Generation Nowhere: Rethinking Youth through the Lens of Un/under-employed Young Men
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V. Political youth In the political sphere, some educated un/under-employed young men in Africa, Latin America and Asia display a cynical or apathetic attitude to party and class-based politics (Osella and Osella, 2000; Weiss, 2002; Jeffrey et al., 2004). But most studies of the unemployed in the global south point to young men’s active efforts to engage in political action, including party- and class-based politics. Because educated un/under-employed young men in the global south come from rich as well as poor social backgrounds, un/under-employment is often a setting for reactionary political assertion. For example, in India educated un/under-employed young men from urban middle class elites have been key players in protests against positive discrimination for lower castes. The decision of V.P. Singh to extend reservations in employment and education to so-called “Other Backward Classes” (OBCs) provoked fierce opposition among upper caste young men, especially those facing un/under-employment (see Balagopal, 1991; Béteille, 1992). In the last three months of 1989, over 150 young people, mainly men, attempted self immolation in protest against V.P. Singh’s announcement, and over 80 of these youths died from their burns (Dirks, 2003). More recently, the educated un/under-employed have been at the forefront of protests against the Indian government’s move in April 2006 to grant OBCs a 27% reservation in central and private institutes of higher education. In response to this move, young people formed an organization called Youth For Equality (YFE), which successfully enrolled large numbers of medical professionals in a nation-wide strike. Young men from prosperous backgrounds occupy leading roles within the YFE, articulate their goals in the language of the upper classes in urban India (English), and circulate political messages on internet blogs (see, for example, http://yfemumbai.blogspot.com/). The involvement of richer sections of the educated un/under-employed is politics is also evident in studies of Hindu right wing political parties in India (Hansen, 1996; Vicziany, 2005). For example, Hansen (1996) has described how the widespread exclusion of young men from secure employment in Mumbai in the 1990s encouraged unemployed young men from middle class backgrounds to cultivate identities as Hindu nationalist political bosses. These men sought to rebuild a sense of masculine prowess through acting as brokers between the urban poor and government officials and participating in anti-Muslim violence coordinated by the right wing political party, the Shiv Sena. In 2002, educated un/under-employed young men from the urban middle classes played leading roles in anti-Muslim riots in Ahmedhabad, Gujarat, which were orchestrated by the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party. Educated un/under-employment is therefore one context in which an increasingly threatened middle class in areas of Latin America, Africa and Asia try to stave off the threat of downward mobility and police the boundaries of their relative privilege. But activism among un/under-employed youth also marks the politics of the poor. Harriss (2003), for example, described the role of educated un/under-employed young men from poor backgrounds in political protests in Argentina in the early 2000s. Following the collapse of the Argentine economy in 2001, many educated young men joined older members of the unemployed as well as union members, indigenous leaders, women and younger children in tightly orchestrated resistance to the Argentine state and regional financial elites. Harriss shows that educated un/under-employed young men assisted in coordinating a nationwide network of picketers and developing popular assemblies. These networks and assemblies served as sites of political discussion and mobilization. Recent media reports point to how educated un/under-employed young men have staged similarly high-profile campaigns against neoliberal economic reform in Ecuador (www.americas.org), Chile (www.news.bbc.co.uk), and Mexico (www.nytimes.com), often through forming political ties with high school students. The involvement of educated un/under-employed young men in protests against dominant state formations is also well attested in studies of the anti-apartheid struggle in 1980s South Africa. Bundy’s (1987) evocative account of “pavement politics” in Cape Town in the mid-1980s, for example, charts the extraordinary influence of educated unemployed young men over processes of anti-state political mobilization. Bundy shows that, unlike other sections of the youth population, educated un/under-employed young men had the educational training, time and motivation to build political organizations critical of the state and instigate violent, often spectacular protests. Like (Harriss, 2003), Bundy identifies young men from among the urban lower middle and working class as prominent figures in the expression of unemployed politics. But more than Harriss, Bundy stresses the role of the educated un/under-employed as “organic intellectuals” (Gramsci 1971) in working class organisations: permanent persuaders and provocateurs. The significance of the educated un/under-employed in processes of organized political endeavour is also a theme that runs through recent research on lower caste political movements in South Asia. For example, Lerche (1999) and Pai (2002) identify educated un/under-employed Dalit young men as pivotal figures in the rise of the pro-Dalit Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in north India. Dalits founded this party in 1984 with a view to improving the dignity of lower castes and their representation within politics and the bureaucracy (see Chandra, 2000; Jaffrelot, 2003), and the BSP became a major force in north Indian politics in the 1990s and early 2000s. During this period, it has attempted to improve Dalits’ access to jobs, reduce social discrimination