic appreciation of single individual searches for openness into an entry point to understand politics, 77 00:08:00,520 --> 00:08:05,740 history, meaning, meanings and and contingency? 78 00:08:05,740 --> 00:08:13,360 But also, how can I traffic up our appreciation of life and open and honest guides, our critical appraisal of the presence, 79 00:08:13,360 --> 00:08:18,610 as well as by an anthropological contribution to the possibilities of a more just futures? 80 00:08:18,610 --> 00:08:22,960 So my wider work seeks to answer these questions in the book provide all the answers. 81 00:08:22,960 --> 00:08:34,870 So by it is why they're cheaper. But today, so I will seek to explore bits or try to make three fundamental points. 82 00:08:34,870 --> 00:08:39,790 The first is that we need to rethink how we understand the standard marginality, 83 00:08:39,790 --> 00:08:46,540 particular our tendency to rely on cunning phrasing also for the speech of this kind of handsome man. 84 00:08:46,540 --> 00:08:50,290 Oh, so the candle, our tendency to rely on cunning phrasing, 85 00:08:50,290 --> 00:08:56,560 analytical style to find the how to assume that whatever marginalised do they tend to reproduce 86 00:08:56,560 --> 00:09:00,550 the condition of my genealogy through their own actions or event performance of resistance? 87 00:09:00,550 --> 00:09:04,120 This is a kind of very dated kind of way of looking at it, 88 00:09:04,120 --> 00:09:09,820 but still very common in the way anthropologists tend to understand marginalised in exclusion, 89 00:09:09,820 --> 00:09:15,010 whatever that even resistance end up reproducing, marginalising the exclusion. 90 00:09:15,010 --> 00:09:19,480 And then, you know, building on my own ethnography critique of this coming anthropological or 91 00:09:19,480 --> 00:09:24,580 sociological interpretations of a vicious cycle between action and reproduction. 92 00:09:24,580 --> 00:09:31,660 I will try to sketch out the reflection of the kind of politics that the closer engagement with open and honest desire what I call the act 93 00:09:31,660 --> 00:09:40,120 of living can potentially inspire so much negative appreciation of the act of living is contingent to a particular place Addis Ababa, 94 00:09:40,120 --> 00:09:44,410 the capital of Ethiopia and time the decade of Africa rising. 95 00:09:44,410 --> 00:09:51,250 And it's specific to the stories of two lives with the particularities of gender, location and upbringing. 96 00:09:51,250 --> 00:09:59,620 The specificity characterise my examination of living noise, a description of undifferentiated and generic features of human existence, but also as. 97 00:09:59,620 --> 00:10:05,720 Narration, one of many particular ways of experiencing the tension between becoming and a history, 98 00:10:05,720 --> 00:10:09,450 the particularity of a given realisation does doesn't limit of its relevance. 99 00:10:09,450 --> 00:10:16,190 The uniqueness of a story, as Hannah Arendt puts it, tells us about the infinite potentialities of living and existence. 100 00:10:16,190 --> 00:10:26,840 At the same time, while unique existence unfolds in places and times and modes of being in the words, they are shared with a wide range of others. 101 00:10:26,840 --> 00:10:34,130 So as my work is about Heidi bringing most of the constituency of urban society to a part of why describe a street life, 102 00:10:34,130 --> 00:10:37,760 she laughs, or is not just a synonym of whatever happens on the streets. 103 00:10:37,760 --> 00:10:42,380 While a street vendor, for instance, might carry out easel activities on the streets, 104 00:10:42,380 --> 00:10:51,890 it doesn't mean that he or she sees self sharing experiences and actions with others also occupy the streets like hustlers or sex workers. 105 00:10:51,890 --> 00:10:58,130 Who makes the difference is the extent to which people inhabiting the streets recognise themselves as a part of a wider repertoire of memories, 106 00:10:58,130 --> 00:11:06,560 practises, collaborations and antagonisms that they describe as street life revolving around hustling as smartness. 107 00:11:06,560 --> 00:11:12,590 So while also doing my research, I also realised that I was occupying a specific sociological niche where interpretation 108 00:11:12,590 --> 00:11:18,500 and waiting and waiting could be an assumption about political and social criminalities, 109 00:11:18,500 --> 00:11:28,040 often linked to youth didn't apply. The reason why this interpretation don't apply is a particular sociological dimensions of people actual waiting. 110 00:11:28,040 --> 00:11:32,300 The often goes, account and account for, and it is that those who. 111 00:11:32,300 --> 00:11:39,620 Often those who can wait. In other words, waiting is a Bible for those who have access to an economy of exchanges, 112 00:11:39,620 --> 00:11:45,650 networks and transactions that enable them to wait for what might be a better social 113 00:11:45,650 --> 00:11:51,260 opportunities and time than full day of of existence towards desired social goals. 114 00:11:51,260 --> 00:12:01,910 So while that one applies to specific sociological niche for highly Bremer, many others in my own research, waiting was simply not an option. 115 00:12:01,910 --> 00:12:04,220 Well, you don't have much my form and stop me. 116 00:12:04,220 --> 00:12:10,760 It doesn't make much sense to spend time wondering about the future you wish for and then wait for it to come. 117 00:12:10,760 --> 00:12:17,460 And and unless this is a come to the question, always get. So I'll just put it out there. 118 00:12:17,460 --> 00:12:24,650 This is simply a story. At least the story I'm telling is inevitably a story of men, economies of street hustling. 119 00:12:24,650 --> 00:12:27,740 I not beautiful women. And why did we search my way? 120 00:12:27,740 --> 00:12:34,700 The research explore three hustling and telling the story of players of smart women and sex workers or by the book, 121 00:12:34,700 --> 00:12:39,020 but also need to be aware that marginality is both produce and live. 122 00:12:39,020 --> 00:12:43,670 This a fundamentally gendered experience for both serendipity and choice. 123 00:12:43,670 --> 00:12:46,400 I can talk more about the questions. 124 00:12:46,400 --> 00:12:54,050 My demography is an exploration of marginality within the gender coordinates of the nexus between subjectivity and subjugation. 125 00:12:54,050 --> 00:12:58,610 Looking at specifically the way policy is an intervention and particularly regulating 126 00:12:58,610 --> 00:13:03,450 and controlling men's behaviour in the cities and the cities in the country. 127 00:13:03,450 --> 00:13:12,800 Political space. So let me tell you be about more about I will tell you the stories in full for moments. 128 00:13:12,800 --> 00:13:22,220 The first one is the search for smartness and pure chance dictated that Heidi Bream was born in poor households in inner city others, 129 00:13:22,220 --> 00:13:28,430 and the randomness of birth assign them to a place shaped by history of political subjugation and marginalisation. 130 00:13:28,430 --> 00:13:36,800 As many of their friends highly brame, where belong to the first generation of adults born in Addis Ababa to families they originated elsewhere. 131 00:13:36,800 --> 00:13:43,010 Their parents were amongst the many who migrated during the 1960s to the 1980s from the rural area, 132 00:13:43,010 --> 00:13:46,850 and they came to constitute the bulk of the population of the city will be. 133 00:13:46,850 --> 00:13:51,350 Tyler's mother came from the Amhara region, northern Ethiopia, when she was very young. 