DANIEL MAINS
Washington University
Neoliberal times:
Progress, boredom, and shame among young men
in urban Ethiopia
A B S T R A C T
In this article, I examine discourses and practices
surrounding employment, the experience of time,
and international migration among young men in
urban Ethiopia to demonstrate the value and limits
of understanding cultural and economic processes in
terms of neoliberal capitalism. Young mens inability
to experience progress and take on the normative
responsibilities of adults is conditioned by economic
policies associated with structural adjustment and
local values surrounding occupational status. Young
men construct international migration as a solution
to their temporal problems. I argue that local values
surrounding status and shame highlight the
importance of social relationships for
conceptualizing time and space. [youth, progress,
neoliberal, Ethiopia, time, migration, unemployment]
I
dle groups of young men rocking on the heels of their thick-soled
leather shoes, hands in pockets, wearing clean button-down shirts
untucked over loose-fitting jeanssuch scenes are common in
Ethiopian cities. In urban Ethiopia, the unemployment rate for young
people between the ages of 18 and 30 is estimated to be higher than
50 percent, and most of the unemployed are first-time job seekers who
remain without work for three to four years (Serneels 2004). Unemployed
young men in Jimma, an ethnically and religiously diverse city of approx-
imately 120 thousand inhabitants located in the southwest of the country,
often joked that the only change in their lives involved following the con-
tours of the shade from one side of the street to the other with the passing of
the sun.1 These young men spoke about time as an overabundant and po-
tentially dangerous quantity. They passed their days chewing chat, a locally
grown stimulant; watching the latest videos from Hollywood, Bollywood,
or, much more infrequently, Ethiopia; and, above all, engaging with one an-
other in chewata, the playful conversation that is a favorite pastime of many
Ethiopians.2
In the African context, scholars have rightly emphasized the role of ne-
oliberal economic policies, particularly structural adjustment, in creating
a gap between the aspirations of youth and economic realities (Cole 2004;
Hansen 2005; Howanda and De Boeck 2005; Jua 2003; Masquelier 2005;
Silberschmidt 2004; Weiss 2004). James Ferguson (1999, 2006) has explained
that economic shifts associated with neoliberal capitalism have derailed
Africa from what he calls a temporal developmental trajectory (2006:190).
Ferguson and other anthropologists have argued that, although theories of
neoliberal capitalism are useful for understanding economic decline and
unemployment, they must also take into account local cultural and eco-
nomic dynamics (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000; Weiss 2004). In this article,
I expand on these insights to explicate the temporal dimensions of neolib-
eralism for Ethiopian young men. I examine the particular relationship be-
tween youth and progress together with the cultural and historical dynamics
of urban Ethiopia to argue that the experience of time is inextricable from
social relationships.
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 659673, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. C 2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content
through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website,
http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ae.2007.34.4.659.
American Ethnologist ! Volume 34 Number 4 November 2007
Youth as a social category is temporally constructed in
terms of the transformation from child to adult and, there-
fore, has a peculiar relationship with notions of progress
(Cole 2005; Comaroff and Comaroff 2005).3 When aspira-
tions are increasingly difficult to attain, the period during
which one exists in the ambiguous stage between childhood
and adulthood expands. Youth is defined increasingly on the
basis of an individuals inability to take on the responsibili-
ties associated with adulthood. A youth is in the process of
becoming something else, but in an environment of severe
economic scarcity, this transformation is frequently never
realized.
My analysis of the discourses and practices of urban
young men concerning issues of progress forces a rethink-
ing of the implications of neoliberal capitalism for under-
standings of time and space. Like Anna Tsing (2002), I argue
against a too-easy application of models of capitalism and
neoliberalism that obscure the variety of local experience.
Rather, I use an examination of local values concerning oc-
cupational status and a heightened sense of social shame as
an entry point to demonstrate both the value and the limits
of analyses of neoliberalism.
In Ethiopia, employment is often conceived of not only
in terms of labor and wages but also in relation to the so-
cial interactions associated with particular occupations. In
the same manner, youth in urban Ethiopia do not evaluate
manipulations of time and space primarily in terms of their
potential for production but in the way that they reposition
one in relation to others. When I asked young men about
unemployment, they stated that there simply was no work
to be had, but when I pushed, pointing to other youth who
were working, they claimed that it was impossible to work in
Ethiopia because of yilun nta.
To have yilun nta
is to experi-
ence an intense shame based on what others think and say
about one and ones family (see Poluha 2004:147). Yilun nta
is like a mosquito faintly whining in the ear, a reminder that
others are watching and judging. During a group discussion,
one young unemployed man explained, We would never
work as a porter here. There is yilun nta
here and that kind of
work is not respected. People will shout orders at you and you
are expected to obey. If we go abroad we can work without
being insulted. We dont care about seeing other countries,
but we want to be free to work and help our families. I ex-
amine yilun nta
and occupational status to draw attention to
the importance of social relationships for understanding un-
employment as well as the related problem of experiencing
progress through time, which is common for young people
throughout much of the world. Similar to the way they view
work, urban young men evaluate progress in terms of so-
cial relationships, and they conceive of spatial movement as
the solution to their inability to experience changes in their
social position with the passage of time.
In the first half of this article, I describe the develop-
ment of a large, young, urban unemployed population in
660
Ethiopia as a three-part process that includes the expansion
of education, a reduction in employment opportunity in the
public sector because of neoliberal economic policies, and
the operation of cultural values that cause available forms
of work to be considered undesirable. Whereas the first two
aspects of this process are common to many world areas, the
third is specific to the Ethiopian case. A close examination of
this process demonstrates how people conceive of work and
interpersonal relationships in Ethiopia and lays the ground-
work for understanding how young men experience time.
In the second half of the article, I examine young mens
discourses surrounding progress, boredom, and migration.
Young men in Jimma often made comments like We live like
chickens, we are just eating and sleeping to express their
frustrations with their inability to progress over time.4 A life
of eating and sleeping or simply sitting was contrasted
with one that involved change or improvement. Living like
chickens implied that life lacked meaning, that one simply
moved here and there without any purpose besides filling
ones stomach. Ideally, for young men, life would proceed
along a series of incremental improvements, but most saw
themselves in ten years still living with their parents and
unable to marry or start families of their own. Young men
complained of having too much unstructured time in which
introspective thoughts about their future became a source
of unease. Unlike the timespace compression described by
David Harvey for the West, in Ethiopia the inability to ex-
perience progress, in the sense of actualizing a future that
is different from ones present (Koselleck 1985), caused time
to expand rather than contract for many youth, producing a
sensation that was akin to Western notions of boredom.
The solution to these interrelated temporal problems,
both imaginatively and in terms of actual social strategies,
involved a kind of spatial fix, but one that was also quite dif-
ferent from that made famous by Harvey. Young men sought
to move across spaceboth within Ethiopia and outside it to
South Africa, to Europe, and, most commonly, to the United
Statesto escape yilun nta
and to take on work that they
would never have performed at home. Within this discourse,
a progressive view of time was restored as the successful mi-
grant was imagined to return to Jimma to carry out projects
like building four-story hotels and founding NGOs. The de-
sire to migrate is common to youth living in many impov-
erished countries, but yilun nta
and notions of occupational
status highlight the manner in which both space and time
are often conceptualized in terms of social relationships.
My analysis is based on fieldwork conducted between
2003 and 2005, primarily with young men between the ages
of 18 and 30. The young men in my study represented a
variety of backgrounds in terms of class, ethnicity, and re-
ligion. Nearly all unemployed young men lived with their
families and were dependent on them for financial sup-
port. My sample was representative of urban Ethiopia in that
most of the unemployed young men in it had completed

secondary school and all had at least completed grade eight.
I carried out interviews and engaged in casual conversation
and group discussions in the spaces in the city where young
men congregatedcafes, video houses, barbershops, and
street corners. As Brad Weiss (2002) has noted, an examina-
tion of the discourses that emerge from these spaces clarifies
the manner in which future possibilities are imagined and
pursued.