against lower castes within government bureaucracies, and expand the flow of development resources to Dalits, especially the poor and those in rural areas (Jaffrelot, 2003). At the local level, educated un/under-employed young men from poor backgrounds have helped to communicate the BSP’s ideas to marginalized people and establish self-help organizations and educational institutions for their community (Pai and Singh, 1997; Jeffrey et al., 2004). In addition, these self-styled “new politicians” act as brokers between rural people and the local state (Jeffrey and Lerche, 2000; Jeffrey, 2001; Jeffrey et al., 2004). Recent research by Corbridge et al. (2005) suggests that the educated un/under-employed play similar roles in rural eastern India, and Krishna (2003) documents the rise of a cohort of educated un/under-employed youth acting as new politicians in Gujarat and Rajasthan even in the absence of strong party political support. Recognition of the role played by educated un/under-employed young men from subaltern groups in processes of political transformation and critique casts some doubt on the value of Bourdieu’s theoretical schema for an understanding of educated un/under-employment. Rather than being apathetic prisoners of their habitus, as Bourdieu’s theory rather suggests, young men from marginalized backgrounds often win significant victories through their political activity, and occasionally their actions and strategies undermine powerful structures. Indeed, Cole (2004) argues for the distinctive capacity of young people to challenge and transform structures of political domination, and she does so with especial attention to gender politics among the educated un/under-employed. Drawing upon Mannheim (1972), Cole (2004) claims that there is a certain distance in how each new generation perceives and acts upon their economic, social, cultural context. “Youths’ structural liminality – the fact that they are less embedded in older networks of patronage and exchange – makes them uniquely poised to take advantage of new social and economic conditions” (ibid.: 576). Cole advances this argument through an ethnographic and relational account of the changing lives of young men and young women in urban Madagascar. Cole observes that many young men, most of whom have acquired a secondary school education, have nevertheless failed to find secure salaried work in the urban economy. Instead, these young men have commonly entered poorly paid criminal activity. Cole contrasts these men with the increasing number of young women who have been able to earn substantial amounts of money through engaging in transactional sex with foreign visitors to Madagascar. This combination of limited but visible mobility among young women and profound insecurity and downward mobility among young men had precipitated a change in the regional politics of gender relations. An increasing number of young men – known locally as jaombilos - had become the dependents of wealthy young women. The jaombilos relied on their female partners for money and in return provided sex, companionship, and the image of a youthful style. Jaombilos tried to maintain and improve their position within these relationships through spending their partners’ money on purchasing “sexy clothes” and the latest consumer styles. Cole concludes that youth in Madagascar have responded to the risks and vicissitudes of post-colonial economic malaise through creatively rethinking their own biographies and the broader gendered structures framing their lives. This amounts to a triple call for youth agency. First, Cole shows that young men are not programmed by their habitus into certain pre-given ways of talking, dressing and moving about. Second, she demonstrates that young men’s strategies are not the pale reflection of adult cultural forms. Finally, Cole’s work suggests that young men’s cultures in the global south are not derivative of Western youth cultures, an argument that lurks behind much of an earlier strain of writing on youth unemployment in the global south (see Coleman and Azrael, 1965; Dore, 1976). Reading Cole’s emphasis on agency alongside my account of the importance of class and politics in young men’s lives suggests that the work of scholars associated with the UK’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) – the so-called “Birmingham School” – might usefully be placed alongside Bourdieu’s corpus in conceptualizing young men’s lives (e.g. Willis, 1977; Hebdige, 1979; McRobbie, 1979). CCCS scholars, particularly Paul Willis, argued that educated un/under-employed young men are capable of critiquing and resisting hegemonic forms of capitalist, state and patriarchal power. Drawing especially on Gramsci, Willis (1982: 112) stressed how political strategies are often worked out through the involvement of young men in forms of “cultural production”: active efforts to deploy available symbolic resources in ways shaped by broader structural forces. More than Bourdieu, Willis was aware of young people’s ability to negotiate structures. According to Willis, power struggles between unequal social actors are never predetermined, and subordinate groups often make small but important gains relative to dominant structures of power (c.f. Hall, 1984). But Willis also anticipates the tone of many recent accounts of marginalized un/under-employed young men by stressing the compromised nature of youth efforts to transform society. Building on the work of the French Marxist thinker, Louis Althusser (1971), Willis suggested that, even where they try to resist dominant structures, young men’s cultural productions are only “partial penetrations” of those structures, critiques marked by the ideologies of the powerful. The notion of partial penetrations is beautifully illustrated in Cole’s work in Madagascar, where young men were circulating critiques of male breadwinner norms even while reproducing other forms of masculine practice. In developing the idea of partial penetrations with reference to his own fieldwork, Willis stressed the value of a political