134 00:13:51,350 --> 00:13:56,750 In this, she gradually became involved in commercial sex to support herself and later her sons. 135 00:13:56,750 --> 00:14:03,560 And a few years later, Hammett, Ibrahim's father, followed the migration routes that historically brought grog and men from the 136 00:14:03,560 --> 00:14:09,470 southern west of the country to work as a seasonal workers or traders in others. 137 00:14:09,470 --> 00:14:16,700 Ahmed started shining shoes, then became a waiter. Nepotism when he was has been working ever ever since. 138 00:14:16,700 --> 00:14:24,320 So a son of an educated rural migrants at the bottom of a society honey brain could hardly consider themselves well-off. 139 00:14:24,320 --> 00:14:29,120 Yet they experience a marginality didn't result inevitably from their parents. 140 00:14:29,120 --> 00:14:33,050 Lack of means the parents actually had achieved a small but valid social 141 00:14:33,050 --> 00:14:38,210 improvement relative to the radical sagacity of the rural areas they came from. 142 00:14:38,210 --> 00:14:38,870 In principle, 143 00:14:38,870 --> 00:14:47,210 being born in the city within a trajectory of relative social improvements with access to education from which their parents have been excluded, 144 00:14:47,210 --> 00:14:52,930 Ibrahim and highly were a step ahead of the previous generation or, despite his clear advantage, highly. 145 00:14:52,930 --> 00:14:59,880 A brainstorm found out in embarking on a trajectory of improvements at least comparable to their parents was. 146 00:14:59,880 --> 00:15:06,030 Was difficult or even impossible as a members of the generation that came to a came of age during the 147 00:15:06,030 --> 00:15:11,880 socialist socialist regime that were meant to be beneficiaries of an expanding education system. 148 00:15:11,880 --> 00:15:20,490 But the visions of progress and social mobility that long characterised these courses in education were oddly reflected in their own experiences. 149 00:15:20,490 --> 00:15:27,900 As I put it, school was fake was a place to avoid, rather than one where a vision of a better future could be cultivated. 150 00:15:27,900 --> 00:15:33,840 Ibrahim remembered studying in overcrowded classes led by underpaid and other motivated teachers. 151 00:15:33,840 --> 00:15:40,740 He blames neighbour Natalia Minibus driver echoed many disenchanted, resentful recollections of school days. 152 00:15:40,740 --> 00:15:51,330 For me, teachers were called so leaving school and finding themselves out there looking for ways to get by was a conjunction of potential change. 153 00:15:51,330 --> 00:15:57,810 Engaging in the illegal street economy of the summer by necessity provided the dream and Heida with ways of getting by. 154 00:15:57,810 --> 00:16:02,180 So getting all of us should not simply be considered as a generic attempt to survive. 155 00:16:02,180 --> 00:16:08,580 The main argument of the book the spending time on the streets these young men, when they were young, build their networks, 156 00:16:08,580 --> 00:16:18,510 as well as elaborate on the sense of self-worth revolving around their ideas and practises of three smartness characterised locally as being Arab. 157 00:16:18,510 --> 00:16:24,520 The Arabic is the name of inner city area where highly brame grew up and lived. 158 00:16:24,520 --> 00:16:31,530 That's why I spend most of my time doing my fieldwork and this coincidence between the name of a place and ideas. 159 00:16:31,530 --> 00:16:39,870 Martinus is not just the case of an enemy, but expressed the need and connexion that my performance felt existed between hub and history 160 00:16:39,870 --> 00:16:45,720 of poverty and scarcity and ideas of smartness and urban sophistication they cultivated. 161 00:16:45,720 --> 00:16:49,880 So being a writer voice, the deep fascination they felt with the ability of the hustler, 162 00:16:49,880 --> 00:16:56,880 resistance to make do and importantly with ease or a capacity to lead smartly through condition of marginality. 163 00:16:56,880 --> 00:17:02,370 However, this is not as straightforward as putting it in now. 164 00:17:02,370 --> 00:17:09,370 Since the 1960s, being a rather, they noted the sociability that pervaded the suburbs, cafes, bars and restaurants. 165 00:17:09,370 --> 00:17:18,300 Now why the definition of Radha is a person of fashion, leisure and style rather is a social hero who fights back in a bar brawl. 166 00:17:18,300 --> 00:17:22,090 The people were telling me this or something side of those who cannot defend themselves. 167 00:17:22,090 --> 00:17:27,330 So this kind of narrative of urban smartness and generosity, 168 00:17:27,330 --> 00:17:34,980 but also a trickster is my personal man or woman who knows how to make things happen, and sometimes it will happen. 169 00:17:34,980 --> 00:17:46,440 However, inner city residents were ready to argue that not all rather are the same, and not all around us could equally claim to be true urbanites. 170 00:17:46,440 --> 00:17:54,600 The way, gentlemen rather people say, using turmeric than barnyard other and thug rather do Riera, then Amharic. 171 00:17:54,600 --> 00:18:01,860 So then banal women's like customer bio, even pork patron and convey the sense of propolis manners, 172 00:18:01,860 --> 00:18:05,730 gallantry style that made the person a proper urbanites. 173 00:18:05,730 --> 00:18:12,900 So being a proper urbanites, a proper arada embody the idea of sophistication in emerging urban middle class made up of students, 174 00:18:12,900 --> 00:18:18,650 intellectual artists, singers, members of the restructuring, government officials claim for themselves. 175 00:18:18,650 --> 00:18:30,810 In the 1940s and in the 1970s. But so clearly being a sakurada at thugs ma person is a completely different way of understanding ideas of the city. 176 00:18:30,810 --> 00:18:39,870 And this idea existed alongside the sight of gentlemen and the ideas of sophistication for my performance amongst hustler, 177 00:18:39,870 --> 00:18:48,360 hustlers and thugs, a pickpocket, a con artist, a robber urbanites because they master the street smartness and street knowledge. 178 00:18:48,360 --> 00:18:51,600 And that is one of my form on the street tourist guide, 179 00:18:51,600 --> 00:18:59,660 which eating tourist told me I rather the ones who understand other people say pickpockets is a smart way of being rather first. 180 00:18:59,660 --> 00:19:03,750 You have to understand the brain of the person than its body. 181 00:19:03,750 --> 00:19:07,830 Then you will choose your targets and simulate brain told me. 182 00:19:07,830 --> 00:19:13,320 A small person, of course, will be a criminal. You already know this. 183 00:19:13,320 --> 00:19:21,510 So in a way, it is more kind of the life experiences and the fact that the middle class idea of urban sophistication 184 00:19:21,510 --> 00:19:30,480 coexisted with fox smartness doesn't tell just about the kind of history of social differentiation in the city, 185 00:19:30,480 --> 00:19:44,820 but also the way how appropriating the term an identity that was central in the way the city defined ideas of urbanity felt something important 186 00:19:44,820 --> 00:19:59,430 about how a group of marginalised men in that case tried to assert their presence in the urban space while encouraging action and exclusion. 