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- Baral, Anna, 1984-
(författare)
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Bad Guys, Good Life : An Ethnography of Morality and Change in Kisekka Market (Kampala, Uganda)
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Based on ethnographic data gathered over a period of almost three years, this dissertation scrutinizes the everyday lives of informal workers selling auto parts in Kisekka Market, central Kampala. Its ambition is to understand how the workers navigated a highly moralized environment in today’s Uganda, where the supposed moral deterioration of society is passionately discussed in public and in private.Analytically the dissertation focuses on three “moral landscapes,” or moral discourses of different geographical scales, that intersected in the workers’ lives: first, the Ugandan nation or the country; second, the Buganda kingdom with its cultural institutions to which the majority of the workers professed allegiance; and third, the capital city Kampala. Materializing in Kisekka Market, each landscape posed moral demands that the workers navigated daily as they struggled to balance norms with lived practices.The workers were perceived by external observers as morally ambiguous for their supposed instrumentality in riots and violent crimes in Kampala. Their notoriousness increased for the fact that they were men, often uneducated, and therefore, in public discourse, potentially threatening. Consequently, they were referred to as bayaaye, translated as hooligans or bad guys, and this label defined their relations with customers from all parts of Kampala and Uganda.In exploring the implications of the three moral landscapes, particular attention is paid to the in-between. Rather than focusing on mediatized events like riots and crimes, the dissertation investigates and locates the workers’ agency in the mundane processes of care and getting by and the tentative paths to a good life that unfolded daily in Kisekka Market, regardless of larger political tensions in Kampala and beyond. The city’s development plan to replace Kisekka Market with a fancy shopping mall rendered the workers’ situation increasingly exposed and their lives increasingly vulnerable. In the workers’ quest for some degree of control and self-worth, the label of bayaaye refracted into its multiple dimensions – proudly appropriated or painfully rejected by the workers themselves – attesting to the complexities of everyday ethics, in Kampala as elsewhere. Consequently, the ethnography of this dissertation problematizes the dominant yet fraught narrative around young men in urban Africa.
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- Baral, Anna, 1984-
(författare)
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Keeping culture clean : 'nested redistribution' as a path to moral redemption in Kampala (Uganda)
- 2023
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Ingår i: Journal for Contemporary African Studies. - : Taylor & Francis Group. - 0258-9001 .- 1469-9397.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The restoration of precolonial authorities in contemporary Uganda has inspired the revival of practices constitutive of local identities. The article focuses on the role of (re)distribution in the formation of Ganda identity in the Buganda kingdom, by exploring the moral conundrums lived by workers in Kisekka Market (Kampala). The article describes two principles underpinning economic relations. First, it explores culturally approved patronage and downwards distribution which, given the pyramidal structure of society, translates simultaneously into forms of redistribution and the upward submission of subjects to a higher order (clans and kingdom). This two-way process is called 'nested redistribution'. Second, it shows how culturally approved forms of (re)distribution conflict with individual accumulation, culturally condemned but paradoxically key to afford redistribution itself. The ethnography describes how tensions between these principles are resolved, making use of the same categories (culture, morality) that engender them in the first place.
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- Baral, Anna, 1984-
(författare)
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La normalità, nonostante tutto. Crisi e moralità quotidiana a Kampala.
- 2020
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Ingår i: L'Uomo. - : Sapienza Università di Roma. - 2465-1761. ; 10:1, s. 27-48
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- La storia del mercato di Kisekka, a Kampala, è stata narrata prevalentemente attraverso una cronologia di eventi violenti. Un luogo “in crisi”, metonimia della capitale postcoloniale in cui era collocato, Kisekka era immediatamente collegato nell’immaginario urbano a rivolte, a scontri e alla reputazione dei “cattivi ragazzi” (bayaaye) che vi lavoravano. L’articolo propone di spostare il focus etnografico dalle rivolte come «eventi critici» (Das 1995) al tempo che intercorre fra essi e in cui essi sono conte-stualizzati. Al centro dell’analisi vi sono la dimensione del quotidiano e le pratiche attraverso cui i lavoratori di Kisekka convalidavano la propria mo-ralità e mantenevano il controllo sulla propria vita e sul mercato. È nei tempi e negli spazi “di mezzo”, che sfuggono agli sguardi dei mass media, che la vita scorre piena di significato, offrendo rassicuranti continuità a dispetto del caos e della precarietà della città. Negli interstizi inesplorati fra i grandi eventi e nelle zone grigie navigate ogni giorno dai lavoratori informali, l’esperienza urbana appare diversa da quanto raccontato dai mass media. Considerando l’etica ordinaria (Lambek 2010) di cui la quotidianità è espressione, il testo propone una narrazione diversa di un mercato urbano e, per estensione, di una città africana.
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