economy approach, one that refuses to reduce questions of youth cultural and political practice to the ineluctable working of global capitalism but remains sensitive to social inequalities which constrain young men’s lives. But Willis’s work is less strong on the changing geographies of young people’s lives. The next section of the paper picks up this theme through a focus on what I call new spatialities of youth. In addition to offering counterpoints to mainstream studies of young people on the issues of class, identity and political action, research on the strategies of educated un/under-employed young men in the global south highlights questions of spatial change that are not always explicit in Western youth research. New spatialities of youth In this penultimate section of the paper I develop a conceptual framework for understanding young people’s lives through an analysis of three closely linked but distinct emerging trends in the spatial strategies of educated un/under-employed young men in the global south: first, their tendency to develop social networks that cross regional and national boundaries: new engagements; second, their attempts to reorient their practices around novel technologies and landscapes: new ecologies; third, their efforts to escape, survive or critique emerging environmental threats: new environmental subjectivities. The increasing reach of global media images, ideologies and goods allied to new possibilities for movement in many parts of the world has often drawn young people into trans-local, inter-regional or even global social, economic and political networks (e.g. Massey, 1998; Simone, 2001). This point is exemplified in Simone’s (2001) research on what he calls the “worlding” of African cities. Simone describes Nigerian and Ghanaian young people who have responded to a shortage of employment in West Africa by obtaining Islamic training in urban Saudi Arabia. Drawing on social links established within these Islamic schools and their Muslim identity, these young people negotiate entry into networks of economic activity centred on religious brotherhoods in the Arab Middle East. In particular, they use their Muslim identity to cultivate links with gulf state entrepreneurs, who offer them lucrative roles as brokers within illegal processes of trade (2001: 31). Simone thereby shows how young people’s efforts to rescale their strategies often involves reaffirming rather than rejecting “traditional” solidarities based on family, kinship or religion. Osella and Osella (2000) make similar arguments in their account of educated un/under-employed Dalit young men in Kerala who have migrated to the Middle East in search of work. Osella and Osella argue that caste, kinship, and religious ties are often crucial to the success of ex-untouchable economic migrants, such that young men are in a key sense resocialized into ascriptive social groups at the very moment at which they appear to be escaping these structures. At the same time, Osella and Osella and Simone show that social inequalities and differences may constrain as well as enable new spatial strategies. For example, in his more recent work in urban Cameroon, Simone (2005) documents how class and location limit the possibilities open to un/under-employed young men to acquire even basic resources. These observations recall Berking’s (1995) work on the changing strategies of young people. Berking (1995) has argued that processes of individualization in the West have coincided with people’s efforts to construct new social networks – what he “ecologies” – of solidarity. The ecological metaphor is important for Berking because it expresses the creative, mutual, and vigorous quality of these processes of network building between individualized but enduringly sociable actors. It is precisely such processes of what Berking calls “solidary individualism” – of social and political interaction and networking among young people who nevertheless often feel increasingly isolated by processes of economic change – that emerges so clearly in recent accounts of the educated un/under-employed in the global south. The un/under-employed build, nurture and sustain networks of mutual support in their attempts to acquire salaried work or manage the consequences of failure, and they increasingly do so across regional and national boundaries and in the face of strong feelings of personal failure. A focus on these new engagements highlights the continued importance of “traditional” social differences and inequalities in young people’s lives while also reaffirming youth agency. Beyond Berking’s primarily metaphorical use of then notion of ecologies, I use the phrase new ecologies of youth to signal the increasing and changing significance of the technological, built and natural environment in the strategies of educated un/under-employed young men, and youth more broadly. As Ong (2005: 338) has recently argued, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari (1987), the proliferation of technologies across the world has generated “systems that mix technology, politics, and actors in diverse configurations that do not follow given scales or political mappings”. Indeed, a remarkable feature of the cultural strategies of un/under-employed young men in the global south is their central preoccupation with “hooking into” and in some important sense “mastering” everyday technologies, such as the cell phone (Jeffrey et al. 2008), revolver (Hoffman, 2004), or car (Hansen, 2006). Cultivating successful masculinities in many settings involves forms of self-disciplining akin to those described by Foucault (1977): the willingness and ability to mould one’s body to dispersed technologies and practices. An educated un/under-employed young man often needs to learn to shoulder arms (Hoffman, 2004), leave one’s shirt hanging out of one’s trousers (Jeffrey et al., 2004), or stand in line (Corbridge, 2003), for example, in order to achieve social distinction or acceptance. These technological capacities require the development of habits durably inscribed