187 00:19:59,430 --> 00:20:03,380 However, they face the predicament they grounded the action in flirtation with street 188 00:20:03,380 --> 00:20:08,270 violence and engagement with illicit activities and sometimes criminal offences, 189 00:20:08,270 --> 00:20:16,910 flirtation with performances of male bravery or physical toughness. Mystery Life a gendered place, both a very violent one. 190 00:20:16,910 --> 00:20:21,170 However, thugs might be tough, but not necessarily rough. 191 00:20:21,170 --> 00:20:30,380 Nor and nor were they bad about drugs. We recognise this as Mob Sakurada and not just the violent thug means embodying a certain balance, 192 00:20:30,380 --> 00:20:36,080 though problematic, regulate the performance of street violence through this mediate and regulate the street. 193 00:20:36,080 --> 00:20:42,410 Violence through life appealed to men like Harley Breen, not because it gave them opportunities to be violent or masculine, 194 00:20:42,410 --> 00:20:48,680 but it gave marginalised men a way of asserting them presence in the city while obtaining and is a classic argument, 195 00:20:48,680 --> 00:20:52,160 a certain degree of respect worth pointing out. 196 00:20:52,160 --> 00:21:00,980 This is how involved ministry life to the level of respect doesn't mean endorsing toughness and street violence as a legitimate grounds for action. 197 00:21:00,980 --> 00:21:08,240 Conversely, means to the essential question struggle behind it with front of an owner with a pillow cry and hustling a street. 198 00:21:08,240 --> 00:21:13,670 Violence for Holly Bream and many others is embedded in a search for somewhere else. 199 00:21:13,670 --> 00:21:23,600 As for something else, if Anon acknowledges this is not a joke, it can be a struggle in which one must be willing to accept the compulsion of death. 200 00:21:23,600 --> 00:21:31,790 Invisible the solution both the possibility of the impossible argue that this temptation to play with the possibility of the impossible 201 00:21:31,790 --> 00:21:39,110 appeal to highly breman generations of marginalised men before them and involved because it gave them an opportunity to experiment. 202 00:21:39,110 --> 00:21:44,900 We will pull people could be and could do in the face of a condition of marginality and exclusion. 203 00:21:44,900 --> 00:21:52,730 So being a rather give them a language not to question poverty and exclusion something impossible, but to live bravely through it. 204 00:21:52,730 --> 00:21:58,610 So at the end of the 1990s, Raymond Hollis French history life culminated with the making of their own group. 205 00:21:58,610 --> 00:22:07,340 They own then use gang also because they don't use the term themselves, and it was called the most mark, those one destined to die. 206 00:22:07,340 --> 00:22:11,690 And the group gained certain fame on the streets in that its name was no self assumed. 207 00:22:11,690 --> 00:22:15,080 People in the neighbourhood called them because of the defined style smoking, 208 00:22:15,080 --> 00:22:19,970 weed heavy drinking, as well as the ability of navigating the street economy. 209 00:22:19,970 --> 00:22:24,050 So the game added, like many other three groups in all, this didn't last for long. 210 00:22:24,050 --> 00:22:28,040 But the early 2000, just a couple of years after the group was formed, 211 00:22:28,040 --> 00:22:35,210 some of its members met the destiny spelled in the name of the group, who was amongst the youngest in the group. 212 00:22:35,210 --> 00:22:39,080 It was just 19 when he was found hanged from the ceiling of his house. 213 00:22:39,080 --> 00:22:43,880 Samson and Stefanos soon followed when the spread of HIV aids in the inner city, 214 00:22:43,880 --> 00:22:49,190 and members of that you must be dead when only the ones to die during those years important piece of the history of streets, 215 00:22:49,190 --> 00:22:57,530 streets and rather with vanishing. In the early 2000s, under the acts of illness, violent deaths and government repression. 216 00:22:57,530 --> 00:22:59,450 So looking back to these days, 217 00:22:59,450 --> 00:23:07,830 Ibrahim and highly recommended the deaths of their close friends seemed both like a warning about the risk inherent in living a tough life and push, 218 00:23:07,830 --> 00:23:13,970 and became a push to find a way out of off street life. 219 00:23:13,970 --> 00:23:18,170 So while Ibrahim and his friends have been struggling to change lives. 220 00:23:18,170 --> 00:23:21,440 That's when I entered in and in their lives. 221 00:23:21,440 --> 00:23:28,280 The Ethiopian economy has been booming, and the capital city of Islamabad has witnessed a dramatic transformation, 222 00:23:28,280 --> 00:23:32,840 and the early 1990s business reports and media accounts portrayed Africa. 223 00:23:32,840 --> 00:23:41,150 Poverty is a threat to rich countries. Ethiopia was the symbol global symbol of famine and in crisis. 224 00:23:41,150 --> 00:23:42,680 But 20 years later, Africa, 225 00:23:42,680 --> 00:23:50,750 because economic growth is described as bringing the promise of an ongoing expansion of opportunities for investment and wealth across the globe. 226 00:23:50,750 --> 00:23:56,960 And because of its success, Ethiopia has been described as a model and development circles and parts of the academic community. 227 00:23:56,960 --> 00:24:01,670 A growing number of studies and developmental, patrimonial and poverty reduction. 228 00:24:01,670 --> 00:24:05,810 I've seen Ethiopia and other African success stories as constituting a political 229 00:24:05,810 --> 00:24:10,580 and developmental laboratory for ideas and formulas for growth in the continent. 230 00:24:10,580 --> 00:24:15,870 So. For this, callers, Ethiopia, for a while until recently, 231 00:24:15,870 --> 00:24:23,100 was a laboratory for the emergence of a of an alternative to the neoliberal orthodoxies of the markets. 232 00:24:23,100 --> 00:24:28,590 However, growth, as you all know, is not for all social inequalities are on the rise. 233 00:24:28,590 --> 00:24:35,970 Stability in the British ruling party significant influence the economy being strictly grounded in authoritarian politics. 234 00:24:35,970 --> 00:24:40,740 Someone will argue that Abiomed is challenging. 235 00:24:40,740 --> 00:24:44,970 That's only partly, but we can talk about that bit later. 236 00:24:44,970 --> 00:24:49,860 But then this kind of political stability is actually constrains the emergence of political competitors. 237 00:24:49,860 --> 00:24:56,880 And until recently, but more are still now the ability of ordinary citizens to affect policy. 238 00:24:56,880 --> 00:25:05,460 So in a way, economic growth and development and offered Ibraheem nothing to build on for that change, for their wish for change. 239 00:25:05,460 --> 00:25:08,340 For most of their lives, they occupy the lower tiers of the economy. 240 00:25:08,340 --> 00:25:14,670 In some moments, wage labour only occasionally have to be able to access even the high level three business, 241 00:25:14,670 --> 00:25:18,540 such as fencing, stolen goods and the word of a legit businessman. 242 00:25:18,540 --> 00:25:24,390 Why was, for the most part, to distance in the origin of the possibilities? 243 00:25:24,390 --> 00:25:33,480 In my interlocutors reckoning, the economy was dominated by the logic that relatives are with relatives and donkeys with ashes. 244 00:25:33,480 --> 00:25:41,310 There is this proverb the met Kazemi do an air. Come do this to say people who are connected are likely to help each other while 245 00:25:41,310 --> 00:25:46,350 living those who are outside their networks with nothing more than ashes. 