Beyond arts and pleasure to be here.
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.
And so whenever I present some kind of always quite nervous and always have in mind a piece of advice,
and David, give me as a as a supervisor, David, you might not remember it's way in Uppsala ECOS.
I was very nervous and you told me, think yourself as a rock star.
And I don't think myself as a rock star.
It's, I think myself rather as an unknown country music singer.
But on that note, I will do some of my oldies as some of my new bits from my new album.
Hope you like it! So I recorded the life histories of Ibrahim and highly.
I will introduce him in a bit. Ibrahim is 39 and 49,
is 49 through dedicated sessions of a span of nearly nine years and often thought
that I was able to create an extensive timeline of the life experiences.
However, any session I had with them often end up completely reshuffling the succession before and after.
Had previously sought it in one of our sessions in 2013.
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.
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,
namely revolving around schooling and for a period of political activists have been neither long nor intense in the eyes of my informants.
Indeed, I had ever had led a very short life. Ibrahim, instead, the person you see is not his real name, but is real.
This is him. Please don't take pictures of the picture.
So brains life has been quite long and intense. When I met he briefly in 2010, he was in his early 30s.
It recently got a job as car attendants or as people, saying at the top of a parking guy in a co-operative.
The local government office and established for the unemployed youth at his initiative was not a localised one,
was part of a broader attempt by the government to recapture the youth that supported
opposition parties in 2005 election and participated in riots and demonstrations that year.
On top of his job, Ibrahim made extra money by brokering the sales of second hand mobile phones.
But in the past,
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.
Video houses a construction worker, a guard, an assistant carpenter, stonework a crucial time successful shoe seller idea.
The second, the protagonist of the book, also claimed to have lived the very intense life.
He had been a student until 14 years of age. Then a pickpocket, a burglar and daily labourer construction sites.
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.
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.
But then when you realise this is not going to work, you return to others and you see a succession of possible lives followed.
You work as a manager with your houses, then you go [INAUDIBLE].
Because he was showing porno movies at the time, it was illegal, then enlisted as a soldier in 1998 2000.
If you have an Eritrean war and after the war ended,
it wasn't to this and they started as a veteran need to help him to, you know, have a job and new opportunities.
So he found himself hustling on the streets again.
And after then, after a few years, was invited to join a government supported cooperative producing concrete blocks for construction sites.
And this work lasted for a lot of for a while.
Until then, the co-operative closed because government was not giving them contracts, and eventually when I met him,
he was enjoying it, just joined the cooperative parking guys to support himself and his son.
So how can we examine, narrates and understands a life?
And how, as anthropologist and scholar,
can we appreciate the complex intertwining of becoming meaning politics and history and everyday life we are often after?
By taking life and living like such, those ones of highly ibrahim as a matter of an ethnographic investigation,
and Hannah Arendt expressed their concerns with actual ability of the philosopher, the scholar or rather.
The storyteller to say something meaningful. She writes on who somebody is.
Our vocabulary, she wrote, leads us a strange to say something of what is and know somebody or that somebody is so a
solution is to make sense of the tension that exists between the uniqueness of a life story.
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
beginning are affected and situated by a range of relationships in which life is experienced.
So ethnography has a valuable tradition in writing of life trajectories and exploring the
tensions between individualities and social relationships and historical constraints.
However, what to make of the lived experience is still a very open question.
You now argue that we need to go back to our Unha in question on definition of somebody is looking
at how people conceptualise and experience the intimate relations within life and the self.
So my four months used two terms to make sense of.
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.
It comes to the Baris knowable through others, in particular to the ways other people describe you and how you relate to them.
The bias that is what people have become through their experiences of life,
and you are what you have lived both so you can become what you have not lived yet.
So being is not an essence or stable position, but is realised in practise and framework to a process of endless becoming.
So it this understanding of its not just existential philosophy or psychology, but an understanding of life,
is that there's a long history in Ethiopia, especially in the Northern Ireland,
where many communities have conceptualised the life of an individual as a continuum of social
experiences and nor as a sort of well-defined succession of off stage of life stages.
So in the experience of my four months to seeing life as a continuum also resulted in appreciating life as an open moments.
So this argument again sounds like an existential philosophy.
But as Jean and John Komarov pointed out, vernacular understanding of life and personhood minded converge with traditional philosophical thoughts.
Any brain did call off afternoon's talking about his life experiences as our philosophy days.
