Searching for Innocence at AAA

At the 116th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington DC the resident postdoc of the MediAfrica project contributed a poster entitled Coming of Age in Cape Town – searching for innocence in difficult transitions. The poster shows how visual narratives of youthhood in my own ethnographic material in crucial ways coincide with the stories told in two recent movies about coming of age in cape town, made by local film companies, and that they challenge how we conceptualize “youth” as a social category of transition.

Youth is conventionally a transition from pure childhood to mature adulthood. But in the disillusioned New South Africa it is the other way around: coming of age is a search for innocence. During 9 months of fieldwork among poor black families in Cape Town I collected video diaries from 19 young parents. Here the diaries of Matt and Jess are juxtaposed with images from the local feature films Noem My Skollie and Tess. The pixelated intimacy of Matt and Jessica's diaries contrast with the professional and clean footage from the movies. But these stories of coming of age told by Capetonians in 2017 have a common telos. They depict childhood as ruined by abuse and violence and transitions to adulthood as a search for purity and new beginnings. Aspirations for respectable adulthood are shaped by the experience of transitions that do not offer the healing and transformation promised. 

Thanks goes out to, Matt, Jess, Meg Rickards and David Max Brown for sharing stories, photos and videos.

Summer of Postdoc: conferences, workshops and inspirations

Summer Snap: Team Urban Orders hanging out at the roof of Moesgård Museum

There’s a time after a long fieldwork, which has always to me been a sort of lost time. What goes on is neither “collection of data,” nor “publishing”. It is difficult to count and account for it, and it is important. There is an invisible processing that goes on, in which the fieldwork material takes on a shape begins to make sense in an academic context. What actually happened? What was important here? What kinds of writing might come of this? A time to seek out inspiration and perhaps return to old knowings in new light.

In August I attended the Mega Seminar, the biannual conference for Danish Anthropologists as a kind of exiled member of the tribe. The conference theme was The End, leading to discussions on both how the people we work with live through and understand different kinds of endings, as well as the seemingly always imminent End of Anthropology as a discipline.

The following week I returned to Moesgård in Århus to meet with the transdisciplinary and international research group around Urban Orders. The project has set out to develop new ways of working with complex urban problems with a focus on what we have called urban orders  - "a dynamic regularity in the relationship between social life in the city and its physical environment, which has emerged without overall coordination, control or use of force". The URO group has held four URO labs, and I was involved in organizing the first Lab in Århus, two years ago. Returning to URO sparks inspiration for my current work the MediAfrica project, both on how to understand the context of motherhood in one of the most unequal cities in the world, and on how to collaborate and write together with other researchers.

Thinking about past and future projects with colleagues opened new doors in my heart and my mind, igniting the desire to start writing about the stories and experiences I have taken with me from South Africa. 

Sindre Bangstad lectures on public anthropology and the media at Aarhus University