246 00:25:46,350 --> 00:25:55,350 Development participation the buzz words of other government approaches to poverty since the mid-2000s 2000s soon became also part of the problem. 247 00:25:55,350 --> 00:26:00,210 The cooperatives of parking guys Holly Ibrahim work for when a part of a broader political strategy 248 00:26:00,210 --> 00:26:06,450 of the ruling party to capture the unemployed youth of an intense moment of political conflict. 249 00:26:06,450 --> 00:26:14,070 In 2005, Ibrahim and highly were amongst the many who joined government repression programmes in the years following the riots, 250 00:26:14,070 --> 00:26:24,330 either out of fear of imprisonment. 2005 200 people were killed in the streets and thousands detained in in in the capital and other major towns. 251 00:26:24,330 --> 00:26:31,470 Either was OK, so they joined other out of fear of imprisonment or sought to make ends meet by joining these problems, 252 00:26:31,470 --> 00:26:37,200 highly bringing their regular income, but also became dependent on the government, the ruling party for their survival. 253 00:26:37,200 --> 00:26:42,720 Even though they were not supporters of the ruling party, they understood they wanted to keep their jobs the way expected. 254 00:26:42,720 --> 00:26:47,670 Indeed, required to act as their supporters and to show up at meetings and rallies. 255 00:26:47,670 --> 00:26:53,010 So the implementation of development programmes enabled the ruling party to expand its reach in the population, 256 00:26:53,010 --> 00:26:57,420 mobilise a significant number of people. The kind of reach is still there. At the same time, 257 00:26:57,420 --> 00:27:00,600 these problems didn't necessarily affect the cleavages the limited the breman height 258 00:27:00,600 --> 00:27:06,720 in the peace access to business networks is parking guys and government operatives. 259 00:27:06,720 --> 00:27:10,020 Honey brings the kunai back and trajectories of social mobility. 260 00:27:10,020 --> 00:27:16,500 They continue to be marginal actors of the cities and inner city economies while experiencing 261 00:27:16,500 --> 00:27:21,780 the increased pervasiveness of the really important parameters of political control. 262 00:27:21,780 --> 00:27:26,190 So access to inner city business community was fundamentally closed. 263 00:27:26,190 --> 00:27:34,410 Ali Ibrahim had the opportunity, but then lost the plot not much time because on one end he was squandering money on the streets. 264 00:27:34,410 --> 00:27:42,930 When he was selling shoes, both cited to have useful networks to build up as as often as his luck in a way. 265 00:27:42,930 --> 00:27:48,340 So when in business community was closed, development programmes failed to provide opportunities for social improvements. 266 00:27:48,340 --> 00:27:52,500 However, over the years that I've known them. Really, 267 00:27:52,500 --> 00:27:56,640 the construction of high rise buildings and increase of ability of resources 268 00:27:56,640 --> 00:28:02,640 and goods will continue triggering expectation and desire for social mobility, 269 00:28:02,640 --> 00:28:07,560 and they were fascinated by the promises of abundance the economic growth offered. 270 00:28:07,560 --> 00:28:16,770 Yeah, the persistence of the own marginality made them wonder about the actual foundation of this wealth, sexism, power, tons of time, 271 00:28:16,770 --> 00:28:24,780 how they breathe and why the circles of friends, neighbours, relatives, men and women questioning the moral authenticity of wealth and politics. 272 00:28:24,780 --> 00:28:30,120 The pillars of the country's economic growth has been randon the self-administer of business people, 273 00:28:30,120 --> 00:28:37,560 the practise of the rich and super rich and the fakeness of politics is a site of opportunism and deception. 274 00:28:37,560 --> 00:28:40,530 As anthropologist Sasha Nuvo will put it, the people I talk to, 275 00:28:40,530 --> 00:28:47,100 so development and economic growth as a B+ development was a bluff because recognised as the outcome of illicit, 276 00:28:47,100 --> 00:28:53,100 immoral practises, businesspeople were described as hustling and cheating just as the hustlers did. 277 00:28:53,100 --> 00:28:57,450 Rich people turn to sorceress to unleash spirits and magic for personal enrichment, 278 00:28:57,450 --> 00:29:06,270 and business elites and politicians were seen as rubbing shoulders and to dodge taxes and accumulate wealth beyond the facade of party politics. 279 00:29:06,270 --> 00:29:13,020 So this critical account was far from nuanced, was far was grounded in rumours and perceptions. 280 00:29:13,020 --> 00:29:20,010 Yet the critical selfishness and the greed of businesspeople as powerful a moral indictment of the logic of the relatives with relatives 281 00:29:20,010 --> 00:29:27,510 and donkey ashes that they so produce in the condition of exclusion and the stunning wealth is embedded in occult practises was a way, 282 00:29:27,510 --> 00:29:36,180 of course, making sense that apparently inexplicable emergence of wealth in a country where extreme poverty still existed. 283 00:29:36,180 --> 00:29:40,950 The images of businesspeople and politicians rubbing shoulders were grounded in a widely shared 284 00:29:40,950 --> 00:29:46,110 perception of intimate connexions between politic and business politics and business in the country, 285 00:29:46,110 --> 00:29:50,640 and finally seen politics as fake was a way of questioning how celebration of human 286 00:29:50,640 --> 00:29:57,330 success story remaining commensurate with their own experiences of political subjugation. 287 00:29:57,330 --> 00:30:04,200 So philosopher Ashley Bender argued that the colony is a site of illicit cohabitation and conviviality, 288 00:30:04,200 --> 00:30:10,380 making attitudes towards power and wealth widely shared between the ruled and the rulers. 289 00:30:10,380 --> 00:30:20,370 In a similar vein, such a new one showed how Ivorian hustlers saw a sort of continuity between the hustling and the possibility of success. 290 00:30:20,370 --> 00:30:28,140 Presenting this to colleagues at work in Kenya. Kenyan politicians describe themselves as hustlers and be very proud of that. 291 00:30:28,140 --> 00:30:32,760 But unless you get to some of us shores, a very radically different reality, 292 00:30:32,760 --> 00:30:39,030 no doubt highly brame and many others people in my field site wanted to be rich and powerful. 293 00:30:39,030 --> 00:30:43,710 I guess I shared that desire as well, but the existence of a critique of power, 294 00:30:43,710 --> 00:30:47,970 wealth and success reveals how my interlocutors saw fundamental incommensurate 295 00:30:47,970 --> 00:30:53,010 ability between the spaces of the existence and the logics that delivered success. 296 00:30:53,010 --> 00:30:57,300 I like the Ivorian hustlers or the Kenyan hustlers. 297 00:30:57,300 --> 00:31:02,580 My informants felt they could not join the bluff of development and economic growth. 298 00:31:02,580 --> 00:31:06,120 Sure, that were hustling and bluffing is the domain of the hustler. 299 00:31:06,120 --> 00:31:11,230 But I also felt that they didn't have the resources to play the big game of faking and cheating. 300 00:31:11,230 --> 00:31:16,230 This all rich people playing is, he put it, we are better squeezed. 301 00:31:16,230 --> 00:31:22,020 We gamble with no money. We don't have opportunities. We don't have a past, present or future. 