Street Dreams and Hip Hop Barbershops: Global Fantasy in Urban Tanzania (review)

Street Dreams is an ethnography about the struggles, fantasies, and aspirations of youth in the informal economy of Arusha (Tanzania). Although the title focuses on one subject of the book (barbershops), Weiss looks at many areas of popular culture in order to attain an awareness of the interconnectedness of peoples and places, as well as the "self-fashioning" that occurs in neoliberal value production (24). The term value refers to a "capacity for consumption" and the way consumerism generates modes of production through knowledge of different styles and ideas. For instance, cheap Indonesian cloth made into a dress does not hold much value until a fake Gloria Vanderbilt label—a symbol of international power and prestige—is sewn into the dress. Weiss argues that Tanzanian youth become driven by values of the wider world even as they feel "incapable of realizing" those values in their lives. This dynamic of being both included and excluded in value production shapes the popular cultural practices in Arusha today.

For most of the ethnography, Weiss focuses on young men and their styles, attitudes, and interactions with one another. The chapters that examine the staff and customers of barbershops (generally, chapters 2–4) are some of the most insightful in this regard, since they provide firsthand accounts of the struggles that youth encounter in a neoliberal economy. In chapter 2, for instance, Weiss analyzes the notion of invincibility among Tanzanian young men. Despite the hardships that youth encounter in their daily lives, they develop a toughness that allows them to confront, and in many ways transgress, their economic and political marginalization. Weiss discusses this invincibility through examining elements of barbers' lives, such as their practice of hanging posters of African Americans inside the barbershop. In addition, Weiss relates this display of invincibility to other areas of daily life in Arusha: public buses, for instance, are frequently emblazoned with names of controversial figures, such as Sani Abacha, the notorious former military ruler of Nigeria. Bus drivers use the signs to defy the power that the name evokes. As one of Weiss's informants told him, "Young people do not love Sani Abacha, but they know no one can 'force' him to do what they want" (51). In turn, the person who places that name on his bus or posts a picture of a tough American rapper in a barbershop is also conjuring up the idea of invincibility. "Invincibility" is examined again in chapter 4, where Weiss moves the discussion to other areas, including weakness and pain—the weakness and pain which youth endure and overcome in their daily lives.

Subsequent chapters in Street Dreams examine other aspects of popular culture and the informal economy in Tanzania. As a symbolic anthropologist, Weiss looks closely at the meaning of things, such as male hairstyles, including controversial ones such as bald heads and dreadlocks (discussed in chapter 3); the meaning and modification of clothes (chapter 5); the popularity of certain television shows, such as American soap operas (chapter 6); and the lyrics to songs by local rap groups (chapter 7). In all of these chapters, there is a richness of theoretical analysis that helps the reader comprehend the harsh realities that youth encounter without making them appear either too despondent or too creative.

While some may find the theoretical sections of Weiss's chapters too dense, others will regard Street Dreams as an important ethnography for interpreting the intersection of youth, masculinity, and popular culture. He draws particularly on the concept of fantasy as valuable for exploring the way that young people deal with the possibilities presented by the importation of foreign popular culture and the limitations of economic circumstances of urban Tanzania, noting that fantasy should be understood as "evidence of the many ways that Arusha's young men have found to inhabit the processes of their own displacement, to live through rupture, not simply...