Nevertheless, seeing life as an open moment is not just a matter of intellectual sophistication is also an ethnographic fact.
In particular, the ways of searching for an open ends can be seen experience understood by those we
write about as something central in the way they understand their own experience.
So how do we accounts for this? People search for openness.
How do we turn our phonographic appreciation of single individual searches for openness into an entry point to understand politics,
history, meaning, meanings and and contingency?
But also, how can I traffic up our appreciation of life and open and honest guides, our critical appraisal of the presence,
as well as by an anthropological contribution to the possibilities of a more just futures?
So my wider work seeks to answer these questions in the book provide all the answers.
So by it is why they're cheaper. But today, so I will seek to explore bits or try to make three fundamental points.
The first is that we need to rethink how we understand the standard marginality,
particular our tendency to rely on cunning phrasing also for the speech of this kind of handsome man.
Oh, so the candle, our tendency to rely on cunning phrasing,
analytical style to find the how to assume that whatever marginalised do they tend to reproduce
the condition of my genealogy through their own actions or event performance of resistance?
This is a kind of very dated kind of way of looking at it,
but still very common in the way anthropologists tend to understand marginalised in exclusion,
whatever that even resistance end up reproducing, marginalising the exclusion.
And then, you know, building on my own ethnography critique of this coming anthropological or
sociological interpretations of a vicious cycle between action and reproduction.
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
of living can potentially inspire so much negative appreciation of the act of living is contingent to a particular place Addis Ababa,
the capital of Ethiopia and time the decade of Africa rising.
And it's specific to the stories of two lives with the particularities of gender, location and upbringing.
The specificity characterise my examination of living noise, a description of undifferentiated and generic features of human existence, but also as.
Narration, one of many particular ways of experiencing the tension between becoming and a history,
the particularity of a given realisation does doesn't limit of its relevance.
The uniqueness of a story, as Hannah Arendt puts it, tells us about the infinite potentialities of living and existence.
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.
So as my work is about Heidi bringing most of the constituency of urban society to a part of why describe a street life,
she laughs, or is not just a synonym of whatever happens on the streets.
While a street vendor, for instance, might carry out easel activities on the streets,
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.
Who makes the difference is the extent to which people inhabiting the streets recognise themselves as a part of a wider repertoire of memories,
practises, collaborations and antagonisms that they describe as street life revolving around hustling as smartness.
So while also doing my research, I also realised that I was occupying a specific sociological niche where interpretation
and waiting and waiting could be an assumption about political and social criminalities,
often linked to youth didn't apply. The reason why this interpretation don't apply is a particular sociological dimensions of people actual waiting.
The often goes, account and account for, and it is that those who.
Often those who can wait. In other words, waiting is a Bible for those who have access to an economy of exchanges,
networks and transactions that enable them to wait for what might be a better social
opportunities and time than full day of of existence towards desired social goals.
So while that one applies to specific sociological niche for highly Bremer, many others in my own research, waiting was simply not an option.
Well, you don't have much my form and stop me.
It doesn't make much sense to spend time wondering about the future you wish for and then wait for it to come.
And and unless this is a come to the question, always get. So I'll just put it out there.
This is simply a story. At least the story I'm telling is inevitably a story of men, economies of street hustling.
I not beautiful women. And why did we search my way?
The research explore three hustling and telling the story of players of smart women and sex workers or by the book,
but also need to be aware that marginality is both produce and live.
This a fundamentally gendered experience for both serendipity and choice.
I can talk more about the questions.
My demography is an exploration of marginality within the gender coordinates of the nexus between subjectivity and subjugation.
Looking at specifically the way policy is an intervention and particularly regulating
and controlling men's behaviour in the cities and the cities in the country.
Political space. So let me tell you be about more about I will tell you the stories in full for moments.
The first one is the search for smartness and pure chance dictated that Heidi Bream was born in poor households in inner city others,
and the randomness of birth assign them to a place shaped by history of political subjugation and marginalisation.
As many of their friends highly brame, where belong to the first generation of adults born in Addis Ababa to families they originated elsewhere.
Their parents were amongst the many who migrated during the 1960s to the 1980s from the rural area,
and they came to constitute the bulk of the population of the city will be.
Tyler's mother came from the Amhara region, northern Ethiopia, when she was very young.
In this, she gradually became involved in commercial sex to support herself and later her sons.