302 00:31:22,020 --> 00:31:28,410 So they thought there was a big divide between the small hassling of the survivors and the big cheating of the wealthy, 303 00:31:28,410 --> 00:31:33,300 and that divide could not be crossed. Meanwhile, in the inner city others, 304 00:31:33,300 --> 00:31:42,510 the inability for hustlers to join the bluff of the wealth and the powerful resulted in actually questioning of the actual smartness of the street. 305 00:31:42,510 --> 00:31:48,510 Orada, the Sakurada, and increasingly, as an increasing number of people turn towards the vision of abundance and wealth 306 00:31:48,510 --> 00:31:52,740 of the city offer to elaborate ideas of desirable and achievable futures. 307 00:31:52,740 --> 00:32:00,060 My informants witness actually why the questions of the unclean claim to smartness many in the city have begun to argue that rather 308 00:32:00,060 --> 00:32:08,640 than smart people are no longer those who can live smartly through poverty and scarcity models was smart enough to get away from it. 309 00:32:08,640 --> 00:32:17,730 These emerging conceptualisation Dorado, the urbanites are those who become rich and not those or remain poor. 310 00:32:17,730 --> 00:32:22,500 So this questioning of the smartness of the rot on the face of the blossoming of the powerful 311 00:32:22,500 --> 00:32:30,930 provided the reason why my informants were so concerns of questioning the morality of development. 312 00:32:30,930 --> 00:32:38,130 My informants critique of economic growth was an attempt to recapture a sense of self-worth to recognition of the moral ambiguities. 313 00:32:38,130 --> 00:32:42,990 The moral ambiguities of their own hustling was nothing compared to the politicians and 314 00:32:42,990 --> 00:32:49,800 businesspeople were believed to be accumulating between the facade of development and politics. 315 00:32:49,800 --> 00:32:55,280 So in these circumstances, my. Informants felt they could do was call the bluff. 316 00:32:55,280 --> 00:32:57,960 Oh, naming something other than themselves. 317 00:32:57,960 --> 00:33:07,410 So characterising power and wealth as something other was not full, followed by sort of internalisation of embodiments of of the powerful. 318 00:33:07,410 --> 00:33:15,510 Although, as you know, most of the kind of debate kind of studies of the marginalised and oppressed in post-colonial Africa tend to argue. 319 00:33:15,510 --> 00:33:19,410 Conversely, by recognising the bluff as something other than themselves, 320 00:33:19,410 --> 00:33:26,520 my former sought to exercise externalise and was simply morally and existentially disengaged from what the recall this recall, 321 00:33:26,520 --> 00:33:34,620 regardless to be the source of the condition or social exclusion. Such moves lead the naturalise and challenge the status quo. 322 00:33:34,620 --> 00:33:44,040 Yet they became so it became so for elaboration of a critique. They've formed how hardy bream positioned himself in wider society, 323 00:33:44,040 --> 00:33:51,150 a question the limits imposed on them by patterns of social differentiation and political authoritarianism. 324 00:33:51,150 --> 00:33:57,030 So by calling the bluff and morally distancing themselves from the forces producing the condition of oppression and subjugation, 325 00:33:57,030 --> 00:34:04,200 Mentalhood leaders made themselves into war. Anthropologist Penny Harvey Hannah Knox, described as an impossible public, 326 00:34:04,200 --> 00:34:10,800 impossible publics are characterised by the right's politics of refusal enacted by those who was Mozo. 327 00:34:10,800 --> 00:34:16,920 Arguments step outside the frame of established, established debates or altogether. 328 00:34:16,920 --> 00:34:25,770 So there was being a completely different language and kind of work. My filmography is kind of understands where the language came from. 329 00:34:25,770 --> 00:34:31,350 So the protagonist, the protagonist of this book, they find their position in society in relation of the relation of incommensurate 330 00:34:31,350 --> 00:34:35,910 ability with the narratives and discourses that pervaded the country development. 331 00:34:35,910 --> 00:34:44,610 Why would they critique was not just oppositional? You'll sort them also to re-imagine ways of re-engaging with this imaginaries of improvements, 332 00:34:44,610 --> 00:34:53,940 the current logics of power and wealth than I to them and impossible public is not always inevitably a counter public expression of austerity. 333 00:34:53,940 --> 00:34:59,610 Refusal aversion and claims of income and stability also reflect an underlying search for being 334 00:34:59,610 --> 00:35:06,330 otherwise engaged with the desires and aspirations from which marginalised people remain excluded. 335 00:35:06,330 --> 00:35:11,410 So elaborating, a moral indictment of the source of their predicament was central in the way mindset 336 00:35:11,410 --> 00:35:20,520 leaders sought to restate the possibility for being somewhere else and for something else. 337 00:35:20,520 --> 00:35:27,390 So such kind of critique can potentially be immobilising rather lead to recognition of the 338 00:35:27,390 --> 00:35:34,080 inevitability of subjugation and oppression and the possibility of action in the hope. 339 00:35:34,080 --> 00:35:37,800 That's more, you know, should Bamberg throw the weight around. 340 00:35:37,800 --> 00:35:44,110 Understanding the politics inside of the simulation and false compliance might result in a neutral zombification, 341 00:35:44,110 --> 00:35:51,120 he writes of the powerful and the weak way in which writers don't bifurcation mean that each each power 342 00:35:51,120 --> 00:35:57,720 from the weak robbed the other of the vitality and leaving them both impotent and on the streets. 343 00:35:57,720 --> 00:36:01,890 I the city of this of a the ten years I've been working on. 344 00:36:01,890 --> 00:36:07,020 The heaviness of constraints imposed on myself through this action and the sense of inevitability 345 00:36:07,020 --> 00:36:11,820 that pervaded the experience of subjugation and exclusion were often so overwhelming. 346 00:36:11,820 --> 00:36:19,050 The immobility, self-destruction or even death appeared inevitable or even desirable. 347 00:36:19,050 --> 00:36:30,600 Some tragically succumb to this. Over the ten years I've had tons of stories, suicides and in recognition the condition of the nature. 348 00:36:30,600 --> 00:36:38,760 The reason of such a pain is very important. The kind of the classic ways of understanding this is to understand this kind of pain and 349 00:36:38,760 --> 00:36:48,900 self-destruction mobility as a result of precariousness or inability to imagine what next for myself. 350 00:36:48,900 --> 00:36:57,900 This, however, uncertainty the idea of not knowing was next was perceived as enabling them to think of their lives as something else. 351 00:36:57,900 --> 00:37:02,510 Paradoxically, what was known was actually bleak and overwhelming distress, 352 00:37:02,510 --> 00:37:08,070 overwhelmingly distressing because reading them, giving them grounds for imagining a better life. 353 00:37:08,070 --> 00:37:11,580 Pain, anxiety and madness were interpreted, by the way, 354 00:37:11,580 --> 00:37:17,700 but a potential obsession of making sense of what they saw and they knew and experienced friends. 355 00:37:17,700 --> 00:37:21,750 The death of one town came as a huge shock to many. 356 00:37:21,750 --> 00:37:27,330 Santorum was in his mid 20s. He was very good friends to the learner alliance says, You know this, 357 00:37:27,330 --> 00:37:33,270 and many people amongst his friends and acquaintances knew that he was heavy drinker and he should actually stop drinking. 