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SoSe 16: Youth and Future; Hopes, Anxieties, and Aspirations in the African Context

Kristina Franziska Dohrn

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For a long time anthropological studies on youth have been dominated by theories of cultural reproduction and by a focus on past influences upon the present. Only recently anthropologists have started to analyze how young women and men around the world engage in making the future that is imagined, aspired for and anticipated and thus a “cultural fact” (Appadurai 2013).
Youth is a social category that is constructed differently in different times and places. Furthermore, young women and men formulate their hopes and aspirations in relation to diverse opportunities and different “emergent horizons of imagination” (Guyer 2013: 289). In the African context, notions of modernization and development have connected hopes for the future to the present. However, these narratives of modernization and development have “derailed” in face of a stagnation of economic growth, crumbled state infrastructures and decreasing life expectancies during the last 30 years (Ferguson 2006). This is especially acute for the African youth that is often considered as emblematic for development and the future and thus based on linear conceptions of time. In this context, neoliberal policies often create a gap between the aspirations of youth and the economic realities they encounter (Mains 2015). Through the impossibility to achieve a transition from childhood to adulthood, youth may even become a stage that is indefinite (Cole 2010).
This seminar examines the imaginations and practices of youth in relation to the future: How do young men and women imagine and create the future in diverse countries on the African continent? How do they formulate, negotiate and live their aspirations and anxieties, their hopes and fears? And to what kind of temporal experiences and horizons are their aspirations connected? In this seminar we will address these questions by engaging with anthropological theories on youth and future and ethnographic case studies on youth in the African context. close