Ethnographies of Uncertainty in Africa ed. by Elizabeth Cooper and David Pratten (review)

Ethnographies of Uncertainty in Africa is an excellent effort to present innovative approaches towards the conceptualization of uncertainty as a constitutive feature of life on the African continent. Elizabeth Cooper and David Pratten have collected eight essays that set out to develop the notion of uncertainty as a productive force, a source of hope and aspirations, and a ground for orientation and action towards the future. Rather than developing one coherent theorization directed towards greater conceptual clarity, the editors successfully present the multifariousness of uncertainty by grouping the different chapters together in two parts. These are based on their focus on the links between uncertainty and, respectively, contingency or futurity, and are related to semantic relatives such as unknowability, opacity, unreliability, anticipation and hope, as well as many others.

First, four chapters address the intricacies between conditions of uncertainty and social contingencies. Susan Reynolds Whyte and Godfrey Etyang Siu demonstrate how, for a group of Ugandans, uncertainties of living with HIV are entwined with the dependency of access to antiretroviral therapy on personal relationships and the actions of others. This generates an ‘ethos of contingency’ (p. 27) or a constant watchfulness for opportunities and testing connections. Next, Elizabeth Cooper argues that the uncertainties following from structural inequality and opacity within a child sponsorship charity in Western Kenya lead to its understanding as a matter of pure and unpredictable chance. Here, knowledge and trust are steeped with uncertainties as people try to test their luck or determine and influence the possibilities of the relationships that constitute these charities. In a third chapter, Nadine Beckmann depicts uncertainties related to pregnancy, childbirth and maternal care among Zanzibari women in a context of increasingly privatized healthcare. Here, too, the search for knowledgeability and trustworthiness is central in these women’s attempts to establish security by creating multiple, strategic but tentative contingencies. Finally, Adam Gilbertson depicts how insecurities that relate to the provision, preparation and consumption of food are entwined with uncertainties about the stability of marital relationships in an informal settlement in Mombasa. Here, relations between spouses regarding the achievement of food security are essential in negotiating and establishing provisional knowledge, power and trust.

In the second part of the book, four ethnographies reveal the relationships between productive conditions of uncertainty and people’s perceptions of and actions towards the future. First, Henrik Vigh discusses the importance of apprehension, which entails perceptiveness, or ‘having eyes’ (p. 113), in people’s attempts to make sense of everyday uncertainties in Bissau. He argues that, in an opaque political environment, the notion of apprehension enables us to understand not only suspicion and anxiety but also engagements with the future, as people try to anticipate the impacts of invisible social and political forces on their daily lives. In her chapter on young people in Inhambane, Mozambique, Julie Soleil Archambault demonstrates how material uncertainties are shaped by payday rhythms. Such temporal rhythms allow people to plan for and act towards the near future, and, thus, essentially feel alive rather than survive. Marco Di Nunzio discusses how young people in Addis Ababa embrace uncertainties, brought about by the unpredictability and unknowability of life in the city, as a productive force. For his informants, being young entails being able to get a chance, influence the future, and, hence, generate hope. Di Nunzio describes how this implies moral reflexivity and an active exposure of oneself to the possibility of chance. In line with this, Simon Turner’s study of young Burundian refugees in Nairobi argues that the unpredictability of living clandestinely in the city engenders uncertainty and, with it, the possibility of hope for the future. Through discipline, sacrifice and faith, described as ‘passionate suffering’ (p. 181) and active waiting, these men actively negotiate both the constraints and temptations of the present and the possibilities of the future.

Throughout this volume, there is a clear ambition to demonstrate the possibilities of the concept of uncertainty for moving...