This seminar will be a hybrid event where the speaker will be presenting in-person and the talk will be streamed via zoom. Those who want to attend physically are more than welcome to join us in meeting room 929 at Eilert Sundts hus.
Abstract
Abundance of time is commonly described as a privilege. By the same token, the chances of obtaining a future reward or becoming successful are conceived of as multiplying with the availability of time, allowing people to work toward their goals in life. In this presentation, I reconsider entanglements of time, action, connections and privilege, by thinking through ‘opportunity’ as an ethnographic concept. Specifically, I explore opportunities as actionable intersections of time, space and people, embedded in histories of social, economic and political relationships. Based on fieldwork carried out during various periods between 2021 and 2023 in the coastal city of Tema – a commercial, industrial and logistical hub that is portrayed by residents as a ‘place of opportunity’ – I trace how young adults are channelled into or hindered from accessing places and occasions they value in terms of potential reward. I also explore how Tema youth anticipate and cultivate opportunities for jobs, training, education, and travel in specific ways. Rather than the unequal distribution of amounts of time, discussions over inequality and privilege among interlocutors focus on exposure and access to timespaces of a particular kind, that only indirectly concern ‘plenty of time’. To grab ‘big opportunities,’ attentiveness to places and moments in which opportunities are likely to arise, and skills of ‘seeing’, are key. To develop my arguments, I draw on anthropological works on temporality and the future and take inspiration from studies of aspirational thinking and achievement within economic anthropology and migration studies.
Bio
Tone Sommerfelt is a social anthropologist interested in the intersection of time, politics, morality and socio-material relations. Her research has addressed issues related to the politics of ethnicity and religion, kinship and marriage, land and rurality, migration, and global child protection agendas, with a particular focus on the ethnography of West Africa (Gambia, Ghana, Mali). She is currently Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), where she takes part in an ERC-funded project entitled Future Migration as Present Fact (FUMI), led by Jørgen Carling. The present presentation draws on her ethnography for the FUMI project. Some of her later works have been published in Anthropological Forum, History & Anthropology, Conflict and Society and The Journal of Modern African Studies. Earlier this year, the book Dynamics of Political Domination in Africa: An Axel Sommerfelt Collection, co-edited with Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Marek Jakoubek, was published by Berghahn Books.
Read more: Tone Sommerfelt – Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO)