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I n the mornings and evenings, when the sun does not burn with such an extreme intensity, the street corners of Jimma, ethiopia, are crowded with unemployed young men. they stand with their hands in their pockets sharing gossip, cracking jokes, and occasionally tossing out a mild insult at a passerby . these young men often joke that the only change in their lives is following the shade from one side of the street to the other with the passing of the sun. in neighborhoods with more commercial activity, the unemployed share the streets with young men working as shoeshines, barbers, bicycle mechanics, minibus touts, and petty traders. these two populations, working and unemployed young men, both negotiate a situation in which their aspirations for the future do not fit with economic realities. in ethiopia, it is common to use the Amharic equivalent of the word hopeless (tesfa qoretewal) to describe the condition of urban youth. like in other ethiopian cities, in Jimma, a city of approximately 150,000 located about two hundred miles southwest of Addis Ababa, the unemployment rate for youth with a secondary education is estimated to be close to 50 percent (serneels 2007). young men claim that a lack of available work is the most significant barrier to attaining their aspirations. to be hopeless, one must have previously had hope. the Amharic phrase tesfa qoretewal expresses this clearly.1 it literally means “hope is cut.” the notion of hope being cut evokes an image of hope existing as a thread linking the present to the future. Hope is necessarily temporal in the sense that it is always fulfilled in the future. progress is the process of moving toward hope with the passage of time. When hope is cut, one’s relationship to the future changes. progress no longer takes place. the connection Youth, Hope, Stratification, and Time Introduction 2 Introduction to the future is severed, and one’s future becomes indistinguishable from the present. modernization and development are hopes. they are powerful beliefs in the possibility of reaching a better world by following a specific series of steps that connect future hopes to the present. to some extent, narratives of modernization have structured the hopes of young men in urban ethiopia. Capitalist and socialist models of industrial modernization that dominated the twentieth century attempted to bring about utopia at both the individual and collective levels (Buck-morss 2000). the ethiopian state sought to enact specifically local versions of these models during the latter half of the twentieth century. revolutionary socialism touched lives in remote areas of the country during the 1970s and 1980s (Donham 1999b), and a slow process of economic liberalization has done the same beginning in the early 1990s (ellison 2009). James Ferguson’s work (1990, 1999, 2006) represents perhaps the most extensive investigation of issues related to modernity, development, progress, and capitalism in an African context, and i engage with his ideas throughout this book. Ferguson has argued that in a context of economic globalization, narratives of progress and development in Africa have been derailed. During the past thirty years, dropping life expectancies, stagnant economic growth, and crumbling government infrastructures have become common across the continent. the magic of the free market that was intended to bring about modernization through structural adjustment policies has failed. Ferguson (1999) uses the terms abjection and disconnection to describe the experience of this process. like the cutting of hope, disconnection implies the loss of something that was previously present. if Africa has been derailed from a modernist narrative of progress, then this experience is especially acute for young people. Jean and John Comaroff have argued that youth is “the historical offspring of modernity,” in the sense that youth represents a stage in an inevitable process of development. the Comaroffs write that youth is the “essential precondition and indefinite postponement of maturity” (2005: 19). the concepts of youth, development, and modernity are based on linear conceptions of time. Just as maturation from child to adult involves attaining a specific set of biological and social markers, becoming modern requires movement along a linear track that permits little variation. in this sense, to be a youth and to aspire to change are in some ways inseparable. the difficulty of attaining aspirations and taking on the normative responsibilities of adults is a condition that anthropologists have identified among youth across the continent. young men in niger cannot access the funds to make bridewealth payments (masquelier 2005). youth in Zambia have little chance...

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