And a few years later, Hammett, Ibrahim's father, followed the migration routes that historically brought grog and men from the
southern west of the country to work as a seasonal workers or traders in others.
Ahmed started shining shoes, then became a waiter. Nepotism when he was has been working ever ever since.
So a son of an educated rural migrants at the bottom of a society honey brain could hardly consider themselves well-off.
Yet they experience a marginality didn't result inevitably from their parents.
Lack of means the parents actually had achieved a small but valid social
improvement relative to the radical sagacity of the rural areas they came from.
In principle,
being born in the city within a trajectory of relative social improvements with access to education from which their parents have been excluded,
Ibrahim and highly were a step ahead of the previous generation or, despite his clear advantage, highly.
A brainstorm found out in embarking on a trajectory of improvements at least comparable to their parents was.
Was difficult or even impossible as a members of the generation that came to a came of age during the
socialist socialist regime that were meant to be beneficiaries of an expanding education system.
But the visions of progress and social mobility that long characterised these courses in education were oddly reflected in their own experiences.
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.
Ibrahim remembered studying in overcrowded classes led by underpaid and other motivated teachers.
He blames neighbour Natalia Minibus driver echoed many disenchanted, resentful recollections of school days.
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.
Engaging in the illegal street economy of the summer by necessity provided the dream and Heida with ways of getting by.
So getting all of us should not simply be considered as a generic attempt to survive.
The main argument of the book the spending time on the streets these young men, when they were young, build their networks,
as well as elaborate on the sense of self-worth revolving around their ideas and practises of three smartness characterised locally as being Arab.
The Arabic is the name of inner city area where highly brame grew up and lived.
That's why I spend most of my time doing my fieldwork and this coincidence between the name of a place and ideas.
Martinus is not just the case of an enemy, but expressed the need and connexion that my performance felt existed between hub and history
of poverty and scarcity and ideas of smartness and urban sophistication they cultivated.
So being a writer voice, the deep fascination they felt with the ability of the hustler,
resistance to make do and importantly with ease or a capacity to lead smartly through condition of marginality.
However, this is not as straightforward as putting it in now.
Since the 1960s, being a rather, they noted the sociability that pervaded the suburbs, cafes, bars and restaurants.
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.
The people were telling me this or something side of those who cannot defend themselves.
So this kind of narrative of urban smartness and generosity,
but also a trickster is my personal man or woman who knows how to make things happen, and sometimes it will happen.
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.
The way, gentlemen rather people say, using turmeric than barnyard other and thug rather do Riera, then Amharic.
So then banal women's like customer bio, even pork patron and convey the sense of propolis manners,
gallantry style that made the person a proper urbanites.
So being a proper urbanites, a proper arada embody the idea of sophistication in emerging urban middle class made up of students,
intellectual artists, singers, members of the restructuring, government officials claim for themselves.
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.
And this idea existed alongside the sight of gentlemen and the ideas of sophistication for my performance amongst hustler,
hustlers and thugs, a pickpocket, a con artist, a robber urbanites because they master the street smartness and street knowledge.
And that is one of my form on the street tourist guide,
which eating tourist told me I rather the ones who understand other people say pickpockets is a smart way of being rather first.
You have to understand the brain of the person than its body.
Then you will choose your targets and simulate brain told me.
A small person, of course, will be a criminal. You already know this.
So in a way, it is more kind of the life experiences and the fact that the middle class idea of urban sophistication
coexisted with fox smartness doesn't tell just about the kind of history of social differentiation in the city,
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
about how a group of marginalised men in that case tried to assert their presence in the urban space while encouraging action and exclusion.
However, they face the predicament they grounded the action in flirtation with street
violence and engagement with illicit activities and sometimes criminal offences,
flirtation with performances of male bravery or physical toughness. Mystery Life a gendered place, both a very violent one.
However, thugs might be tough, but not necessarily rough.
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,
though problematic, regulate the performance of street violence through this mediate and regulate the street.
Violence through life appealed to men like Harley Breen, not because it gave them opportunities to be violent or masculine,
but it gave marginalised men a way of asserting them presence in the city while obtaining and is a classic argument,
a certain degree of respect worth pointing out.
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.
Conversely, means to the essential question struggle behind it with front of an owner with a pillow cry and hustling a street.
Violence for Holly Bream and many others is embedded in a search for somewhere else.
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.