358 00:37:33,270 --> 00:37:38,310 He kept drinking. Iraqia very strong local struggle, local brandy. 359 00:37:38,310 --> 00:37:45,600 For this reason, many thought I'd-I'd interpretation was that Funcao drank itself out of existence. 360 00:37:45,600 --> 00:37:51,390 His death was taken to be a consequence of it. He was thinking too much friends. 361 00:37:51,390 --> 00:37:57,390 What died or gone mad were most dramatic rebound of the potential consequences of too much thinking people, 362 00:37:57,390 --> 00:38:03,650 creative ways of living to anxiety about the reversibility of the condition of poverty. 363 00:38:03,650 --> 00:38:08,070 Ibrahim appeal to its ability to forget. He told me I was quite stressed. 364 00:38:08,070 --> 00:38:12,450 I was getting sick was the end of my fieldwork before coming here to Oxford. It's all you know. 365 00:38:12,450 --> 00:38:16,440 It's nice that you think about what you need to do, but don't do it too much. 366 00:38:16,440 --> 00:38:21,030 People get crazy for much for for my thinking. I like my brains. 367 00:38:21,030 --> 00:38:25,740 It is incredible. I can't forget things. These make things easier. 368 00:38:25,740 --> 00:38:33,720 So forgetting exercising one capacity to deal with the problems, but components of a form of social reflexivity, a discipline of the self. 369 00:38:33,720 --> 00:38:40,200 There was brand in the recognition that we are thrown in the world without control of the circumstances of our existence. 370 00:38:40,200 --> 00:38:46,950 For four months, the essential choice was not just to be or not to be, but to do something or to do nothing and be in the world. 371 00:38:46,950 --> 00:38:53,760 Slipping away from it through madness or death was perceived to be dependent on this ability to deal with this dilemma. 372 00:38:53,760 --> 00:38:58,750 So what? Not knowing what was next was a reason to have hope. 373 00:38:58,750 --> 00:39:03,000 What they hoped for was touching change. But do they conceptualise that change? 374 00:39:03,000 --> 00:39:06,960 Remains specifies. So in anthropology, 375 00:39:06,960 --> 00:39:13,560 there is an increasing concern with this thought in the future and imagination of the future at the right talks about ideas of the good life 376 00:39:13,560 --> 00:39:20,940 and my four months with a clear idea of the good life which was on the high rise steel and glass buildings dotting the some of the landscape. 377 00:39:20,940 --> 00:39:26,280 They did dream about wealth and success, but didn't spend much thinking about that. 378 00:39:26,280 --> 00:39:32,890 How their life could be in a context where abundance of what were unreachable, inexplicable visions of a good life were rally. 379 00:39:32,890 --> 00:39:37,590 Imagine as an actual plans to pursue in the present and the future, 380 00:39:37,590 --> 00:39:45,420 the possibility of achieving a better life in the future was dependent on chances and not dreams. 381 00:39:45,420 --> 00:39:52,590 A chance is a definition is a stroke of fortune and events on a series of events, which is unpredictable. 382 00:39:52,590 --> 00:39:55,790 But when happens, you will take your life in a direction you will not. 383 00:39:55,790 --> 00:40:05,640 I expected to use the term in the. About the way interesting why the idea of success of change red unspecified is the notion of chance was 384 00:40:05,640 --> 00:40:12,570 very precise is wrong in a deep configuration of meanings revolving around nations with God and morality. 385 00:40:12,570 --> 00:40:19,980 Chances are they're understood as a gift of gods such as that because it's dependence on God inscrutable will. 386 00:40:19,980 --> 00:40:24,960 So much bigger than predictability of existence is therefore an expression of this great ability of God 387 00:40:24,960 --> 00:40:30,330 and the fact that what will happen only God knows yet doesn't mean that individuals are powerless. 388 00:40:30,330 --> 00:40:38,250 My four months believe that they could do was to cultivate a good relationship with God, basically the loyalty to him with prayers and religious acts. 389 00:40:38,250 --> 00:40:41,400 But however, gaining God's favour was not an easy thing to do, 390 00:40:41,400 --> 00:40:47,940 especially all the things that were doing the way you know that past present involvement in legal street life, 391 00:40:47,940 --> 00:40:56,040 they stole and cheated hostels, and this was their way of not something that could present I could be proud of in front of God. 392 00:40:56,040 --> 00:41:02,190 So how could they reconcile their ability to gain the favour of gods that dispense of chances? 393 00:41:02,190 --> 00:41:08,430 One, of course, was to pray to a good relationship with God through religious acts going to church. 394 00:41:08,430 --> 00:41:15,890 They were all the Christians on be committed to know about Islam as Muslim and framed it on top of their commitment religious life. 395 00:41:15,890 --> 00:41:19,620 My for my soul to turn to an exercise of moral flexibility. 396 00:41:19,620 --> 00:41:27,210 And the conversation I had with them about how they evaluated their deeds echoed what philosopher debated about moral block, 397 00:41:27,210 --> 00:41:33,540 whether or not what people do in a situation outside their control can be an object of moral judgement. 398 00:41:33,540 --> 00:41:41,790 So they argued that the bad acts were the result of a contingencies of their lives, as such, not subject to clear moral judgement. 399 00:41:41,790 --> 00:41:48,270 You can choose to be poor, and they believed when you are poor, you need to do what you need to do in order to get by. 400 00:41:48,270 --> 00:41:53,760 So by recognising the limits of the action, rather by arguing that you don't have control of the circumstances of the lives, 401 00:41:53,760 --> 00:42:02,520 may four months thought of themselves as moral subjects who could rightfully claim a chance from God. 402 00:42:02,520 --> 00:42:08,700 Of course, this is kind of this. Then on that basis, they knew that had they knew that they had work to do. 403 00:42:08,700 --> 00:42:14,010 So being able to get the chance was fundamentally a matter of innovating, then the contingency of lives, 404 00:42:14,010 --> 00:42:20,490 as they put it, was a matter of moving around in secrecy and my performance kept moving. 405 00:42:20,490 --> 00:42:27,540 The proverbial parking guys, for instance, is still there. But many of its members, including Johnny Bream, have been trying to find a way out of it, 406 00:42:27,540 --> 00:42:33,660 either by finding replacements to work for them and continue to receive receive a share of the salary, 407 00:42:33,660 --> 00:42:39,950 or by asking the government to give them money as part of the capital, the cooperative parking guys that it has saved. 408 00:42:39,950 --> 00:42:43,020 Ibrahim found the replacement work for him at The Co-operative, 409 00:42:43,020 --> 00:42:47,640 handing him two thirds of his salary at the end of the month and keeping the difference. 410 00:42:47,640 --> 00:42:53,820 This gave him more time enabled him to combine is one salary with his take on his mobile phone business. 411 00:42:53,820 --> 00:42:56,730 At the same time, however, his income was not very different. 