Fada: Boredom and Belonging in Niger by Adeline Masquelier (review)

Fada: Boredom and Belonging in Niger is a study of youth prolonged, perhaps indefinitely, by precarious economic circumstances. At the center of the book are samari, or young unmarried men, who have completed their formal education but who are unable to land the salaried jobs needed to establish their own households, and ultimately, to secure fullfledged adulthood. Without a suitable job to work or family life to cultivate, these men feel out of place, where place refers as much to a point in space as to a generational position that one occupies at a particular moment in time (62). This out-of-placeness brings about feelings of boredom and anxieties about belonging at a variety of scales: from family structures to the community and to the realm of men and masculinity more broadly. That being said, the analytical focus of the book is not the social and structural conditions that disrupted these life trajectories and that led these men to endure feelings of displacement and dispossession day in and day out. Rather, the book focuses upon the male social clubs, or fadas, that these men have formed to overcome the social and affective dimensions of insecurity (4). As becomes clear throughout the book, the term "fada" is a broad category that encompasses a diverse set of male social configurations ranging from informal discussion groups to highly structured associations complete with ritualized expressions of sociality.

As the book's introduction contextualizes, democratization and the collapse of the uranium market in the 1990s form the backdrop of the development of fadas. University students who had completed studies in anticipation of securing office work confronted a job market characterized by currency devaluation, large-scale layoffs, and reduced recruitment into the civil service. The Human Development Index at the time ranked Niger as the poorest country on earth (7). In such a climate, educational credentials only managed to create the expectation of full-time salaried work but not the actual attainment of it. While opportunities to earn small change through low-skilled, low-prestige work abounded, these educated young men preferred to stay unemployed rather than undertake what they themselves characterized as "shit jobs" that were beneath their educational attainment (10). Instead, these men formed social clubs that congregate on street corners. The appropriation of these public spaces by samari carved out concrete places where, as the book nicely illustrates, men could manage their unemployment collectively and where a novel sense of belonging could be cultivated.

The book's substantive chapters detail the micropolitics of fadas that allow samari to not feel bored and out of place, but instead, with reference to Heidegger (1993), at home in the world. Masquelier characterizes fadas as an infrastructure of support for unemployed men struggling to become fully adult, providing the tools and techniques for repairing crippled selfhoods and providing disoriented samari with a sense of purpose. In focusing upon the samari's projects of self-fashioning, rather than the production of the structures that brought about the hardship and constraint, Masquelier explicitly positions the book within the recent call to produce an "anthropology of the good," one that shifts analytical focus away from dynamics of oppression and suffering to foreground "the different ways people organize their personal and collective lives in order to foster what they think of as good, and to study what it is like to live at least some of the time in light of such a project" (Robbins 2013:457).

Masquelier details in the initial chapter the production of value, exchange, and affect circulating through the daily serving of tea at fadas. In the absence of adult responsibilities of work or providing for a household, samari men confront an abundance of idle time by producing and drinking tea with friends. While elders observing fadas at arm's length shake their heads at samari for what appears to be idleness, Masquelier shows prolonged bouts of tea consumption to be a purposeful temporality, one that offers unemployed youth a respite from boredom...