Invisible the solution both the possibility of the impossible argue that this temptation to play with the possibility of the impossible
appeal to highly breman generations of marginalised men before them and involved because it gave them an opportunity to experiment.
We will pull people could be and could do in the face of a condition of marginality and exclusion.
So being a rather give them a language not to question poverty and exclusion something impossible, but to live bravely through it.
So at the end of the 1990s, Raymond Hollis French history life culminated with the making of their own group.
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.
And the group gained certain fame on the streets in that its name was no self assumed.
People in the neighbourhood called them because of the defined style smoking,
weed heavy drinking, as well as the ability of navigating the street economy.
So the game added, like many other three groups in all, this didn't last for long.
But the early 2000, just a couple of years after the group was formed,
some of its members met the destiny spelled in the name of the group, who was amongst the youngest in the group.
It was just 19 when he was found hanged from the ceiling of his house.
Samson and Stefanos soon followed when the spread of HIV aids in the inner city,
and members of that you must be dead when only the ones to die during those years important piece of the history of streets,
streets and rather with vanishing. In the early 2000s, under the acts of illness, violent deaths and government repression.
So looking back to these days,
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,
and became a push to find a way out of off street life.
So while Ibrahim and his friends have been struggling to change lives.
That's when I entered in and in their lives.
The Ethiopian economy has been booming, and the capital city of Islamabad has witnessed a dramatic transformation,
and the early 1990s business reports and media accounts portrayed Africa.
Poverty is a threat to rich countries. Ethiopia was the symbol global symbol of famine and in crisis.
But 20 years later, Africa,
because economic growth is described as bringing the promise of an ongoing expansion of opportunities for investment and wealth across the globe.
And because of its success, Ethiopia has been described as a model and development circles and parts of the academic community.
A growing number of studies and developmental, patrimonial and poverty reduction.
I've seen Ethiopia and other African success stories as constituting a political
and developmental laboratory for ideas and formulas for growth in the continent.
So. For this, callers, Ethiopia, for a while until recently,
was a laboratory for the emergence of a of an alternative to the neoliberal orthodoxies of the markets.
However, growth, as you all know, is not for all social inequalities are on the rise.
Stability in the British ruling party significant influence the economy being strictly grounded in authoritarian politics.
Someone will argue that Abiomed is challenging.
That's only partly, but we can talk about that bit later.
But then this kind of political stability is actually constrains the emergence of political competitors.
And until recently, but more are still now the ability of ordinary citizens to affect policy.
So in a way, economic growth and development and offered Ibraheem nothing to build on for that change, for their wish for change.
For most of their lives, they occupy the lower tiers of the economy.
In some moments, wage labour only occasionally have to be able to access even the high level three business,
such as fencing, stolen goods and the word of a legit businessman.
Why was, for the most part, to distance in the origin of the possibilities?
In my interlocutors reckoning, the economy was dominated by the logic that relatives are with relatives and donkeys with ashes.
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
living those who are outside their networks with nothing more than ashes.
Development participation the buzz words of other government approaches to poverty since the mid-2000s 2000s soon became also part of the problem.
The cooperatives of parking guys Holly Ibrahim work for when a part of a broader political strategy
of the ruling party to capture the unemployed youth of an intense moment of political conflict.
In 2005, Ibrahim and highly were amongst the many who joined government repression programmes in the years following the riots,
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.
Either was OK, so they joined other out of fear of imprisonment or sought to make ends meet by joining these problems,
highly bringing their regular income, but also became dependent on the government, the ruling party for their survival.
Even though they were not supporters of the ruling party, they understood they wanted to keep their jobs the way expected.
Indeed, required to act as their supporters and to show up at meetings and rallies.
So the implementation of development programmes enabled the ruling party to expand its reach in the population,
mobilise a significant number of people. The kind of reach is still there. At the same time,
these problems didn't necessarily affect the cleavages the limited the breman height
in the peace access to business networks is parking guys and government operatives.
Honey brings the kunai back and trajectories of social mobility.
They continue to be marginal actors of the cities and inner city economies while experiencing
the increased pervasiveness of the really important parameters of political control.
So access to inner city business community was fundamentally closed.
Ali Ibrahim had the opportunity, but then lost the plot not much time because on one end he was squandering money on the streets.
When he was selling shoes, both cited to have useful networks to build up as as often as his luck in a way.
So when in business community was closed, development programmes failed to provide opportunities for social improvements.