412 00:42:56,730 --> 00:43:04,680 The that the arrangements made him feel that it was free to consider the other option and 413 00:43:04,680 --> 00:43:09,750 eventually quit the co-operative without getting a share of the capital is saved over the years. 414 00:43:09,750 --> 00:43:10,050 It is. 415 00:43:10,050 --> 00:43:17,610 He did pull resources for his sister to open a little container shop in the streets in the government scheme of small scale commercial activities. 416 00:43:17,610 --> 00:43:23,550 In 2015, Heidi was taking talking about his family's shop with pride and excitement. 417 00:43:23,550 --> 00:43:28,440 It was selling small items from chewing gums to bottles of water. 418 00:43:28,440 --> 00:43:39,540 Unfortunately, by 2017, a mood about family shop and radically change realised that the family shop is simply replace one meagre income with another. 419 00:43:39,540 --> 00:43:45,330 The prospects of achieving life but to, as he put it, were still out of reach. 420 00:43:45,330 --> 00:43:53,910 But my performance keep kept moving. So talking about the challenges of of his life, it brings for me, though, 421 00:43:53,910 --> 00:44:02,310 and this is the kind of the base of the most important quotes for me to think about this say living is the most important thing. 422 00:44:02,310 --> 00:44:05,850 We have this life. We live it brame and many others. 423 00:44:05,850 --> 00:44:07,410 What stories are you not telling? 424 00:44:07,410 --> 00:44:16,480 The book living was important because staying alive was the ultimate condition for be able to turn down expected and uncertain into possibility. 425 00:44:16,480 --> 00:44:24,990 It gave them the sense that they still have the time to transform their life and think their life or the ways we desire 426 00:44:24,990 --> 00:44:32,720 knowledge to join an existing ethnographic critique to anthropological come the temptation to Paul to use Aristotle. 427 00:44:32,720 --> 00:44:39,330 I do not find in English as an Italian distinction between a life of just living and a life of actions. 428 00:44:39,330 --> 00:44:46,680 Philosophers such as I Gambon, for instance, have argued that desire to be emphasised is easily exploited and exploited for this, 429 00:44:46,680 --> 00:44:52,320 because when life assumes an intrinsic value and survival becomes the main concern of the subject, 430 00:44:52,320 --> 00:44:59,110 the individual is caught into mechanism governing the reproductions of regimes or subjugation. 431 00:44:59,110 --> 00:45:02,920 By narrating, I mean, I strongly disagree with the way of thinking. 432 00:45:02,920 --> 00:45:09,640 I argue that there is not much gain, much to gain in making the distinction between a life of just living and a loss of action, 433 00:45:09,640 --> 00:45:15,760 getting by surviving and not just mere experiences of letting oneself brief, but they are ultimately enabled. 434 00:45:15,760 --> 00:45:19,570 The actualisation of existence is a site of possibility. 435 00:45:19,570 --> 00:45:27,400 We can route my informants search for an endless says, illusory, fatalistic of wars, a form of a false consciousness. 436 00:45:27,400 --> 00:45:31,420 Be my guest. There is a long tradition of sociological philosophical thoughts. 437 00:45:31,420 --> 00:45:36,160 There's either portraits people desires an impediment to action or seen limited 438 00:45:36,160 --> 00:45:40,820 purpose in investigating how social actors understand their own action. 439 00:45:40,820 --> 00:45:50,470 In a recent book, Cruel Optimism. But lancement I've been pronouncing names she bases. 440 00:45:50,470 --> 00:45:54,970 But then she compared the mode of existence that the kind of things I'm writing about 441 00:45:54,970 --> 00:46:00,580 its potential symptoms of an attachment to visions and desire of a better life, 442 00:46:00,580 --> 00:46:07,990 which are cruel because wittingly or unwittingly, there are obstacles to the actual ability to achieve one's dreams. 443 00:46:07,990 --> 00:46:13,720 If you go to the ecology board, you would argue that as highly brame move the rounds, 444 00:46:13,720 --> 00:46:18,940 the choices they made and trajectories they embarked on to pursue the quest for social mobility 445 00:46:18,940 --> 00:46:26,590 wittingly or unwittingly contributed to the reproduction of the own condition of of marginality, 446 00:46:26,590 --> 00:46:33,340 surely in inner city and suburb on my informants engagements with SRI economy and notions of history, smartness, 447 00:46:33,340 --> 00:46:40,660 imagine or position of experience of exclusions and and see in a rather wear face with the 448 00:46:40,660 --> 00:46:45,670 farther they engaged amongst the hustling and cheating as malkmus and not taking them anyway. 449 00:46:45,670 --> 00:46:51,040 However, it's important to not assume that my mind informants in the case and more generally the sense 450 00:46:51,040 --> 00:46:55,720 of the possible the fact that the sense of the possible coincides with social position, 451 00:46:55,720 --> 00:46:59,740 or that there is a coincidence that the Queen's potential coincidence is the 452 00:46:59,740 --> 00:47:05,830 dependent variable in the reproduction of of of marginality and exclusion. 453 00:47:05,830 --> 00:47:12,070 Argue that the position people occupy don't necessarily and fully determine the understandings of society and the self. 454 00:47:12,070 --> 00:47:17,920 But rather, while the sense of what people can and cannot do is elaborated through the own experience of power relations. 455 00:47:17,920 --> 00:47:23,490 This doesn't mean that constrains and exclusion are naturally internalised. 456 00:47:23,490 --> 00:47:27,340 Argue that we need to take the XYZ and action, identity and inspiration seriously. 457 00:47:27,340 --> 00:47:31,780 We should not give in to the temptation to claim a sort of allegiance to any of 458 00:47:31,780 --> 00:47:37,750 the sides of the long term and to resolve debates about structure and agency. 459 00:47:37,750 --> 00:47:43,780 We should not be analytically and graphically the tensions that pervade existence of our interlocutors. 460 00:47:43,780 --> 00:47:48,850 The subject attempt to become the be it becomes something else and the constraints while living in existence. 461 00:47:48,850 --> 00:47:56,560 This firmly embedded in experience of subjugation structure, agency debates, you know, talking about this is such a 1990s things to do, 462 00:47:56,560 --> 00:48:04,510 but remains unresolved because the tension the discussion seeks to make sense of doesn't have any historical final synthesis. 463 00:48:04,510 --> 00:48:12,460 This is the tension remains as such because the subject is not a fully determined by power, not fully determining willpower. 464 00:48:12,460 --> 00:48:16,990 The tension and ambivalence remains fundamentally unresolved, making the experiences try to be something else. 465 00:48:16,990 --> 00:48:24,700 The one constraints a painful one. Yes, these tension and this endures unresolved because people stubborn acts of moving 466 00:48:24,700 --> 00:48:29,590 around is a fertile terrain for elaboration of a repertoire of practises for living, 467 00:48:29,590 --> 00:48:34,990 assessing, criticising, hiding and bypassing. It was through this repertoire in mind for months. 468 00:48:34,990 --> 00:48:42,520 Granted, the act of living into a very cruel sense of realism. externalised power is something other than themselves and distance distance 469 00:48:42,520 --> 00:48:48,520 themselves from what they identify to be the sources of their predicaments. 