Yilun nta,
occupational status, and social
relationships
Young men frequently claimed that high rates of unemploy-
ment were partly a result of yilun nta.
They often said that
Ethiopians do not appreciate work (sira yinaqel) and that,
although one could earn money shining shoes or perform-
ing other small jobs, this type of work was not respected.5 To
engage in low-status employment was to adopt a particular
position in ones relations with others. It was the undesir-
ability of that position that often caused youth to choose to
remain unemployed. Contrary to analyses of late capitalism
that claim consumption has taken the place of work in the
construction of identity (Baudrillard 1981), issues of occupa-
tional status indicate that the relationship between identity
and production continues to be highly relevant.
Stigmatized occupations were often those that involved
menial labor or were associated with traditional craft work-
ers. Among most Ethiopian ethnic groups and in East Africa,
generally, artisan professions like carpentry, blacksmithing,
weaving, and pottery have been highly stigmatized.6 Al-
though important ideological differences underlie the two
cases, the treatment of artisan workers was similar to that
of lower castes within the Hindu caste system (Levine 1974;
Pankhurst 2003:1217). Alula Pankhurst (2003) explains that
in Ethiopia nonartisans marginalized artisans in terms of
space, economics, politics, and social life. Marriage with
nonartisans was prohibited, and artisans frequently lacked
locally defined rights to land. In most cases, they worked as
tenant farmers on the land of others and were required to
give the products of their work to their patrons, receiving
only token amounts of grain in return. Artisans did not ob-
serve the same religion-based food taboos as Muslims and
Orthodox Christians. For example, artisans are said to have
eaten animals, like the pig, that do not have a cloven hoof and
certain forbidden wild game like monkey or hippopotamus.
Although sharing food and eating from the same dish consti-
tute an important part of most Ethiopian cultures, artisans
were not permitted to share the same utensils or dishes with
others. If artisans were guests in the home of a nonartisan,
they would eat from banana leaves or other items that could
be disposed of following the meal. Artisans frequently were
thought to possess an evil eye, which also contributed to the
general discrimination they faced throughout their day-to-
day lives.
Neoliberal times ! American Ethnologist
Pankhurst and Dena Freeman (2003) explain that no-
tions of personhood are important for maintaining the
marginalized status of artisans in rural areas. The farmers
in their study asserted that artisans were not fully human.
Despite documenting a discourse centered on factors like
cleanliness and eating habits, Pankhurst and Freeman ar-
gue that the continued low status of artisans was based on
their lack of access to land and the social relations that are
involved with land rights. Even when artisans were able to
increase their wealth, this did not translate into status and
full personhood unless they were able to obtain land rights.
As was the case for marginalized rural artisans, in Jimma
money alone was not enough to improve the social position
of lower occupations.7
After the 1974 revolution, discrimination against arti-
sans was banned by the Marxist Derg regime, but at the time
of my research (200305), youth informants claimed that a
powerful stigma was still present. This stigma was broadly
applied to all forms of work that resembled traditional crafts.
For example, youth claimed that, because they work with
metal, welders are often subject to some of the same stigma
as blacksmiths and are referred to by the same pejorative
terms. Other nonartisan occupations, like porter, waiter, or
shoeshine, were also grouped together within the general
category of lower work (ziqittena sira). Workers in these
occupations did not have rigid constraints placed on their
behavior, but young men generally considered these types
of employment to be undesirable and potentially shameful.
These professions were undesirable not because work-
ers received low payment for demanding work (even working
as a shoeshine could sometimes bring a relatively high in-
come) but because of yilun nta,
specifically, the fear of what
others might think or say about one or ones family if one
were seen performing this type of work. As one young man
explained, In Ethiopia there is work, but most people dont
do it. Young people would rather depend on their parents
than take lower work. If they cant get government work they
would rather just sit and wait. They are afraid of what people
will say about them if they work.
Although low-status work did not have the established,
culturally prescribed restrictions on social interactions as-
sociated with artisan professions in the past, performing
this type of work still placed one into a distinctive social
categorya type of person who is treated differently from
others.8 As one young man put it in regard to lower work,
If someone says come youve got to come. Working in
lower occupations meant placing ones self at the bottom
of relations of authority, and one had to be prepared to
accept this transformation. During my research, I spent
long periods of time conducting participant-observation
among young men working as street-side bicycle repairmen,
watch vendors, barbers, and in other occupations that were
stigmatized in a contemporary urban context. In interac-
tions with others, they were consistently spoken to in the
661
American Ethnologist ! Volume 34 Number 4 November 2007
imperative and were rarely able to engage in equitable con-
versation. Working young men complained of being the ob-
jects of insults, for instance, being called thief. Lower work-
ers would generally not be invited to weddings or other im-
portant social events. If they arrived on their own, they would
not be turned away, but their presence would most likely be
ignored, and no one would greet them or encourage them to
eat.
Hierarchical relations are pervasive in Ethiopia, but
there is a difference between subordinating ones self on the
basis of age or gender and doing so in exchange for money.
For a woman to submit to a man or a young person to sub-
mit to an elder is seen as model behavior that one should
strive to emulate (Poluha 2004). In these cases, showing re-
spect or deference is thought to be chosen freely and to be
a sign of good character. The individual who is deferred to
is expected to provide some level of protection or guidance
for his or her subordinates. The parentchild and teacher
student relationships are good examples of this dynamic. In
contrast, showing deference in the context of work does not
involve a personal relationship. The worker is simply follow-
ing orders to access money, and there is no expectation of
a deeper relationship. The worker exists at the bottom of a
power hierarchy without a corresponding personal relation-
ship of protection and obedience.
In some cases, a positive form of relationship does ex-
ist between the worker and his customers. In Amharic, both
the vendor and customer are referred to as demibena if a
relationship exists between them. To have a demibena rela-
tionship implies a degree of loyalty. The customer should not
buy elsewhere, and the vendor should give a favorable price.
Although the demibena relationship is important, it only ex-
ists at the moment of the transaction. The vendor and seller
are on equal terms for a moment, each helping the other to
obtain his or her needs, and then that relationship ends until
another purchase is made. It does not generally encompass
other aspects of social life. Ones demibena would not be
expected to attend ones wedding. The form is a means of
establishing civility in an otherwise tense interaction, but it
does not imply the existence of a relationship that resembles
the patronclient model and extends beyond the moment of
exchange.
The demibena relationship may be contrasted with the
prestigious nature of the government employment that plays
a key role in youth aspirations. When asked about the type
of work that they wanted, the majority of youth simply re-
sponded government work (mengist sira). Government
work encompasses a wide range of professions from jani-
tor to clerk to administrator, and youth expressed a general
desire for public employment, rather than for a particular
occupation.
The prestige of the government worker derives from
the fact that work-related subordination and exchange take
place on the basis of relationships that extend into all as-
662
pects of life and are not limited to the moment of the trans-
action. As they are for the low-status worker, giving, receiv-
ing, and subordination are present. But there is little sense
that one is directly exchanging ones labor for what one re-
ceives. Unlike that of lower workers, the salary of government
employees does not directly correspond to production. It is
common for government workers to spend long periods of
time away from work attending funerals and other social
events, which implies that their salary is not directly based
on time spent at work. Furthermore, relationships between
government workers extend beyond the workplace. For ex-
ample, an administrator will usually attend the funeral of
a janitor if the two are employees in the same government
compound. Many of the material benefits controlled by gov-
ernment workers are connected to access to powerful indi-
viduals and the chance to distribute better housing, educa-
tion, and employment. Giving and receiving in this context
take place because a relationship exists, not just at the mo-
ment of the transaction but in all aspects of life.