However, over the years that I've known them. Really,
the construction of high rise buildings and increase of ability of resources
and goods will continue triggering expectation and desire for social mobility,
and they were fascinated by the promises of abundance the economic growth offered.
Yeah, the persistence of the own marginality made them wonder about the actual foundation of this wealth, sexism, power, tons of time,
how they breathe and why the circles of friends, neighbours, relatives, men and women questioning the moral authenticity of wealth and politics.
The pillars of the country's economic growth has been randon the self-administer of business people,
the practise of the rich and super rich and the fakeness of politics is a site of opportunism and deception.
As anthropologist Sasha Nuvo will put it, the people I talk to,
so development and economic growth as a B+ development was a bluff because recognised as the outcome of illicit,
immoral practises, businesspeople were described as hustling and cheating just as the hustlers did.
Rich people turn to sorceress to unleash spirits and magic for personal enrichment,
and business elites and politicians were seen as rubbing shoulders and to dodge taxes and accumulate wealth beyond the facade of party politics.
So this critical account was far from nuanced, was far was grounded in rumours and perceptions.
Yet the critical selfishness and the greed of businesspeople as powerful a moral indictment of the logic of the relatives with relatives
and donkey ashes that they so produce in the condition of exclusion and the stunning wealth is embedded in occult practises was a way,
of course, making sense that apparently inexplicable emergence of wealth in a country where extreme poverty still existed.
The images of businesspeople and politicians rubbing shoulders were grounded in a widely shared
perception of intimate connexions between politic and business politics and business in the country,
and finally seen politics as fake was a way of questioning how celebration of human
success story remaining commensurate with their own experiences of political subjugation.
So philosopher Ashley Bender argued that the colony is a site of illicit cohabitation and conviviality,
making attitudes towards power and wealth widely shared between the ruled and the rulers.
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.
Presenting this to colleagues at work in Kenya. Kenyan politicians describe themselves as hustlers and be very proud of that.
But unless you get to some of us shores, a very radically different reality,
no doubt highly brame and many others people in my field site wanted to be rich and powerful.
I guess I shared that desire as well, but the existence of a critique of power,
wealth and success reveals how my interlocutors saw fundamental incommensurate
ability between the spaces of the existence and the logics that delivered success.
I like the Ivorian hustlers or the Kenyan hustlers.
My informants felt they could not join the bluff of development and economic growth.
Sure, that were hustling and bluffing is the domain of the hustler.
But I also felt that they didn't have the resources to play the big game of faking and cheating.
This all rich people playing is, he put it, we are better squeezed.
We gamble with no money. We don't have opportunities. We don't have a past, present or future.
So they thought there was a big divide between the small hassling of the survivors and the big cheating of the wealthy,
and that divide could not be crossed. Meanwhile, in the inner city others,
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.
Orada, the Sakurada, and increasingly, as an increasing number of people turn towards the vision of abundance and wealth
of the city offer to elaborate ideas of desirable and achievable futures.
My informants witness actually why the questions of the unclean claim to smartness many in the city have begun to argue that rather
than smart people are no longer those who can live smartly through poverty and scarcity models was smart enough to get away from it.
These emerging conceptualisation Dorado, the urbanites are those who become rich and not those or remain poor.
So this questioning of the smartness of the rot on the face of the blossoming of the powerful
provided the reason why my informants were so concerns of questioning the morality of development.
My informants critique of economic growth was an attempt to recapture a sense of self-worth to recognition of the moral ambiguities.
The moral ambiguities of their own hustling was nothing compared to the politicians and
businesspeople were believed to be accumulating between the facade of development and politics.
So in these circumstances, my. Informants felt they could do was call the bluff.
Oh, naming something other than themselves.
So characterising power and wealth as something other was not full, followed by sort of internalisation of embodiments of of the powerful.
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.
Conversely, by recognising the bluff as something other than themselves,
my former sought to exercise externalise and was simply morally and existentially disengaged from what the recall this recall,
regardless to be the source of the condition or social exclusion. Such moves lead the naturalise and challenge the status quo.
Yet they became so it became so for elaboration of a critique. They've formed how hardy bream positioned himself in wider society,
a question the limits imposed on them by patterns of social differentiation and political authoritarianism.
So by calling the bluff and morally distancing themselves from the forces producing the condition of oppression and subjugation,
Mentalhood leaders made themselves into war. Anthropologist Penny Harvey Hannah Knox, described as an impossible public,
impossible publics are characterised by the right's politics of refusal enacted by those who was Mozo.
