Focaal

Nearly a decade after the global financial crisis of 2008, this thematic section investigates one way in which marginalization and precarization appears: boredom. An increasingly competitive global economy has fundamentally changed the coordinates of work and class in ways that have led to a changing engagement with boredom. Long thought of as an affliction of prosperity, boredom has recently emerged as an ethnographically observed plight of the most economically vulnerable. Drawing on fieldwork from postsocialist Europe and postcolonial Africa, this thematic section explores the intersection of boredom and precarity in order to gain new insight into the workings of advanced capitalism. It experiments with ways of theorizing the changing relationship between status, production, consumption, and the experience of excess free time. These efforts are rooted in a desire to make sense of the precarious forms of living that proliferated in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and that continue to endure a decade later.

Studies of marginality have examined how individuals or groups are distanced from a hoped-for life as a result of structural, economic, or political circumstances, and how this may result in unwanted experiences of boredom. This article critically reexamines this perspective by juxtaposing it with an empirical description of a group of young Georgian nihilists who live in a sphere of disengaged repetition where turning the future into something that “doesn’t matter anyway” becomes a way of handling boredom in the present in an inactive manner. I use this to examine the temporal aspects at stake among marginal groups who deliberately disengage. In the article, I deploy the term “joyful pessimism” as an analytical device to capture an alternative configuration of marginality and boredom.

Outside the main railway station in Bucharest, Romania, otherwise unemployed day laborers hustle for small change as informal parking lot attendants (parcagii). While their efforts yield numerous ethnographic observations of entrepreneurial activity, these attendants report “doing nothing” day in and day out. This article explores the tension between etic observations and emic feelings in order to ask a methodological question: how can “not doing” and “absent activity” be captured within an ethnographic method primed to observe activity constantly? In response, this article takes inspiration from photography to develop “the negative” as a technique for bringing the impress of absent activity on social worlds into ethnographic view. The intent of this methodological intervention is to open new theoretical lines of flight into the politics of inactivity.

In the context of unprecedented rates of urban unemployment, in the early 2000s young men in Ethiopia struggled with an overabundance of time. I examine changes in urban young men’s experiences of time and progress over a period of 13 years to better understand the nature of boredom and modernity. Young men simultaneously experienced a sense a linear progress in their own lives, and feelings of frustration when shifts in their built environment did not translate into a more abstract sense of change. Ultimately I argue that in contrast to conceptions of boredom that emerge out of the West, Ethiopian boredom was profoundly social in the sense that it was based on an inability to experience progress in one’s relations of reciprocity with others.

This article is based on research conducted in various South African cities, in contact with organizations involved in demonstrating against poor living conditions. It aims to grasp these collectives outside of their interactions with the political sphere, by moving away from the traditional definitions of a “social movement.” The protesters are here examined in terms of their relationships with their immediate surroundings: the neighborhoods. The point is thus to emphasize the continuities that may exist between protest and daily life. Indeed, one may find elements in the ordinary and the everyday that shed light on some of the logics that structure mobilization and certain practices of protest.

This article explores the prevalence of concerns over artistic originality in Albania’s postsocialist art world. Based on anthropological fieldwork, it discusses how Albanian artists discipline each other’s work, particularly by noting its lack of originality in relationship to well-known Western artists but also their own. Emphasizing the social and organizational role of such concerns, I analyze them in light of various factors that have become salient after Albania’s transition from postsocialism to a market economy, including the loss of a system of authority following the liberalization of art production from state support and oversight and the failure to develop a stable one since 1991. The discourse on originality expresses Albanian artists’ perceived marginal status in the transnational art world and market and is deployed to transcend this status.

This article concerns the formation of price in Kathmandu’s land market. In Nepal, land has been for generations the bedrock of savings and household finance, an objectification of social status and a subject of intense political debate, up to and including the recent Maoist insurrection. In Kathmandu, however, the meaning of land has begun to change, mostly because of the rapid fluctuations in its monetary value. This article demonstrates how residents have used localized understandings of price and value formation to explain these changes, understandings that take as their reference point historical landlord-tenant relationships and not the machinations of market equilibrium. This article interrogates the notion that the market animates price, instead arguing that price can index a multitude of value formations.

This article examines the evolution of the credit market for small-scale sugarcane producers in the Plan Chontalpa development program in Tabasco, Mexico. The plan promoted neoliberal policies that transformed the existing credit market available to small-scale producers. The availability of credit was supposed to lead to increased efficiency. However, making credit available to low-income farmers can result in unintended outcomes. We found that many households had high discount rates and used the credit to supplement their household income. Thus, farmers are getting caught in a cycle of debt that often culminates in losing their land. We use a life history to consider the strategies the program has adopted to control credit as well as the counterstrategies the families have developed.

This article explores the variable, contextual nature of drug dealing as an economic activity. It juxtaposes Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh’s (2000) well-known study of the finances of a drug-dealing gang in Chicago with an analogous investigation carried out in Managua. It highlights how differences in the labor market contribute to individuals associated with drug dealing in Managua earning much more than the median local wage, in stark contrast to the situation famously described in Chicago. These disparities can be linked on the one hand to the more decentralized organization of the drug trade in Nicaragua and the fact that drug dealing was more of a specialist activity, and on the other to the fundamentally different broader political economies of the United States and Nicaragua.