Hope Is Cut: Youth, Unemployment, and the Future in Urban Ethiopia

Notes

IntroducIon 1. Tesfa qoretewal sometimes implies that a person has cut his or her own hope, or that one causes oneself to be hopeless. i do not believe this is the case for ethiopian youth. i argue that ethiopian young people simultaneously experience hope and hopelessness, and that these emotions are closely related to structural economic conditions. 2. mixed religious and ethnic groups were the norm among young male friends, but this was not generally the case for adult men. For the most part, groups of adult male friends that i interacted with tended to be of the same ethnicity and religion. this generational difference may be a result of the economic and political shifts that i describe in Chapter 1. 3. i use progress in place of the Amharic lewt. in Kenneth maes’s study of health care volunteers in Addis Ababa, lewt was also commonly mentioned as an aspiration or goal (maes 2010). maes translates lewt as “change,” and indeed this is the definition offered in many english–Amharic dictionaries (Aklilu 1986: 6). in the narratives of youth involved in my research, however, lewt consistently referred to gradual improvement over time, and therefore i translate it as “progress.” 4. the convention when citing ethiopian scholars is often to use the first, rather than the second name. in ethiopia the father’s first name becomes the second name of his children, and people are referred to by their first names. For example, in ethiopia i am Dr. Daniel, not Dr. mains. However, many of the ethiopian scholars that i cite are ethiopian Americans who have adopted Western naming practices. For the sake of consistency, i adopt the standard Western practice of listing last name first in the bibliography and referring to scholars by their last names. researchers should, however , keep in mind that in some libraries, particularly in ethiopia, the works cited in my bibliography will be listed by the author’s first name. For example, Bahru Zewde’s Notes 172 Notes to the Introduction important books on the history of modern ethiopia will be cataloged under Bahru, rather than Zewde. 5. Anthropologists have gone far beyond Harvey’s notion of neoliberalism as a class project. John Clarke (2008) gives a useful description of the various ways that anthropologists and others have employed the concept of neoliberalism. 6. examples of the isolated extraction of resources described by Ferguson (2006) may be found in the recent exploration of oil drilling possibilities in the Gambella and Ogaden regions of ethiopia. perhaps not coincidentally, both of these areas have experienced escalating levels of violence. 7. partially in reaction to conceptions of a singular neoliberalism, anthropologists have increasingly advocated examinations of locally specific neoliberalisms and how people rework neoliberal discourses in new and surprising ways (ellison 2009; Kanna 2010; rudnyckyj 2009). Although there is certainly value in this move, there is also a danger of expanding the category of neoliberalism so far that the term loses analytical utility (Collier 2009; mains, forthcoming, “Blackouts and progress”). in these analyses it is often unclear which aspects of neoliberalism are being retained and discarded in the formation of localized neoliberalisms. 8. i refer to J. K. Gibson-Graham in the singular because she is the combined identity of Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson. chApter 1 1. electricity, improved phone service, and even the internet came to Goha tsion in the early 2000s, but it still would not be considered a city by residents of Addis Ababa. 2. the Oromo are the most populous ethnic group in ethiopia and include muslims, Orthodox and protestant Christians, as well as believers in the sky god, Waaqaa. 3. At the time of my research, thursday markets still drew the largest crowds. 4. Ferenj means “foreigner,” and arada is something that is elevated or held in higher esteem than others. While the label ferenj clearly stems from the italians’ residence in this neighborhood, arada implies both that the neighborhood is at a slightly higher elevation than other areas and that the italians sought to elevate themselves by living separately from ethiopians. Mahel Ketema translates as “city center,” and this neighborhood is often referred to as Shoa Berr (“the door to the shoa region”), or Arab Terra (“the place of Arabs”). 5. in a survey of secondary and college students conducted by Donald levine, 55 percent were Amhara, 22 percent tigrayan, 15 percent Oromo, 4 percent Gurage, and 4 percent other (1965: 114). 6. Among urban youth, 37.8 percent of the...