This contrast should not be conceived of as exchange for
profit versus a relationship-based form of exchange, with
exchange for profit representing the intrusion of a market
economy (Taussig 1980). Urban Ethiopians did not necessar-
ily evaluate accumulation through exchange negatively. Suc-
cessful business owners depended on impersonal exchange
to accumulate wealth, and they possessed high levels of pres-
tige. Unlike working youth, however, business owners were
never in a position to directly sell their labor to a customer.
This meant that their interactions with others did not entail
subordinating themselves with the intent to access wealth.
Business owners did directly engage in relationships with
their employees, but they were in a position of power and fre-
quently sought to imbue these relationships with personal
qualities that went beyond a simple exchange. Low status
was associated not so much with the intent to accumulate
profits as with the subordination of ones self without the
presence of a relationship that extended to other aspects of
life beyond the moment of exchange.
In this sense, youth evaluated an occupation not only
on the basis of its utility in accumulating wealth but also
in terms of its association with a particular quality of social
relations. The government employment that most youth de-
sired provided a secure form of income, and it also placed
one within a vertical hierarchy of power that was accompa-
nied by close personal relationships. As I detail in the fol-
lowing section, because of local and international economic
shifts, government work was not available and most youth
chose unemployment. Nevertheless, it is perhaps not quite
accurate to conceive of youth as choosing between unem-
ployment and employment. Youth were faced with a choice
between contrasting ways of positioning themselves socially,
and the shame of yilun nta
prevented them from engaging in
socially undesirable work. This was true not only of relatively
well-off young men but also of those who came from families

with very few economic resources.9 To work or not to work
was a social decision. As I explain in the second half of this
article, employment was closely interrelated with notions
of progress and the experience of time, and the social di-
mensions of decisions surrounding employment impacted
evaluations of time.
Education and expectations
The role of yilun nta
and values surrounding occupational
status in creating a large population of unemployed youth is
a historically specific phenomenon. That working in partic-
ular occupations should be considered shameful is a result
of expectations surrounding education and the urban op-
portunity structure. These dynamics are also partly respon-
sible for the recent emergence of youth as a distinct social
category.
It was with the growth of permanent cities that no-
tions of occupational status began to develop beyond the
traditional stigmas applied to artisans. The expansion of
northern settlers into southern Ethiopia and the consequent
appropriation of land during the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, described by Bahru Zewde (2002a) and Donald
Donham (1986), also occurred in Jimma. In Jimma, however,
the process was delayed by a peace treaty between King Abba
Jifar II of Jimma and Menelik II, emperor of Ethiopia. Most of
the movement of northerners, especially Orthodox Christian
Amhara and Oromo from the Shoa region, into the Jimma
area took place under the reign of Haile Sellasie, beginning
after the brief Italian occupation ended in 1941. Individuals
who received land after the Italian occupation quickly
expanded their wealth through farming and trade. The
pattern was to have a large piece of land in the countryside
and also a home in the city. Money from the sale of coffee,
which is grown extensively in the area surrounding Jimma,
funded the building of a house in the city and engagement in
trade.
The creation of a wealthy land-owning class in Jimma
attracted others to the city. In particular, large numbers of
people from the Dawro, Kambata, Yem, and Kafa ethnic
groups living in the area surrounding Jimma moved to the
city in search of wage labor. Some came only to earn money
during the coffee harvest, but others stayed and found work
as servants or manual laborers for landowners. With little
education or knowledge of Amharic, the language of com-
merce in most of urban Ethiopia, these new migrants had
difficulty finding anything but the most menial of jobs. It was
during this period, beginning after 1941, that the prestige
and desirability of government employment as an urban
occupation developed in Jimma. The prestige of govern-
ment work was partly based on the traditional hierarchical
relationship between nobility and farmers. As Allan Hoben
(1970:222) notes in describing Addis Ababa under the reign
of Haile Sellasie, the government administrator replaced
Neoliberal times ! American Ethnologist
the authority of the gult-holding lord, and education took
the place of military activity as a means for accessing social
mobility. Owning land and longer residence in the city in-
creased ones chances of obtaining an education. Finishing
secondary school virtually guaranteed one a position as
an administrator or a teacher. An occupational hierarchy
between those with and those without government work
began to develop. Government workers had both political
and economic power, whereas others generally performed
the service work and manual labor necessary to maintain
life in the city. To some extent, a patronclient relationship
existed between these two strata. In much the same manner
that a rural lord could provide access to land, government
administrators and landowners could give their clients ur-
ban employment, better housing, and other opportunities.
The revolutionary Derg regime (197491) eliminated most
opportunities to accumulate wealth through private enter-
prise, causing the value of government work to increase.
For the parents of the youth in my study, who came of
age under Haile Sellasie and early in the Derg regime, edu-
cation was the key to accessing status through government
employment. Class sizes were smaller than today, the qual-
ity of education was higher, and secondary graduates were
virtually guaranteed government jobs. Although the partic-
ularities differ, similar relationships between government
employment, education, and class have been described for
other parts of Africa (Berry 1985; Covell 1987; Sharp 2002).
In recent years, most urban youth have completed pri-
mary education, and around half have had at least some
secondary education (Central Statistical Authority 1999). In
general, these youth have aspired to use their education
to access government employment, but for most this has
not been possible. Tekeste Negash (1996:79) argues that the
expansion of education under the Derg regime defied ra-
tionality, creating a population of young people unable to
find employment. Under the Derg, the public sector also ex-
panded, and although it may not have been able to absorb
all secondary school graduates, its expansion certainly pre-
vented extremely high levels of unemployment, like those
that began in the 1990s. The total urban unemployment rate
for individuals between the ages of 10 and 65 rose from
7.9 percent in 1984 to 22 percent in 1994 to 26.4 percent
in 1999, with young people forming the bulk of the unem-
ployed (Bizuneh et al. 2001). Todays students are very differ-
ent from the elite group of the past. With the increase in the
number of students, the quality of education has declined.
Today a typical secondary school classroom contains 8090
students, sharing books and learning in English, a language
that many students do not understand well. In 1994, only
around 10 percent of young people between the ages of 20
and 29 had advanced to postsecondary education (Central
Statistical Authority 1999). Although the few youth who do
obtain a postsecondary degree are generally able to access
desirable government employment, the vast majority leave
663
American Ethnologist ! Volume 34 Number 4 November 2007
school with few practical skills and little hope of securing
employment.
The decrease in the value of education has created a gap
between young peoples probable life trajectories and their
aspirations and has led to the development of a situation
similar to what has been described as a diploma disease
(Dore 1976; Gould 1993) or diploma inflation (Bourdieu
1984:142143).10 This is a dynamic that is common in many
world areas, but where a decrease in the value of education
and access to government work led youth to create opportu-
nities in the informal sector elsewhere (Cole 2004), this was
not common in Ethiopia. Although some youth occasionally
express dissent, for the most part, values surrounding occu-
pational status and education appeared to be quite rigid.
In the absence of jobs that young people believed fit with
their education status, urban Ethiopian youth of all class
backgrounds frequently accepted extended periods of un-
employment.
The ability to remain unemployed for a long period of
time is a reflection of the relatively privileged social and eco-
nomic position occupied by most urban young men. The
unemployed young men in my study represented a variety
of class backgrounds, but all of them were born and raised in
the city, and this provided them with a distinct advantage in
relation to Ethiopias predominantly rural population. Even
youth from poor families had extended social networks that
provided them with the support necessary to remain un-
employed for a period of years. Some came from house-
holds headed by single mothers with monthly incomes of
less than 200 birr (approximately $25) earned from brew-
ing and selling beer, and others came from households in
which both parents were government administrators and the
monthly income was around 2,000 birr. I collected budgets
from 20 unemployed young men, who were roughly evenly
distributed in terms of class background, and documented
their income from nonwork-related sources for an entire
month. These journals revealed that, although all young men
had adequate support to survive on a day-to-day basis, total
income varied dramatically on the basis of class and neigh-
borhood of residence. Middle-class young mens incomes
from gifts were often nearly equal to amounts earned by
working young men. This may explain why, in my study, no
young men who worked in stigmatized occupations were
from middle-class backgrounds. The vast majority of unem-
ployed young men, however, received gift incomes only large
enough to cover the basic costs of living, and, therefore, they
were foregoing economic gain by avoiding low-status work.