470 00:48:48,520 --> 00:49:04,940 So the question is, so what why I'm torturing you for for for an hour about this, so so I still have time need to tell you so what's so? 471 00:49:04,940 --> 00:49:12,280 So if you have is going through a process of political reform and opening led by the new Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's members, 472 00:49:12,280 --> 00:49:18,700 opposition parties have been released from prison and restriction of media and civil society lifted, 473 00:49:18,700 --> 00:49:24,070 resulting in a wave of optimism hope across the country. 474 00:49:24,070 --> 00:49:30,010 What are these? Reforms will entail a radical rethinking of Ethiopia's developmental model, 475 00:49:30,010 --> 00:49:34,360 whether the greater enjoyment of political rights will also result in increased ability 476 00:49:34,360 --> 00:49:42,790 of people at the bottom of urban society and rural society to affect policy is unclear. 477 00:49:42,790 --> 00:49:49,270 So Ibrahim, when I've been actually when I was writing the book was finished. 478 00:49:49,270 --> 00:49:56,350 The last bit was March 2008. That's when Abiy then came into into the picture. 479 00:49:56,350 --> 00:50:01,570 Then I basically flew into all this. And the first person I met was, of course, a brave man. 480 00:50:01,570 --> 00:50:08,380 Many told me I was stressing about how to be and how to put that into the book, and I'll be saying, Look is a good speaker, 481 00:50:08,380 --> 00:50:18,790 but if you ask me is like when you move your teapot from one fire to another and the sentence kind of reflected much of the spectrum is scepticism 482 00:50:18,790 --> 00:50:25,840 that populated the streets in inner city Addis Ibrahim and many others were sceptical because they recognise that this moment of change, 483 00:50:25,840 --> 00:50:28,210 while being kind of the way beautiful, 484 00:50:28,210 --> 00:50:34,480 doesn't necessarily result in the proliferation of chances there could indeed boost the search for an end, Denis. 485 00:50:34,480 --> 00:50:40,570 Someone will say, You know, this takes time, but you know, up by also is an opportunity for us to think about, 486 00:50:40,570 --> 00:50:47,380 you know, what we make of these experiences and whether we can actually anthropology can pull. 487 00:50:47,380 --> 00:50:52,360 Our ethnography is going to be part of the making of politics, let's say of open ended. 488 00:50:52,360 --> 00:51:03,040 This we can do that's, you know, like by just basically combining this demands for for a chance into into a nation of politics. 489 00:51:03,040 --> 00:51:05,080 Oh, we can do by just the first thing, 490 00:51:05,080 --> 00:51:14,200 which is kind of I think step is the fact that we need to stop questioning the very idea that development concern 491 00:51:14,200 --> 00:51:22,600 revolves around enabling the poor to help themselves out of poverty and take advantage of expansion of the economy. 492 00:51:22,600 --> 00:51:30,520 Amartya Sen capabilities, approach or in anthropology find the right capacities to aspire and fail the poor. 493 00:51:30,520 --> 00:51:35,860 Instead, we need to choose interventions, a commitment to provide opportunities of continuous improvement. 494 00:51:35,860 --> 00:51:44,380 Montelukast this understanding of the act of living central here, living as a fertile terrain for the of concerns, aspiration expectation, 495 00:51:44,380 --> 00:51:53,020 just central for the imagination, the political as the pursuit of justice and as a collective project to achieve a fair distribution of opportunities. 496 00:51:53,020 --> 00:51:56,890 Hari Brame and many others learn to understand that living in the city is revolving 497 00:51:56,890 --> 00:52:01,960 around the efforts to achieve a form of relative yet significant improvements. 498 00:52:01,960 --> 00:52:09,100 They expect it to be better placed than their parents, and they hope to enable their children to live a better life than they did. 499 00:52:09,100 --> 00:52:12,730 So the search for open ended us is an attempt to fulfil the way I read it. 500 00:52:12,730 --> 00:52:20,290 A sort of generational duty of incremental improvements and what was actually kind of they were concerned 501 00:52:20,290 --> 00:52:27,280 about is the fact that economic growth was not enabling them to fulfil their generational duty. 502 00:52:27,280 --> 00:52:33,400 Pursuing response to these claims for open ended demands for continuous improvements would imply questioning 503 00:52:33,400 --> 00:52:40,480 the long held idea that many objectives the the main objectives of social policy are to change people's minds, 504 00:52:40,480 --> 00:52:50,890 penalise the unworthy and the lazy, and help the deserving poor to 12 themselves out of poverty. 505 00:52:50,890 --> 00:52:55,610 A response to this restaurant idea that tackling poverty and exclusion requires a collective effort 506 00:52:55,610 --> 00:53:00,710 to question the political and social hierarchies of work which produce subjugation and exclusion, 507 00:53:00,710 --> 00:53:03,530 such as a straightforward cause for a political redistribution, 508 00:53:03,530 --> 00:53:12,200 which targets poor people as a members of society and noise barriers of some form of commendable or reprehensible morality. 509 00:53:12,200 --> 00:53:15,680 Over 10 years are spent investigating and to see the other side witness highly 510 00:53:15,680 --> 00:53:19,760 brainy and many others expressing tons of claims and demands to NGOs and 511 00:53:19,760 --> 00:53:27,470 government institutions were promptly unaddressed from giving a pot of money to each members of the parking cooperative to launch their own ventures. 512 00:53:27,470 --> 00:53:37,130 An informal economy to replace dual skill training programmes into employment oriented initiatives focussed on cooking or driving. 513 00:53:37,130 --> 00:53:42,230 All of them cast aside because others seem to be impossible or irrelevant. 514 00:53:42,230 --> 00:53:46,820 So responding to these claims and demands entails a commitment to transform the search for open, 515 00:53:46,820 --> 00:53:50,870 endless trajectory of social improvement and turning open ended. 516 00:53:50,870 --> 00:53:54,770 A sense is less about vision of the ideal future as me. 517 00:53:54,770 --> 00:54:00,980 My informants understood with their quest for openness, there is not much point in preferring a vision of the future. 518 00:54:00,980 --> 00:54:09,740 He didn't work for them, and it doesn't work when visions of the future functioned as a justification for political authoritarianism in the present. 519 00:54:09,740 --> 00:54:14,630 The very idea that you need to have a certain decades of political authoritarianism, 520 00:54:14,630 --> 00:54:19,500 then this develop produce development and then economic growth and economic growth will solve everything. 521 00:54:19,500 --> 00:54:27,860 There's a language that was quite resilient in the times of Zimbabwe and al-Amari miscellaneous still there with Abiy Ahmed. 522 00:54:27,860 --> 00:54:33,740 He said what is required is the liberation of a method can get us closer to the realisation of something better, 523 00:54:33,740 --> 00:54:39,380 moving us away from normative understanding of developments and when the better is not just 524 00:54:39,380 --> 00:54:47,210 the trade off by something imagine discussed and debated and pursued openly and collectively, 525 00:54:47,210 --> 00:54:53,900 we reach the moments, potentially when a better world is coming to be. 526 00:54:53,900 --> 00:54:55,138 OK. Thanks.