Elusive Adulthoods

Description

Elusive Adulthoods examines why, within the past decade, complaints about an inability to achieve adulthood have been heard around the world. By exploring the changing meaning of adulthood in Botswana, China, Sudan, Papua New Guinea, Russia, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and the United States, contributors to this volume pose the problem of "What is adulthood?" and examine how the field of anthropology has come to overlook this meaningful stage in its studies. Through these case studies we discover different means of recognizing the achievement of adulthood, such as through negotiated relationships with others, including grown children, and as a form of upward class mobility. We also encounter the difficulties that come from a sense of having missed full adulthood, instead jumping directly into old age in the course of rapid social change, or a reluctance to embrace the stability of adulthood and necessary subordination to job and family. In all cases, the contributors demonstrate how changing political and economic factors form the background for generational experience and understanding of adulthood, which is a major focus of concern for people around the globe as they negotiate changing ways of living.

Acknowledgments
1. Elusive Adulthoods: Introduction / Deborah Durham
2. The Predicament of Adulthood in Botswana / Jacqueline Solway
3. Educated Youth and the Search for in Adulthood Post-war Sri Lanka / Dhana Hughes
4. Learning to Wait: Schooling and the Instability of Adulthood for Young Men in Uganda / Claire Elisabeth Dungey and Lotte Meinert
5. Adulthood and Youth in a Rapidly Urbanizing Chinese County / Andrew B. Kipnis
6. Inventing the Rules: Redefining Moral Agency amongst the First Post-Independence Generation in Papua New Guinea / Karen Sykes
7. "Just Sitting" But Not Sitting Still: Delayed Adulthood and Changing Gender Dynamics in Northern Sudan / Janice Boddy
8. Between 'Too Young' and 'Already Old': The Fleeting Adulthood of Perestroika Teens / Anna Kruglova
Index

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• General officer
• Anthropology
• General
• Social
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 12 octobre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253030191
• Langue: English