At the same time that a historical relationship between
education and urban employment conditioned youth to as-
pire to certain types of occupations, policies associated with
neoliberal capitalism constrained the possibility of realiz-
ing these aspirations. If late capitalism in the United States
has been associated with growth (and possibly a long-term
economic crash), in Africa it is generally associated with eco-
664
nomic decline or, at best, stagnancy. An inability to compete
with the nations of East and South Asia in the manufacture
of low-cost commodities, the burden of servicing interest
on debt, and the economic policies associated with struc-
tural adjustment have all contributed to economic decline
in Africa (Arrighi 2002). In general, the increased ability of in-
ternational capital to utilize the productive qualities of space
has caused most Africans to be left out of the global econ-
omy, although isolated spaces are used for the extraction
of resources (Ferguson 1999, 2006).11 In Ethiopia, an IMF-
imposed reduction in the size of the public sector has been
particularly significant, as it has eliminated desirable oppor-
tunities for government employment. If yilun nta
and local
values concerning occupation have combined with the ex-
pansion of education to lead urban youth to seek govern-
ment employment, then the structural adjustment associ-
ated with neoliberal capitalism has acted as a vise that has
closed off any opportunity for a growing population of edu-
cated urban youth to achieve their aspirations.
In this context, the manner in which young people move
through time has shifted, and caused the meaning of youth
to change. Although the Amharic term for youth, wettat, is
not new, a distinct phase of life that could be referred to as
youth did not exist in the past in Amhara culture (Levine
1965:9698).12 Young men and women gradually took on
adult responsibilities until, in terms of work, their day-to-
day life more or less resembled that of their parents. Once
this point was reached, the next step was marriage. With the
introduction of formal education in the mid20th century,
this dynamic gradually began to change. Rather than taking
on the roles of their parents, educated youth expected to be-
come government workers. The expansion of education and
the contraction of the public sector have created an environ-
ment in which individuals experience a prolonged period of
time between childhood and adulthood. Many of the young
men in my study were in their early thirties and still had
not found viable employment. Some young men with fam-
ily connections were eventually able to find work that was
not stigmatized, but for others it was unclear if their depen-
dence on their parents would ever end.13 In discussing youth
in Madagascar, Jennifer Cole (2005) has suggested that youth
no longer be conceptualized as a transitional phase leading
up to adulthood, as it now appears to be quite common to
remain a youth indefinitely. In an environment of economic
decline, individuals occupying this expanding category of
youth experience a changed relationship to their future.
Progress and the problem of becoming
through time
Reinhart Koselleck (1985) explains that notions of progress
appear at points in history when the relationship between
experience and expectations shifts. Expectations for the fu-
ture are generally based on what one has experienced in

the past, but with the development of a belief in the in-
evitability of progress, this changes. In discussing the ad-
vent of progress in relation to increased technological in-
novation in Europe, Koselleck explains, What was new was
that the expectations that reached out for the future became
detached from all that previous experience had to offer
(1985:279). In other words, progress is the expectation that
the future will not be like ones past and that, instead, it will
be qualitatively better.
Not only has education created expectations among ur-
ban youth that they will be able to access high-status gov-
ernment employment but it has also conditioned them to
expect to lead lives that involve progress. Education is a pro-
gressive process in that it involves gradual linear improve-
ments. As one advances from grade to grade, it is assumed
that this movement creates a change within oneself. The
educated individual expects to be transformed so that his
future will be better than the present. Contrasts between
unemployment and life as a student are revealing. Many of
my primary informants had completed secondary school
within the past five years and had remained unemployed
after graduation. For these young men, school was the last
structured activity they were involved in. One way school
differs from unemployment is that it simply makes a person
very busy and, therefore, eliminates the problem of passing
excessive amounts of time. Possibly a more significant dif-
ference is how the two contexts affect ones relationship to
his future. As one young man who had been unemployed for
two years after completing grade 12 put it, When I was a
student I had no thoughts. I learned, I studied, and I didnt
worry about the future. Now I always think about the future.
I dont know how long this condition will last. Maybe it will
be the same year after year. In contrast to student life, un-
employment is the absence of change. Days pass, but ones
material and social positions remain the same. Long-term
unemployment prevents youth from imagining a desirable
future and placing their day-to-day lives within a narrative of
progress. The social category of youth, as it exists for urban
young men, emerges not just through an extended period of
uncertainty regarding ones future but with the development
of expectations of progress.
Because of the expansion of education and urbaniza-
tion, the young men I studied were far more embedded in
an ideology of progress through education than previous
generations. Most urban youth were the sons and daughters
of parents who did not advance beyond primary education.
Although the parents had lived through a Marxist revolu-
tion that was associated with particular notions of modernity
(Donham 1999), their lack of education meant that they of-
ten did not internalize an ideology of progress as it pertained
to their own lives. The mother of an unemployed young man
explained that todays generation is different. They are edu-
cated and they have knowledge about the world. Today they
want so many things. In describing their life histories, most
Neoliberal times ! American Ethnologist
parents spoke of the movement from a rural area to Jimma as
a major shift in their lives. After arriving in Jimma, they gen-
erally accepted whatever work was available and were not
as concerned with issues of status as their children. Parents
often argued that their childrens lives should be different
from their own specifically because of their higher level of
education, and they were disappointed when this was not
the case.
Young mens narratives of aspiration typically began
with education, followed by work, and then helping younger
siblings before moving out of their parents home to marry
and start families. Finally, young men believed that one
should support his parents and, if possible, create a project
or business that would benefit the community. Most urban
youth were able to attain the first step in this narrative and
pursue their education to the secondary level, but they were
unable to find employment and this created a dead end in
their pursuit of other aspirations.
Many young men believed that nearly insurmountable
financial barriers prevented them from dating, marrying,
and having children. They claimed that they would not
marry before the age of 30 or 35 and then only if they be-
came wealthy. Children were seen as a natural and desir-
able result of marriagethe next step in youth narratives
of aspirationand the financial burden of raising children
was an additional factor preventing young men from achiev-
ing their aspirations. To simply raise children did not involve
any great costs, but most young men desired a future for their
children that would be better than their own. The following
quote comes from an unemployed young man who first ex-
plained to me that he would not accept available forms of
work like carpentry or waiting tables because they would not
allow him and his family to experience progress.
Without something big [a source of money] I wont even
think about marriage or children. Even if I am rich I
will never have more than two children. With two kids
I can educate them properly so that they can reach the
university. If they dont reach the university I will send
them to America. Of course I could get a job and have
children now. Even if I was only making 100 birr a month
I could feed them shuro, but that kind of life is not good
for children. They will not learn properly and they will
end up shining shoes or something like that. You want
your children to have a better life than yourself. You want
them to improve and have a good life.14
A similar perspective comes from a young man who
earned money by selling sandals he made of tires but who
continued to live with his parents:
I dont want to marry unless I have a different type work.
I need something different before I try to start a family,
but once I arrange my own life I definitely want a family. I
only want two children. In the past people have just been
665
American Ethnologist ! Volume 34 Number 4 November 2007
having kids without saving money or thinking about the
future. In my neighborhood, kids are everywhere. This is
fine if you have a big compound but in my neighborhood
there are no compounds, all of the houses are packed in
together. People sleep three or four to a bed. At my house
we all sleep in one room. We all come home at night and
watch television and then when the programming ends
at 10:00 or 11:00, we turn it off and go to sleep. If you
want to stay up and study you cant because there is only
one light for one room and you cant keep everyone else
awake. Then in the morning we all wake up at the same
time. Everyone in my neighborhood is like this.
