Caught in The Act of Living: socialities, history and positionality in an ethnography of Addis Ababa's street life– a response

How do we narrate the complex entanglement of hustling, development, marginality and existence? Does engaging with the street economy make street hustlers co-producers of their condition of marginality, locked in by their networks and modes of action? Or is this engagement a challenge to their marginality? While writing The Act of Living, I was determined to go beyond these two potential explanations to make sense of how men who are engaged in Addis Ababa's street economy seek to be something other than the constraints of their oppression, albeit from within a condition of marginality and exclusion. My key concern was to situate ethnography and theory, and accounts of Ethiopia's growth, within an appreciation of that tension. This tension remains fundamentally unresolved, yet is a fertile terrain for the elaboration of existential and moral concerns about open-endedness, respect, chance, the self and the future.

I wholeheartedly thank the reviewers for their important questions on making sense of this tension, in particular the relation between solidarity and economies of prestige on the streets (Beuving), the interaction between individuals and collectives in shaping history and the political (Dawson), and the positionalities from which we appreciate the unfolding of lived experience (Howard).

The street economy of hustling and getting by is a place where this tension unfolds. Beuving argues that the book falls short of making sense of how hustling produces hierarchies of prestige, and of the kinds of solidarities that encompass the trajectories of individual street hustlers. I politely disagree with this assessment and argue that 'prestige' and 'solidarity' are fragile realizations on the streets. In the specific case Beuving refers to, the book shows that tourist guides acted as if Prof John was worthy of respect because they could make money out of his pretentions to prestige. Similarly, the solidarity that emerged in street conflicts was grounded in recognition that both parties engaged in hustling and cheating for the same reason: to get by. This was not just a tacit understanding: my interlocutors in the book called this thug realism bammilo, meaning 'yes, I know it is not good, but I am doing this for a living'.

On another scale, the economies of the street are not a bounded reality, as Beuving perhaps unintentionally seems to suggest. Socialities, solidarities and economies are deeply affected by the ways in which street hustlers engage with other segments of the urban economy and how other actors, including government officials, interact with the street economy. Recognizing this entanglement means appreciating how geographies of inequality produce disconnections between the terrains of the urban economy. As the book shows, there is a fundamental discontinuity between the economies of street hustling and the sources of wealth accumulation in Addis Ababa. As witnesses to this fundamental discontinuity, the discourses of hustlers were not only a language about and within the streets (Chapters 1, 2, 5 and 6), but a way of making sense of the radical incommensurability between official visions of Ethiopia's economic growth and their own experience of exclusion and marginality (Chapters 3, 4 and 7).

It is from this vantage point that the book narrates acts of living. I agree with Howard that the book could have been written from a myriad of perspectives – in particular those of women. I could have tried to break the gendered boundaries of sociality and sociability on the streets in which I found myself carrying out my research. Yet I did not. Partly, this was in recognition of the many accounts that could be and, more importantly, have been written about poverty and exclusion in urban Ethiopia, and on women's experiences of exclusion, such as Laketch Dirasse's sociological work⁴ and Bethlehem Tekola's excellent account on sex workers.⁵ I carried out my research aware that my account would inevitably be a partial one, and a complement to the accounts of other scholars.

My decision to...