Extrait

ELUSIVE ADULTHOODS
ELUSIVE ADULTHOODS
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF NEW MATURITIES

EDITED BY D EBORAH D URHAM
AND J ACQUELINE S OLWAY
I NDIANA U NIVERSITY P RESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2017 by Deborah Durham and Jacqueline Solway
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-02973-7 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-03000-9 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-03019-1 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18 17
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Elusive Adulthoods: Introduction
DEBORAH DURHAM
1 The Predicament of Adulthood in Botswana
JACQUELINE SOLWAY
2 Educated Youth and the Search for Adulthood in Post-War Sri Lanka
DHANA HUGHES
3 Learning to Wait: Schooling and the Instability of Adulthood for Young Men in Uganda
CLAIRE ELISABETH DUNGEY AND LOTTE MEINERT
4 Adulthood and Youth in a Rapidly Urbanizing Chinese County
ANDREW B. KIPNIS
5 Inventing the Rules: Redefining Moral Agency among the First Post-Independence Generation in Papua New Guinea
KAREN SYKES
6 Just Sitting, But Not Sitting Still: Delayed Adulthood and Changing Gender Dynamics in Northern Sudan
JANICE BODDY
7 Between Too Young and Already Old : The Fleeting Adulthood of Russia s Split Generation
ANNA KRUGLOVA
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T HIS BOOK STARTED with a double session at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in November 2013 in Chicago, Illinois. Although not all participants in that session could join in the edited publication, their papers at that session and our discussions of all our papers over meals and emails enriched our understanding of how anthropologists can approach the study of adulthood. We want to thank Jocelyn Chua, Jennifer Cole, Samuli Schielke, and Xia Sharon Zhang for their participation and conversation. The two discussants for the panel, Susan McKinnon and Brad Weiss, also gave us wonderful feedback and suggestions, and we gratefully thank them and audience members who asked stimulating questions. We are indebted to Susan Reynolds Whyte for her generous reading and review of the manuscript as a whole and her rich set of suggestions. Dennis Rogers provided thoughtful, detailed, and extensive discussion of an early version of the introduction that in revision helped guide all the authors. Gary Dunham and Janice Frisch of Indiana University Press offered encouragement and editorial support for which we are grateful. Judith K. Brown s work on women through the life cycle from childhood to seniority has been an inspiration to us. Keith Adams and Michael Lambek have been our most keen supporters and interlocutors through our fieldwork to the stages of this book. Finally but with deep gratitude, we want to thank our contributors, who put up with endless suggestions and requests from us, and offered us their rich ethnographic analyses and insights.
ELUSIVE ADULTHOODS
ELUSIVE ADULTHOODS
Introduction
Deborah Durham
T HE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY seems at its outset to be the century of elusive adulthoods. 1 We hear reports that young people cannot grow up, that they cannot attain adulthood. In urban Zambia, young people are stuck in the compound living with parents (Hansen 2005); in Rwanda they are stuck outside of the compound, unable to build the separate household in the family plot needed to move into adulthood (Sommers 2012). In North and Sub-Saharan Africa, youth are said to be caught in a period of waithood unable to attain social adulthood well into their thirties (Honwana 2012; Singerman 2013). More ominously, Henrik Vigh (2006) describes young men in Guinea-Bissau as in a state of social death, a liminal social space with no exit. In India, middle-class young men are mired in timepass, enrolling in advanced degree after advanced degree at second-rate universities, dabbling in campus politics or just sitting around drinking tea, unable to find the employment they seek (Jeffrey 2010); in Ethiopia, young men say they live like chickens, just eating and sleeping, waiting but not progressing into adulthood (Mains 2007). In Japan, people worry about parasite singles enamored of the comforts of their parents home and wary of an employment landscape that no longer promises stability, long after their ceremonial inauguration into adulthood at the age of twenty-one (Brinton 2011; Newman 2012). In China, young people have gone tribal: the gnawing the elderly tribe lives off their parents and grandparents dwindling resources (Zhang 2013), while an ant tribe is un- or under-employed in the cities (see Kipnis this volume) and a moonlight clan (Schott 2011) spends its entire income every month, instead of scrimping and saving as their parents did. In post-Soviet Georgia, young men hang around, growing old without growing up, the path to a successful adulthood unclear in the temporal and spatial reorientations of the post-Soviet state (Frederiksen 2013).
In the United States, too, the elusiveness of adulthood is widely reported and studied, and the subject of many popular advice books and comedic films. Where college graduation is commonly held to be a threshold to adulthood, debt, inadequate jobs, instability in careers, and an increasingly late average age of marriage are said to make it difficult for people to cross the threshold and be considered truly adult (Settersten et al. 2008). These factors burden those who do not go to college as well as those who do, perhaps more so. Members of the working class may struggle without the family support that might help house them, support them in further education or training, or meet debt payments (Silva 2013). Whether the problem is structural, as statistics about jobs and debt suggest, or psychological, as blame is laid on a new generation of narcissists unable to resolve their quarterlife crisis (Robbins and Wilner 2001; Twenge and Campbell 2010), the American millennials are often depicted as a boomerang generation, stuck in their parents basements, failing to launch and refusing responsibility. Jeffrey Arnett (2004) has detected in them a new psychological stage of life, between adolescence and adulthood proper. He labels their experience emerging adulthood, a period shaped by ongoing fluidity and experimentation, an extension of the time of becoming, taking place before commitments are made to being a certain kind of person and self. Fortunately, for those struggling with the transition to adulthood in all its dimensions, there is a long and growing shelf of advice books at the bookshop. These range from the 2001 Quarterlife Crisis by Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner, describing the twenties in terms analogous to the already recognized mid-life crisis, to Kelly Williams Brown s more recent Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps , which both urges its readers to recognize that they are not special snowflakes and helps them understand and negotiate apartment rentals and vacuuming, call in a plumber, and get along with coworkers (Brown 2013; Robbins and Wilner 2001). Parents of this generation now have their own how-to manuals, with the publication of Julie Lythcott-Haims s How to Raise an Adult in 2015, responding to fears that this generation of Americans has been educated by overzealous parenting into perpetual childhood (Twenge 2006). The humor and self-deprecation often present in these books, however, belies the very real struggles and sense of social dislocation felt by many people in their twenties and thirties in America, even while laying considerable blame on individuals and their parents for not taking the responsibility themselves to grow up.
The distribution of these complaints and anxieties around the world raises the question of what adulthood means to those who feel they cannot attain it. Has adulthood changed, perhaps in the course of those processes known as globalization-a linked restructuring of economies, sharing of ideas through media and consumer practices, and the global spread of age-disciplinary institutions, including Western models of citizenship, education, and health that overtake local ones? At the very least, the scope of political and economic changes has disrupted the traditional life course everywhere, even as what is thought of as traditional can be either invented traditions (Hobsbawm 1983) or deeply rooted perduring practices. In the United States, the adulthood that is bemoaned emerged in its idealized and normative form in the 1950s, and unraveled soon after. Yet it is that limited form of adulthood that is often the index of proper adulthood in America and, some suggest, in other parts of the world. 2 In some parts of the world, it can seem that nostalgia for a lost path to adulthood is borrowed from the United States, as are other borrowed nostalgias that speak to very local concerns about ethnic difference or rural lifeways (e.g., Appadurai 1996: 29-31; Ferguson 2010), or as borrowed life stages are used to reimagine local difficulties (Weiss 2002). In other places, neoliberal changes have wrenched away the paths to a newly formulated adulthood