The emphasis on raising ones children in a different
manner than one was raised so that they could have a bet-
ter life was common among young men. These statements
contrast education and small families with symbols of lower-
class urban life like shuro and sharing rooms to construct
different future trajectories.15 Shuro and sharing rooms rep-
resent the mistakes of ones parents, whereas having fewer
children is thought to allow a heavy investment in education
and open up more opportunities for higher learning and de-
sirable employment. Each of these narratives expresses a de-
sire to move from a position of dependence on ones parents
to supporting ones own children. Young men conceived of
progress not only in terms of repositioning oneself within
social relationships but ensuring that ones children enjoy
this status as well.
The underlying problem in achieving such progress was
that the smooth transition between education and govern-
ment employment had been ruptured. Many young men
could have found work in low-status professions, but this
would not have allowed them to develop the social relation-
ships associated with their particularly urban Ethiopian no-
tions of success or to access an adequate income for raising
children in the manner they desired. Young men sought both
to preserve the quality of their social relationships with oth-
ers by avoiding low-status work and to raise a family in which
their children would lead modern progressive lives that in-
volve more than eating and sleeping. As achieving this goal
was felt to be impossible, many young men chose to remain
unemployed. They could not access the economic resources
necessary to become an adult in a normative sense, and,
therefore, they could not move through time in the manner
they desired. Young men were in the ambiguous position of
continuing to aspire to become adults and reposition them-
selves within social relations but lacking any faith that this
process could be accomplished locally.
As I noted in my opening discussion, Ferguson (2006)
argues that the economic shifts associated with neoliberal-
ism have derailed Africans from participating in progressive
narratives of development, creating a situation in which im-
proving ones standard of living through linear progress is no
longer possible. In other words, under a regime of neoliberal
capitalism, the separation between experience and expecta-
666
tions that Koselleck associates with progress is never actual-
ized in the form of a new experience. Narratives of progress
are still imagined, and expectations of a life that is different
and better than previous experience still exist, but they do
not become reality. The derailment from progressive nar-
ratives that Ferguson identifies is particularly acute among
youth. The peculiar position of youth, existing as not yet
adults for an indefinite period of time means their condi-
tion is, to a large degree, defined through their relationship
to the future.
The overaccumulation of time
The temporal problem of young men was based both in their
relationship to the future and in their experience of time in
the present. As I note at the beginning of this article, partly as
a result of their inability to achieve progress, young men ex-
perienced unstructured time as an overabundant and poten-
tially dangerous quantity. For young men, the most salient
quality of time was its lack of structure; it was something to
be passed (yasallefal) or killed (yasgedal).16 The burden
of too much time was a privilege of gender and urban resi-
dence. All of the young men in my study were born in the city
and, therefore, at least had the minimal social networks nec-
essary to meet their daily needs for food and shelter. Young
men were expected to perform very little household work
and were generally free from participating in any activities
directly associated with the reproduction of the household.
In contrast, young women spent nearly all of their time do-
ing tedious housework. Whereas young men expressed an
interest in working partly as an escape from boredom, young
women explained that the best part of their day included ac-
tivities like drinking coffee with friends, when they were free
to relax and socialize.
The problem of too much unstructured time was that it
led to introspective thinking and feelings of stress, and young
men evaluated activities in terms of their ability to focus
their minds away from their present condition.17 Thought
(assab) was a key term in these narratives, representing a
broad range of feelings, including stress and depression,
and thoughtlessness was often described as a desired emo-
tional state. Weiss (2005) explains that the Swahili term for
thought is also used by young men in urban Tanzania to
describe worries associated with ones relationship to his fu-
ture. Although the situation in Jimma appears to be similar,
in contrast to Weisss study, in Jimma the stress of thought
was not caused by a gap between the present and limit-
less prospects of the future (2005:110). Youth felt that the
future should be better than the present, but the dangers
of thought and unstructured time were a result of the per-
ceived lack of potential for achieving ones aspirations in the
future. Young men explained that excessive amounts of time
led to introspective contemplation of ones long-term unem-
ployment. They did not want to think about their continued

dependence on their family, their inability to marry, and the
indefinite continuation of their joblessness. Time stretched
in front of youth, and the future seemed relatively certain
but definitely not desirable.
The experience of time among unemployed young
men has interesting parallels to the emergence of a dis-
course of boredom in 19th-century Europe, as discussed by
Elizabeth Goodstein (2005). Goodstein argues that the no-
tion of progress described by Koselleck (1985) constitutes
the condition of possibility for modern boredom (2005:122
123). In Goodsteins analysis, the production of boredom is
based on the existence of a notion of progress similar to the
one I have described above, in which the future is expected
to be different and better than the past. This is combined
with a sense that the actual reality of life is not equal to what
one had imagined. Boredom is the feeling that one not only
has too much time but also that that time is not meaningful
because it is not passed in the progressive manner that one
has come to expect.
Time is a problem for unemployed young men in Jimma
because they are unable to actualize their expectations of
progress. In contrast to what Goodstein describes in her dis-
cussion of Western discourse on boredom, however, there is
no sense that the subject both registers and rebels against
the regulation of lived, subjective time by the inhuman
demands of technological progress (2005:124). Goodstein
links the emergence of boredom with romanticism and an
intense desire for meaning that often valorized the experi-
ence of the individual. The Ethiopian case is different in two
important ways. First, rather than being overwhelmed by
technology so that a utopian sense of individual humanity
is not realized, as the discussion above indicates, in Ethiopia
young men are simply faced with an absence of progress.
Second, the notion of romantic individualism described by
Goodstein for western Europe is very far from the experience
of unemployed youth. The pressure of yilun nta
led young
men to conform to traditional norms for social relationships.
Unease and frustration with an abundance of unstructured
time were not based in romantic visions of the self but in
an inability to experience progress in the form of desirable
social relations with others. Ethiopian boredom is the com-
bination of unstructured time and an unfulfilled desire for a
self that is constructed through social relationships.18 Lack
of employment is the barrier to the construction of relation-
ships that would alleviate the stress of unstructured time,
and, therefore, the problems of time and youth unemploy-
ment are inseparable.
The interrelationship between unstructured time, work,
and social relationships is illustrated in the following parable
told to me by a young man. An Ethiopian was resting under
a mango tree. A ferenj approached the Ethiopian and sug-
gested that he gather up all of the mangos and sell them in the
market.19 The Ethiopian did this and made a large amount
of money. He found the ferenj and asked him what he should
Neoliberal times ! American Ethnologist
do with all of the money that he made. The ferenj advised
him to take his money and go on a vacation and relax.
The obvious interpretation of this story is that it ques-
tions the need to work to access leisure when one already
possesses it in abundance. If this story is placed in the
context of yilun nta
and local conceptions of occupational
status, however, then the interpretation changes. From an
Ethiopian perspective, the absurdity of the Western contrast
between work and leisure is that it divides activities into
productive and nonproductive categories without regard for
their implications for constructing social relationships. For
the young men in my study, decisions regarding employ-
ment were based primarily on how working or not working
would shift the manner in which one relates to others. Youth
sought government work to transform themselves from in-
dividuals who give rather than receive support. At the same
time, low-status work was avoided because it required that
one subordinate oneself without the presence of a positive
relationship. In this sense, work is not evaluated simply on
the basis of what one receives in exchange for a particular
quantity of labor but in terms of how the performance of that
work requires one to interact with others.
Work is measured in terms of relationships, and re-
lationships are measured in terms of an abstract notion
of time. In his Marxist analysis of time and labor, Moishe
Postone (1993:200216) explains that, within capitalism,
time becomes an independent rather than a dependent vari-
able. In classic anthropological analyses of time in noncapi-
talist societies like E. E. Evans-Pritchards discussions of the
Nuer, time is measured on the basis of seasonal changes in
nature or daily activities, and, in this sense, time does not
exist independently. Postone argues that with the advent of
capitalist production, time became increasingly abstracted
and measured in terms (i.e., hours or minutes) that do not
reference human activities. E. P. Thompson (1967) has de-
scribed in vivid detail the process by which notions of time
change with industrialization and the spread of wage labor.
