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Out of place? Re-considering 'deviant' children and youth in Africa eds Lorenzo Bordonaro and Ruth Payne Several recent works on childhood and youth in Africa have underlined the local ambivalence of these categories. In this book we propose to explore, understand and witness what happens in different African contexts when children and young people who escape mainstream classification are defined as ‘deviant’, ‘at risk’, ‘out of place’ and conceived as social problems. Youth gangs, underage criminals, child-soldiers, street children, orphans, children heading households and child prostitutes are among the categories of ‘out of place’ youth which are a major concern for many African governments and international organizations today. They are, consequently, targeted by social policies, local and international NGOs and governmental institutions as well as by the police and the juridical and penitentiary systems. We welcome submissions from social scientists coming from diverse disciplines and are particularly interested in contributions which consider the following issues... read on |
Within the children-right framework, street children are usually victimized and portrayed as passive and vulnerable offspring enduring a horrible fate. Little attention is commonly paid to the children’s own motivations for moving and staying in the street. Interviews with street children and former street-children in Cape Verde revealed that for most of them running away to the street had been a choice - even though within limited life-chances - and that children enjoyed most aspects of street-life. Most of them declared that they prefer staying in the street rather than at home or in institutions. |
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Youth in the Bijagó Islands (Guiné Bissau)
Analysis of the ‘will to be modern’ of a group of young boys living in Bubaque, in the Bijagó Islands. Their discourse of modernity is considered as a cultural strategy to overcome social and political marginality: appropriating the narrative of development and taking advantage of the institutions of modernity, young people strive to find their way among (and a way out from) the predicaments of contemporary Guinea Bissau. |
Women trafficking in Portugal: a critical approach
The scope of this project is to understand why we have come to talk so much about trafficking – and especially about women trafficking – in Portugal in the last decade. Portugal of course is not alone in this new crusade. Also, it is not the first time in Euro-American history that the issue of women ‘sexual slavery’ is brought up to the public concern. This is why we will first draw the genealogy of the notion of ‘sex trafficking’, looking for its origins in the moral panic about ‘white slavery’ that spread throughout Europe and the United Stated between the 19th and the 20th century. Afterwards, we will analyse the recent history of international legislations and campaigns targeting human trafficking. We will then turn to the Portuguese case, analysing recent investigation, policies and legislation and showing the results of the research we carried out in institutional settings designed to fight women’s trafficking or support the ‘victims’. |
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The project 'Youth and the City in Africa' aims to portrait the new forms of performative and cultural production, as well as the spaces of marginality that characterize the world of youth in urban African contexts. What are the spaces of marginality and the social constraints young people in African towns are experiencing today? How are they reacting to these situations? In which ways are they reinventing the cultural and artistic forms and the forms of sociability that make up their life? Through extensive ethnographic documentation combined with video documentation, a team of anthropologists and documentary filmmakers will contribute to our knowledge of the life of young people in African towns. The project will target nine different African cities. In each city, one meaningful cultural and social phenomenon, emblematic of youth culture, will be explored by a team of anthropologists through extensive ethnographic investigation, and will be the basis of a documentary film. |
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Youth and modernity in Africa international conference
The purpose of this event was to unsettle the apparently obvious relationship between youth and modernity in Sub-Saharan Africa. The link between generation and change will be problematized and contested, refusing linear periodizations implicit in the notion of modernity, and underlining instead the ambiguous and troubled relationship between youth and social and cultural change in contemporary Africa. The challenge we take up is therefore that of proposing new theoretical frames to reassess the role of youth in contemporary Africa, getting rid of the pitfalls of modernity or modernization theory but without overlooking concrete and dramatic processes of change. |
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Initiation and music in the Bijagó Islands
An older hypertext in Italian about the realtionship between male age-grades, initation and performative culture among the Bijagós of Buabque. |
Lorenzo I. Bordonaro (PhD Anthropology, ISCTE, Lisbon) is a post-doctoral associate researcher at the Social Anthropology Research Centre - Centro de Estudos de Antropologia Social (CEAS/CRIA) in Lisbon, Portugal. He has conducted research in the Bijagós Islands (Guinea Bissau) since 1993, initially investigating music and public performances as key elements in the social construction of masculinity. Since 2001 he has focused on the wish to be modern of a group of young men on the island of Bubaque, showing the local appropriation of the categories of development and progress and their tactical use in intergenerational dynamics. Presently he is working on youth issues in Cape Verde, focusing on street children and younger prisoners in local penitentiaries, youth policies and criminality. |