Arguments step outside the frame of established, established debates or altogether.
So there was being a completely different language and kind of work. My filmography is kind of understands where the language came from.
So the protagonist, the protagonist of this book, they find their position in society in relation of the relation of incommensurate
ability with the narratives and discourses that pervaded the country development.
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,
the current logics of power and wealth than I to them and impossible public is not always inevitably a counter public expression of austerity.
Refusal aversion and claims of income and stability also reflect an underlying search for being
otherwise engaged with the desires and aspirations from which marginalised people remain excluded.
So elaborating, a moral indictment of the source of their predicament was central in the way mindset
leaders sought to restate the possibility for being somewhere else and for something else.
So such kind of critique can potentially be immobilising rather lead to recognition of the
inevitability of subjugation and oppression and the possibility of action in the hope.
That's more, you know, should Bamberg throw the weight around.
Understanding the politics inside of the simulation and false compliance might result in a neutral zombification,
he writes of the powerful and the weak way in which writers don't bifurcation mean that each each power
from the weak robbed the other of the vitality and leaving them both impotent and on the streets.
I the city of this of a the ten years I've been working on.
The heaviness of constraints imposed on myself through this action and the sense of inevitability
that pervaded the experience of subjugation and exclusion were often so overwhelming.
The immobility, self-destruction or even death appeared inevitable or even desirable.
Some tragically succumb to this. Over the ten years I've had tons of stories, suicides and in recognition the condition of the nature.
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
self-destruction mobility as a result of precariousness or inability to imagine what next for myself.
This, however, uncertainty the idea of not knowing was next was perceived as enabling them to think of their lives as something else.
Paradoxically, what was known was actually bleak and overwhelming distress,
overwhelmingly distressing because reading them, giving them grounds for imagining a better life.
Pain, anxiety and madness were interpreted, by the way,
but a potential obsession of making sense of what they saw and they knew and experienced friends.
The death of one town came as a huge shock to many.
Santorum was in his mid 20s. He was very good friends to the learner alliance says, You know this,
and many people amongst his friends and acquaintances knew that he was heavy drinker and he should actually stop drinking.
He kept drinking. Iraqia very strong local struggle, local brandy.
For this reason, many thought I'd-I'd interpretation was that Funcao drank itself out of existence.
His death was taken to be a consequence of it. He was thinking too much friends.
What died or gone mad were most dramatic rebound of the potential consequences of too much thinking people,
creative ways of living to anxiety about the reversibility of the condition of poverty.
Ibrahim appeal to its ability to forget. He told me I was quite stressed.
I was getting sick was the end of my fieldwork before coming here to Oxford. It's all you know.
It's nice that you think about what you need to do, but don't do it too much.
People get crazy for much for for my thinking. I like my brains.
It is incredible. I can't forget things. These make things easier.
So forgetting exercising one capacity to deal with the problems, but components of a form of social reflexivity, a discipline of the self.
There was brand in the recognition that we are thrown in the world without control of the circumstances of our existence.
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.
Slipping away from it through madness or death was perceived to be dependent on this ability to deal with this dilemma.
So what? Not knowing what was next was a reason to have hope.
What they hoped for was touching change. But do they conceptualise that change?
Remains specifies. So in anthropology,
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
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.
They did dream about wealth and success, but didn't spend much thinking about that.
How their life could be in a context where abundance of what were unreachable, inexplicable visions of a good life were rally.
Imagine as an actual plans to pursue in the present and the future,
the possibility of achieving a better life in the future was dependent on chances and not dreams.
A chance is a definition is a stroke of fortune and events on a series of events, which is unpredictable.
But when happens, you will take your life in a direction you will not.
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
very precise is wrong in a deep configuration of meanings revolving around nations with God and morality.
Chances are they're understood as a gift of gods such as that because it's dependence on God inscrutable will.
So much bigger than predictability of existence is therefore an expression of this great ability of God
and the fact that what will happen only God knows yet doesn't mean that individuals are powerless.
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.
But however, gaining God's favour was not an easy thing to do,
especially all the things that were doing the way you know that past present involvement in legal street life,
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.
So how could they reconcile their ability to gain the favour of gods that dispense of chances?
One, of course, was to pray to a good relationship with God through religious acts going to church.