Time is no longer measured in terms of tasks; rather, the re-
verse is true, and tasks are quantified on the basis of the ab-
stract time they require to be completed as well as the value
of that labor time in money.
In the case at hand, it seems that time is also functioning
as an independent variable. Unemployed young men con-
ceive of progress and the passing of time independently of
human activity, and activities are assessed on the basis of
an abstract notion of time. Even in the case of work, how-
ever, activities are generally not quantified in terms of pro-
duction. Instead, activities are assessed both in terms of the
manner in which they lead one to interact with others in the
present and in terms of their potential for repositioning one
within relationships in the future. Time is taken as a mea-
sure of human activity, but it is used to measure and quantify
relationships rather than labor and its corresponding mon-
etary value. For example, young men were often reluctant to
667
American Ethnologist ! Volume 34 Number 4 November 2007
disclose their age because they felt that their accomplish-
ments in terms of marriage and having children were not
what one would expect for persons of their age. The attain-
ment of particular social relationships was evaluated on the
basis of an abstract measurement of age, rather than the re-
verse. Ethiopian young men experienced their unstructured
time as a potentially dangerous quantity because it did not
match their progressive expectations, in which they should
achieve linear improvement in their relative social position
with the passage of time. The intersection between time and
social relationships is potentially masked by an analysis that
seeks to understand culture primarily in terms of neolib-
eral capitalism. Attention to local particularities in relation
to work and time also supports insights into processes sur-
rounding spatial movement.
A spatial fix to the problems of time
Many young men believed that their interrelated temporal
problems could be addressed with the spatial solution of mi-
gration, preferably to the United States or Europe.20 In the
narratives of young men, people experienced time differ-
ently outside of Ethiopia. As one unemployed young man
put it during a heated conversation at a chat house, I can
do more in six months in America than I can in five years in
Ethiopia. In America there is progress. This quote implies
that linear change through time is possible only in certain
spaces and supports Fergusons (2006) suggestion that, as
Africa has been separated from temporal narratives of de-
velopment, qualities of space have become fixed in relation
to modernity.
The rise of the U.S. Diversity Visa (DV) Lottery as a
means of experiencing change or progress represents the
transition from temporal to spatial strategies for attaining
ones aspirations. Although few American-born U.S. citizens
know about the annual DV Lottery, it is eagerly anticipated
in much of the world. Every year, 50,000 winners from coun-
tries around the world are selected to receive a U.S. visa. To
be a DV applicant, one must be a secondary school graduate,
have a sponsor in the United States (someone who will pro-
vide initial support) and a job skill, and not be infected with
HIV. Many Ethiopians who have entered the United States
in the last ten years have family members with DVs or have
won a lottery themselves. Although Ethiopia receives a rel-
atively high number of DVs, the roughly 4,000 winners who
migrate to the United States every year via the lottery are a
small fraction of those who enter the lottery.21 For most, the
lottery is a dream that takes the place of working locally and
participating in a temporal narrative of becoming.
Within young mens discourse, winning the DV Lottery
did not fit into a larger narrative of progress. Unlike educa-
tion, one does not win the DV Lottery by following a set of
rules for development or passing through a series of stages. In
practice, social networks are extremely important for access-
668
ing a sponsor abroad and funds for travel and for negotiating
a complicated bureaucratic process that involves extensive
paperwork in English and an interview at the U.S. embassy.
Most youth, however, do not acknowledge these realities and
speak of the lottery primarily in terms of chance. One sim-
ply wins or does not. Access to technology, wealth, and the
prestige of living in the United States is acquired not through
disciplining oneself to advance from education to employ-
ment but through good luck. In the absence of a temporal
process of becoming, the DV Lottery is a spatial strategy that
instantly allows one to be modern.22
Fitting with the lottery, youth narratives often con-
structed migration as facilitating a transformation of iden-
tity. The notion that migration and the appropriation of
stylistic practices (particularly fashion) may allow a re-
creation of ones identity has been effectively explored in
other studies of urban youth in Africa (De Boeck 1999;
Friedman 1994; Gondola 1999; Hansen 2000; MacGaffey and
Bazenguissa-Ganga 2000; Newell 2005). For example, in rela-
tion to the Congolese subculture of la Sape, Didier Gondola
writes that popular culture allows African urban youth to
build a dreamlike order, otherwise unreachable (1999:24)
and that the sapeur does not dress like a CEO to imitate the
CEO. He is a CEO (1999:32). Sasha Newell (2005) extends this
analysis of popular culture and argues that migration is also
a form of consumption. Migration is in part a symbolic pro-
cess that allows the traveler to accumulate cultural capital
through an association with modern or developed world
areas. Within this construct of migration as a symbolic act,
ones identity is transformed through association with place
without one personally undergoing a temporal process of
becoming.
During an afternoon that I spent with a group of young
men as they chewed chat and talked, one of them told me
about a dream he had had the night before. I was in New York
City at an amazing club. We were dancing and drinking and it
was wonderful. Jennifer [Lopez] was singing. You were there
too. I didnt want to wake up. Young men also frequently
dreamed about life in the United States during the day as
they chewed chat and socialized (Mains 2004). They spent
hours speculating about life in different cities and the pos-
sibility of meeting celebrities. From Ethiopia, this lifestyle
can only be dreamed of, but if one wins the DV Lottery, this
dream becomes a reality.
Actually moving to the United States, a world that was
usually accessed only through dreams, was believed to cause
an internal transformation in oneself. That same afternoon,
one of the young chat chewers showed me before and after
photographs of his brotherone before his departure for the
United States and one after. The difference was not imme-
diately apparent to me, but he explained, Of course he has
become fat, but the really beautiful thing is his skin. His skin
glows. Before he was old and starving but now in America
he is young and healthy. According to these young men, the

United States is a land where there are no beggars, everyone
is fat, and people pay the equivalent of half a months salary
for a low-level Ethiopian government worker to have their
dogs washed. In response to my attempts to provide a more
complete picture of life in the United States, one of the young
men shouted, Listen Danny, the life of a dog in America is
better than a human in Ethiopia!
In discussions that reference Western pop culture and
compare Ethiopia to the United States, young men were
defining their own lives in terms of absencethe absence
of entertainment, the absence of health, and the absence
of modernity. These narratives are similar to Charles Piots
(2005) notion of living in exile within ones own country
isolated from the modern life that one desires. To migrate was
to transform oneself completely. The statement We live like
chickens and the negative comparison of an Ethiopians life
with that of a dog in the United States imply that there is
something not quite human about life in Ethiopia. There is a
sense that one cannot really be a full person without leaving
the country.
Although they may conceive of Ethiopia as inherently
backward, through movement young men quickly shift
from living like a chicken to the sort of healthy and mean-
ingful life assumed to exist elsewhere. Within youth dis-
course, it is spaces and not people that are fixed in time, thus
allowing individuals to experience progress through spa-
tial movement. Change occurs not just with movement but
also by referencing symbolic qualities associated with other
spaces. In this sense, one can experience progress through
the manipulation of spatial qualities despite the inability to
participate in temporal narratives of progress.
The use of space to overcome problems of time within
a context of economic decline is a strategy widely employed
within Africa and other world areas, and an examination of
the specific dynamics of the Ethiopian case generates further
insights into the relationship between time, space, and pro-
duction. In urban Ethiopia, spatial movement was not only
a tool for circumventing the problem of becoming but it also
allowed young men to escape the confines of local relation-
ships. In general, the Westthe United States, in particular
was conceived as a space in which social freedom was pos-
sible. One young man with a particularly strong interest in
travel abroad explained, In Ethiopia there is yilun nta.
We
are not free here. In America I would do so many things. I
like to play sports but in Ethiopia I cannot wear shorts. Peo-
ple will talk and insult me. In America I could wear shorts.