in the body (Foucault, 1977). To be successfully youthful is frequently to be so wholly steeped in an approved version of modernity and associated self-regulatory modes of movement, thought and perception that the “right practices” become second nature (Jeffrey et al., 2008). Closely related to this preoccupation with technological acuities is the stress laid by un/under-employed young men, and youth more generally, on renegotiating the urban or rural landscape or remaking landscapes to reflect their ambitions and achievements. For example, Demerath (1999) describes how educated un/under-employed young men in Papua New Guinea who migrated back to their villages rationalized their return migration and recovered respect through advertising their attachment to symbols of rural life and the village landscape. By contrast, Jeffrey et al. (2004) notes that desire to escape the “dirt and dust” of rural environments suffused the practices of educated un/under-employed young men in north India. These case studies also show that ideas of what it is to be masculine or feminine mediate the process through which threatened youth perform modern technological accomplishment and rework local environments. The capacity to achieve a particular fashionable style of dress for example or demonstrate one’s remove from village “dirt” is often derived in large part from the link between these self-regulatory norms and models of masculinity or femininity. Hence, we can only grasp why young people follow particular self-styled trajectories when we appreciate the relationship between gendered models of success and visions of technological/material achievement. Weiss’s (2002) work in Arusha, Tanzania offers a case study of the significance of new gendered ecologies in the lives of young people in the global south. Weiss argues that one of the most important ways in which educated young men in Arusha have tried to negotiate the uncertainties of widespread un/under-employment is through establishing barbershops. These barbershops offer meagre incomes but they provide hubs for the dissemination of information, sites for the public presentation of self, and centers of male sociality (2002: 107). The barbershops also provide un/under-employed young men with opportunities to project their sense of marginalization within the global economy. With deliberate irony, young men often name the barbershops after the global locations from which they are excluded - such as “Brooklyn barbers” or “Paris barbershop” - and they also place value on the short Western-style haircuts which they cannot afford to maintain. Intriguingly, however, young men also refer to a barbershop in Arusha as the “stone”: a discursive move that connects these institutions to the image of the village stone in rural Tanzania - a site of sociability, work, and pleasure - and to images of rock-like masculine endurance in the face of gruelling physical struggle. The barbershop therefore operates as both a mischievous comment on young men’s distance from desired modernities and as a traditional, rural “hard” and “fixed” place of work within an urban economic environment characterized by fluidity and uncertainty. Assemblages of youth activity not only create their own spaces (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), then, but also confer “diverse values to the practices and actors thus connected together” (Ong, 2005: 338; see also Moore, 2005). The involvement of educated un/under-employed young men in the global south in contemporary environmental movements provides further reason for stressing the value of a spatial frame of reference in studying marginalized youth. Tsing (2004) describes how urban students, among whom educated un/under-employed young men were prominent, in protests against deforestation and rural dispossession in Indonesia under Suharto. Tsing uncovers urban students’ role in circulating ideas about indigenous and environmental rights and acting as intermediaries between the state and rural society. Similarly, Krishna (2003) has described the rise of a set of “new politicians” among educated un/under-employed young men in western India who act as lobbyists for the rural poor in their efforts to address connected problems of environmental degradation and social oppression. The broader engagement of un/under-employed young men in environmental movements in the global south has been described in recent research on the World Social Forum (Bello and Mertes, 2004), anti-globalization protest (Routledge, 2005), and middle class environmentalism (Mawdsley, 2004). These ethnographically informed analyses remind us that in certain settings in the global south the experience of educated un/under-employment has provided young men with the inclination, time, and energy to rethink their relationship to the environment, and thereby create new environmentalist subjectivities, often in ways that reflect their position within social hierarchies. Of course, the “new” engagements, ecologies and environmental subjectivities I have outlined here are not wholly novel. Young people have for long been implicated in trans-national strategies of resource mobilization, a point we learn, for example from Rudner’s (1994) work on the history of south Indian banking or Bayart’s (1993) genealogies of African politics. Nor are young people’s ecologies entirely innovative; there are many situations in which youth have had to adapt rapidly to environmental change, of which war (Hoffman, 2004) and urbanization (e.g. Koditschek, 1990) are only the most visible examples. Finally, there is a rich history of youth involvement in forms of environmental protest in India (Gadgil and Guha, 1995), Africa (Watts, 2003), and elsewhere. But processes of global and regional social and economic change – dynamics often grouped under the problematic heading of “globalization” – are leading to a profusion of fairly novel cultural, political and social strategies among young people, and the intensification of educated un/under-employment offers an important window on these trends. |