They were all the Christians on be committed to know about Islam as Muslim and framed it on top of their commitment religious life.
My for my soul to turn to an exercise of moral flexibility.
And the conversation I had with them about how they evaluated their deeds echoed what philosopher debated about moral block,
whether or not what people do in a situation outside their control can be an object of moral judgement.
So they argued that the bad acts were the result of a contingencies of their lives, as such, not subject to clear moral judgement.
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.
So by recognising the limits of the action, rather by arguing that you don't have control of the circumstances of the lives,
may four months thought of themselves as moral subjects who could rightfully claim a chance from God.
Of course, this is kind of this. Then on that basis, they knew that had they knew that they had work to do.
So being able to get the chance was fundamentally a matter of innovating, then the contingency of lives,
as they put it, was a matter of moving around in secrecy and my performance kept moving.
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,
either by finding replacements to work for them and continue to receive receive a share of the salary,
or by asking the government to give them money as part of the capital, the cooperative parking guys that it has saved.
Ibrahim found the replacement work for him at The Co-operative,
handing him two thirds of his salary at the end of the month and keeping the difference.
This gave him more time enabled him to combine is one salary with his take on his mobile phone business.
At the same time, however, his income was not very different.
The that the arrangements made him feel that it was free to consider the other option and
eventually quit the co-operative without getting a share of the capital is saved over the years.
It is.
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.
In 2015, Heidi was taking talking about his family's shop with pride and excitement.
It was selling small items from chewing gums to bottles of water.
Unfortunately, by 2017, a mood about family shop and radically change realised that the family shop is simply replace one meagre income with another.
The prospects of achieving life but to, as he put it, were still out of reach.
But my performance keep kept moving. So talking about the challenges of of his life, it brings for me, though,
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.
We have this life. We live it brame and many others.
What stories are you not telling?
The book living was important because staying alive was the ultimate condition for be able to turn down expected and uncertain into possibility.
It gave them the sense that they still have the time to transform their life and think their life or the ways we desire
knowledge to join an existing ethnographic critique to anthropological come the temptation to Paul to use Aristotle.
I do not find in English as an Italian distinction between a life of just living and a life of actions.
Philosophers such as I Gambon, for instance, have argued that desire to be emphasised is easily exploited and exploited for this,
because when life assumes an intrinsic value and survival becomes the main concern of the subject,
the individual is caught into mechanism governing the reproductions of regimes or subjugation.
By narrating, I mean, I strongly disagree with the way of thinking.
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,
getting by surviving and not just mere experiences of letting oneself brief, but they are ultimately enabled.
The actualisation of existence is a site of possibility.
We can route my informants search for an endless says, illusory, fatalistic of wars, a form of a false consciousness.
Be my guest. There is a long tradition of sociological philosophical thoughts.
There's either portraits people desires an impediment to action or seen limited
purpose in investigating how social actors understand their own action.
In a recent book, Cruel Optimism. But lancement I've been pronouncing names she bases.
But then she compared the mode of existence that the kind of things I'm writing about
its potential symptoms of an attachment to visions and desire of a better life,
which are cruel because wittingly or unwittingly, there are obstacles to the actual ability to achieve one's dreams.
If you go to the ecology board, you would argue that as highly brame move the rounds,
the choices they made and trajectories they embarked on to pursue the quest for social mobility
wittingly or unwittingly contributed to the reproduction of the own condition of of marginality,
surely in inner city and suburb on my informants engagements with SRI economy and notions of history, smartness,
imagine or position of experience of exclusions and and see in a rather wear face with the
farther they engaged amongst the hustling and cheating as malkmus and not taking them anyway.
However, it's important to not assume that my mind informants in the case and more generally the sense
of the possible the fact that the sense of the possible coincides with social position,
or that there is a coincidence that the Queen's potential coincidence is the
dependent variable in the reproduction of of of marginality and exclusion.
Argue that the position people occupy don't necessarily and fully determine the understandings of society and the self.
But rather, while the sense of what people can and cannot do is elaborated through the own experience of power relations.
This doesn't mean that constrains and exclusion are naturally internalised.
Argue that we need to take the XYZ and action, identity and inspiration seriously.
We should not give in to the temptation to claim a sort of allegiance to any of
the sides of the long term and to resolve debates about structure and agency.
We should not be analytically and graphically the tensions that pervade existence of our interlocutors.
The subject attempt to become the be it becomes something else and the constraints while living in existence.