I would be free to do whatever I wanted. Although wearing
shorts may seem trivial, it represents a general sense that
one could escape local cultural norms through migration.
The following quotes from young people illustrate the
relationship between occupational status and a desire to mi-
grate. From a group of vocational students:
Everyone wants to go to leave Ethiopia. This is because
work is not appreciated here [sira yinaqel]. A person who
Neoliberal times ! American Ethnologist
does street work like shining shoes and washing cars will
be insulted, especially if they are educated. They wont
be accepted by society. My father has a friend who works
in South Africa selling socks on the street. He is an adult
with a good education. Someone like him would never
do this in Ethiopia. Of course he can make more money
in South Africa, but also there is no yilun nta
there. An
educated person like my fathers friend will be insulted
here and he may have to fight.
From a different group of vocational students:
Student 1: The best reason for leaving Ethiopia is to
work and make money, but yilun nta
is also important.
A shoeshine can make fifteen or twenty birr a day [$2.00
$2.50]. This is good money but they will be insulted. If I
have to do this kind of work I would have to go to a new
city first.
Student 2: I want to work part-time while I am a student
nta.
but there is yilun Even if they dont insult you they
wont respect you, they will order you around, and no
one wants to be known as a shoeshine.
Student 3: Ive seen in movies that comedians make
money telling jokes on the street in America but you
cant do this in Ethiopia.
Migration abroad was a narrative that was rarely put into
practice by young men, but migration within Ethiopia was
more common.23 Choosing to live without the support of
family or friends was no small sacrifice to make. One young
man from the Wollo region left his rural home and worked
as a waiter in Jimma. He explained that he had moved so
far (two to three days from his home by bus) to avoid sham-
ing himself in front of family and friends. He did not have
even minimal social support in Jimma. When the room he
rented was robbed, he lost all of his possessions, and he had
no one to turn to for aid. Despite these hardships, he felt he
had made the right decision by leaving his home. This mans
story was typical of restaurant workers, and nearly all of the
waiters that I conducted interviews with had migrated from
elsewhere. This example also indicates that spatial move-
ment did not necessarily require one to leave the country
to escape yilun nta.
Avoiding the shame of stigma could be
accomplished by moving locally, but this did not provide the
symbolic association with modernity and the opportunity
to earn high incomes that caused young men to perceive in-
ternational migration as being so effective in facilitating a
change in ones status.
The shame of working in a low-status occupation was
entirely social. If one was surrounded by strangers, then the
nta
stress of yilun was forgotten. Spatial movement as a so-
lution to problems of time was embedded in local values
concerning occupation. Local cultural norms were experi-
enced as barriers to ones aspirations for progress, and it was
only by temporarily escaping those norms that one could re-
turn to and reenter his community with a different and more
desirable social position. An extensive literature describes
669
American Ethnologist ! Volume 34 Number 4 November 2007
the importance of migration in Africa, usually in relation to
accessing urban wage labor, for accumulating the resources
necessary to take on the role of an adult. For example, in
her study of the Nuer, Sharon Hutchinson (1996) describes
young men performing wage labor in the city to accumulate
the cash necessary to return home, expand their cattle herds,
and start families. Others have argued that accessing mod-
ern qualities of space are as important in motivating migra-
tion as differences in economic opportunity (Newell 2005).
The Ethiopian case is distinct because more than just differ-
ences in access to material goods or qualities associated with
modernity motivated migration. Rather, young men sought
to leave Ethiopia partly because of differences in the way
individuals were thought to interact in different spaces.24
The fundamental quality that allows spatial movement
to solve problems of time is a shift in the manner that pro-
ductive activity is evaluated. Within Ethiopia, young men
evaluated work primarily in terms of how it situated one in
relation to others. They conceived of work outside of Ethiopia
as essentially the exchange of ones labor power and time for
wages. For unemployed young men, progress in terms of
ones position within relationships at home was achieved by
moving to a space in which work is not assessed in terms of
relationships. The choice to work as a taxi driver in the United
States was based not on the position of that occupation
within a hierarchy of power but on the possibility of earning
money. This is not to say that working outside of Ethiopia
was divorced from yilun nta
and social relationships. Money
earned elsewhere was usually invested in Ethiopia, and work
and time in Ethiopia continued to be evaluated in terms of
relationships. The government employment that previously
allowed one to simultaneously work and engage in positive
relations, however, was no longer a realistic possibility. This
led young men to conceive of the construction of positive
relationships as possible only by moving to a space where
work and time functioned differently.
In practice, accessing these spaces was accomplished
primarily through social networks. As noted above, even in
the case of a seemingly random process like the DV Lottery,
networks were very important. Often, young men who man-
aged to migrate had family living abroad who could provide
assistance. To move without these connections was virtually
impossible. In this sense, networks of people facilitated the
movement that allowed one to temporarily escape from so-
cial relationships and, ideally, eventually reposition oneself
within those same relationships. At each step in the process,
the meanings of different spaces were determined largely by
their implications for social relationships.
Conclusion
Many of the dynamics that I describe in this article are com-
mon to youth living in a variety of different world areas. To
varying degrees, a decrease in the value of education, con-
striction in opportunity within the public sector, difficulty in
670
taking on the responsibilities associated with adulthood, and
an increased interest in migration are all themes in recent
studies of youth. The specific argument I develop, however,
is based on rethinking these processes through a close anal-
nta
ysis of yilun and values concerning occupational status.
I have argued that urban youth in Ethiopia evaluated em-
ployment not so much on the basis of income and labor time
but in terms of the manner in which it situated one within
social relationships, both in the present and the future. By
extending this argument to discourses and practices con-
cerning progress and international migration, I have demon-
strated that both time and space are inextricable from social
relationships.
The argument I develop is based both in an analysis of
neoliberal capitalism and local understandings of time and
work. Although I do not deny the utility of a synthesis be-
tween macro- and microlevel dynamics, I question the value
of a theory of neoliberal capitalism. The current moment
has been referred to as a neoliberal world order or neolib-
eral age that is dominated by a culture of neoliberalism. In
practice, the analysis behind these broad phrases is usually
complex and does not promote a simple understanding of
neoliberal capitalism; however, the terms in themselves are
problematic. To conceive of Ethiopian youth, or any other
group, in terms of a neoliberal era implies that neoliberal-
ism is the primary contextual factor in determining cultural
and economic processes and closes off possibilities for fur-
ther inquiry.
Through an analysis of yilun nta
and occupational sta-
tus, I have demonstrated that dynamics associated with
neoliberal culture, like timespace compression, cannot eas-
ily be applied to urban Ethiopia. Similar to J. K. Gibson-
Grahams (1996, 2006) suggestion that diverse economies
should be investigated on their own terms rather than
through theories of capitalism, I argue for a method of anal-
ysis that moves from the ground up. Attention to local speci-
ficity supports an understanding of the diversity of experi-
ence while also generating insight into processes that exist
in different moments and places. This approach enables the
emergence of an anthropology that is capable of thinking
reflexively about neoliberal capitalism.
Notes
Acknowledgments. This article is based on research funded by
a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Grant and
grants from the Emory University Department of Anthropology, In-
stitute for African Studies, and Graduate School of Arts and Sci-
ences. Special thanks go to Nicholas DAvella, Donald Donham,
Bruce Knauft, Christopher Krupa, Sarah Mathis, Timothy Murphy,
and Ramah McKay for providing comments on drafts of this article.
Also, thanks to Virginia Dominguez, Jennifer Cole, and three anony-
mous reviewers who all provided useful comments and suggestions
for revision.
1. Although I conducted interviews with young women as well
as men, my focus in this article is on men because, in many ways,
their experiences of employment, time, and space were distinct.

Young, urban Ethiopian men are clearly a very specific population,
but through an examination of their particular experiences abstract
concepts such as time and space may be better understood.
2. I use the method outlined by Allan Hoben (1973) for the tran-
scription of Amharic using the Latin alphabet.