This firmly embedded in experience of subjugation structure, agency debates, you know, talking about this is such a 1990s things to do,
but remains unresolved because the tension the discussion seeks to make sense of doesn't have any historical final synthesis.
This is the tension remains as such because the subject is not a fully determined by power, not fully determining willpower.
The tension and ambivalence remains fundamentally unresolved, making the experiences try to be something else.
The one constraints a painful one. Yes, these tension and this endures unresolved because people stubborn acts of moving
around is a fertile terrain for elaboration of a repertoire of practises for living,
assessing, criticising, hiding and bypassing. It was through this repertoire in mind for months.
Granted, the act of living into a very cruel sense of realism. externalised power is something other than themselves and distance distance
themselves from what they identify to be the sources of their predicaments.
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?
So if you have is going through a process of political reform and opening led by the new Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's members,
opposition parties have been released from prison and restriction of media and civil society lifted,
resulting in a wave of optimism hope across the country.
What are these? Reforms will entail a radical rethinking of Ethiopia's developmental model,
whether the greater enjoyment of political rights will also result in increased ability
of people at the bottom of urban society and rural society to affect policy is unclear.
So Ibrahim, when I've been actually when I was writing the book was finished.
The last bit was March 2008. That's when Abiy then came into into the picture.
Then I basically flew into all this. And the first person I met was, of course, a brave man.
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,
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
that populated the streets in inner city Addis Ibrahim and many others were sceptical because they recognise that this moment of change,
while being kind of the way beautiful,
doesn't necessarily result in the proliferation of chances there could indeed boost the search for an end, Denis.
Someone will say, You know, this takes time, but you know, up by also is an opportunity for us to think about,
you know, what we make of these experiences and whether we can actually anthropology can pull.
Our ethnography is going to be part of the making of politics, let's say of open ended.
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.
Oh, we can do by just the first thing,
which is kind of I think step is the fact that we need to stop questioning the very idea that development concern
revolves around enabling the poor to help themselves out of poverty and take advantage of expansion of the economy.
Amartya Sen capabilities, approach or in anthropology find the right capacities to aspire and fail the poor.
Instead, we need to choose interventions, a commitment to provide opportunities of continuous improvement.
Montelukast this understanding of the act of living central here, living as a fertile terrain for the of concerns, aspiration expectation,
just central for the imagination, the political as the pursuit of justice and as a collective project to achieve a fair distribution of opportunities.
Hari Brame and many others learn to understand that living in the city is revolving
around the efforts to achieve a form of relative yet significant improvements.
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.
So the search for open ended us is an attempt to fulfil the way I read it.
A sort of generational duty of incremental improvements and what was actually kind of they were concerned
about is the fact that economic growth was not enabling them to fulfil their generational duty.
Pursuing response to these claims for open ended demands for continuous improvements would imply questioning
the long held idea that many objectives the the main objectives of social policy are to change people's minds,
penalise the unworthy and the lazy, and help the deserving poor to 12 themselves out of poverty.
A response to this restaurant idea that tackling poverty and exclusion requires a collective effort
to question the political and social hierarchies of work which produce subjugation and exclusion,
such as a straightforward cause for a political redistribution,
which targets poor people as a members of society and noise barriers of some form of commendable or reprehensible morality.
Over 10 years are spent investigating and to see the other side witness highly
brainy and many others expressing tons of claims and demands to NGOs and
government institutions were promptly unaddressed from giving a pot of money to each members of the parking cooperative to launch their own ventures.
An informal economy to replace dual skill training programmes into employment oriented initiatives focussed on cooking or driving.
All of them cast aside because others seem to be impossible or irrelevant.
So responding to these claims and demands entails a commitment to transform the search for open,
endless trajectory of social improvement and turning open ended.
A sense is less about vision of the ideal future as me.
My informants understood with their quest for openness, there is not much point in preferring a vision of the future.
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.
The very idea that you need to have a certain decades of political authoritarianism,
then this develop produce development and then economic growth and economic growth will solve everything.
There's a language that was quite resilient in the times of Zimbabwe and al-Amari miscellaneous still there with Abiy Ahmed.
He said what is required is the liberation of a method can get us closer to the realisation of something better,
moving us away from normative understanding of developments and when the better is not just
the trade off by something imagine discussed and debated and pursued openly and collectively,
we reach the moments, potentially when a better world is coming to be.
OK. Thanks.