3. Youth is understood here as a social shifter in the sense a more detailed discussion of the construction of youth in relation
that it serves both a referential and indexical function (Durham
2004:592). In other words, youth refers to a specific group of people,
but membership in that group is always defined in relation to other
categories that encompass age but may also include gender, class,
status, and other markers of identity.
4. I use progress in place of the Amharic word lewt, which is
sometimes used to simply imply change but often indicates linear
improvement that occurs over time. Idget, meaning growth, was
sometimes used to convey notions of progress as well.
5. Although my analysis in this article focuses primarily on un-
employed young men, I gathered extensive data on young men
working in stigmatized occupations. All of the working young men
in my study were from lower-class backgrounds, but they were
quite diverse in terms of ethnicity and religion. In terms of edu-
cation, they were similar to unemployed young menmany had
completed secondary school, and all had at least reached the ju-
nior secondary level. I argue that working young men were able to
avoid the stress of social pressure through a variety of mechanisms
that distanced them from the social norms I describe here (Mains
2007).
6. An extensive literature exists concerning similar stigmatized
occupation groups in West Africa (Dilley 2004; Herbert 1993;
McNaughton 1993). Dena Freeman (2003) uses ethnographic ma-
terial from Ethiopia to make an interesting intervention into this
literature. She argues that the roots of occupational stigma are to
be found in local movements of people and relations of dominance
rather than the symbolic qualities of production and transforma-
tion that have been associated with blacksmithing and other artisan
occupations.
7. The importance of money for social relations was changing,
and extremely wealthy individuals were able to access status. Nev-
ertheless, although working youth often had more access to money
than their unemployed peers, their greater purchasing power did
not appear to bring them respect at the community level.
8. In contrast to the status of traditional artisans, at the time of
my research the stigmas attached to working in lower occupations
were very flexible. Stories of the shoeshine who became a power-
ful business owner were common. Also, how one treated workers in
lower occupations varied with the quality of ones relationships with
them. James Ellison (2006) argues that occupational status groups
have not been historically rigid, and I observed that status is partic-
ularly flexible in a contemporary urban setting.
9. At the lowest end of the economic scale, many unemployed
young men lived with their single mothers, who earned a meager
living baking bread or brewing beer. Although it was more common
for young men from poor families to engage in low-status work, the
majority remained unemployed for long periods of time.
10. This is not a new phenomenon in Ethiopia, and Donald Levine
(1965) describes educated youth who, unable to find employment
and unwilling to work in the traditional agricultural sector, migrated
to cities in search of opportunities that were largely unavailable. The
drastic increase in the number of educated youth without a corre-
sponding increase in government employment, however, has cre-
ated a far larger and more visible population of unemployed youth.
11. Examples of the isolated extraction of resources described
by Ferguson (2006) are seen in the exploration of oil drilling pos-
sibilities in the Gambella and Ogaden regions of Ethiopia. Perhaps
not coincidentally, both of these regions have recently experienced
escalating levels of violence.
Neoliberal times ! American Ethnologist
12. Together with political and economic changes, the emergence
of youth in Ethiopia is influenced by a growing discourse within
government media concerning the problem of youth. In this dis-
course, youth are continually constructed as unemployed young
men who present a potential danger to the well-being of society. For
to politics, see Mains in press.
13. For this small population of middle-class young men it seems
that extended unemployment may have been a successful economic
strategy. Avoiding the stigma associated with available forms of work
allowed them to maintain social networks that could eventually pro-
vide acceptable, if not high-status, employment (Mains 2007).
14. Shuro is a spicy bean paste that is a popular dish with most
Ethiopians and is generally eaten daily by poor families.
15. Fertility rates in urban Ethiopia have dropped dramatically
in recent years, to the point that they are below replacement lev-
els in Addis Ababa (Kinfu 2000). The common explanation for this
decline is that increased education and empowerment of women,
combined with increased availability of contraceptives, have caused
more women to delay marriage and childbirth. Like that of Caroline
Bledsoe and colleagues (2000), my study indicates that, to under-
stand falling fertility rates, attention must also be given to the roles
of economic decline and the desires of young men with respect to
childbirth.
16. It is interesting that the same idiomatic terms are used in
Amharic and English. I am uncertain about the origins of the expres-
sions to kill time and to pass time in Amharic. Although most of
the young men that I worked with did not have adequate experience
with English to be aware of these phrases, I did occasionally hear
educated adults make statements in both English and Amharic like
Todays youth are just killing time. It is possible that young men
adopted the phrase from more educated English speakers. The use
of these terms may reflect the notion that, in contrast to the way it
passes in the lives of unemployed young men, time should be used
productively.
17. Chewing chat and watching videos were popular activities
among young men partly because of their utility in dealing with the
problem of time (Mains 2007).
18. Young men often used the Amharic term debirt to describe
their condition. Debirt is close in meaning to depression. Both the
sight of a person suffering from a physical injury and a day spent
alone with nothing to do could be described with the adjective form
of debirt, but the term is more likely to be applied in the latter case.
19. Although the term ferenj literally translates as foreigner, in
practice it is generally not used in reference to Africans. In most
cases, a ferenj is of European or, sometimes, Asian descent.
20. The interrelationship between migration and progress has a
long history in Ethiopia, but in the past it has primarily played out
among the elite. During the 18th and 19th centuries, it was common
for northern nobles to live as bandits in peripheral areas to accumu-
late the wealth and followers needed to assume a position of power
within the Abyssinian kingdom (Bahru 2002a). During the 20th cen-
tury, urban elites often traveled to the United States or Europe for
education and took on high-level positions within the government
on their return (Bahru 2002b).
21. For the 2006 DV Lottery, 6,995 Ethiopians were finalists, more
than from any other country in the world. Of these, approximately
two-thirds will actually receive visas. An obsession with the DV Lot-
tery is not unique to Ethiopia, and Charles Piot (2005) has described
economic networks surrounding brokers arranging false marriages
for DV winners in Togo.
22. The contrast between being and becoming has been asso-
ciated with late capitalism (Harvey 1990), but in urban Ethiopia it
works slightly differently than elsewhere. In this case, being and be-
coming cannot be associated with postmodernity and modernity.
671
American Ethnologist ! Volume 34 Number 4 November 2007
Instead, youth who seek to experience transformation through be-
ing are operating within a paradigm closely associated with local
values concerning status and personhood.
23. In practice, women were much more likely to travel abroad
for work, usually to the Middle East to work as domestic servants.
Yilun nta
and a restructuring of social relations were also relevant
for this type of occupational migration, but the dynamics were sig-
nificantly different than those I have described here for young men.
Young women generally worked on a contractual basis and stayed
abroad for only a few years. Although they usually sent remittances
to their families, they were unable to accumulate the large sums of
wealth accessed by migrants in Europe or the United States. I knew
of many cases in which unemployed young men were supported
largely by remittances sent by their sisters working in the Middle
East.
24. Actual changes in yilun nta
and occupational status with mi-
gration deserve further research. I once asked an Ethiopian friend
who had been in the United States for about a year after winning
nta
the DV Lottery if yilun existed in the United States. He quickly re-
sponded that it did not. I then asked if he would eat a sandwich while
walking down the street in the United States, and he explained that
his culture did not permit this. Clearly, shifts that occur with spatial
movement are complex and often contradictory.
References cited
Arrighi, Giovanni
2002 The African Crisis: World Systemic and Regional Analysis.
New Left Review 15:536.
Bahru Zewde
2002a A History of Modern Ethiopia, 18551991. Oxford: James
Currey.
2002b Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia: The Reformist Intellectu-
als of the Early Twentieth Century. Oxford: James Currey.
Baudrillard, Jean
1981 For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Charles
Levin, trans. St. Louis, MO: Telos Press.
Berry, Sara
1985 Fathers Work for Their Sons: Accumulation, Mobility, and
Class Formation in an Extended Yoruba Community. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Bledsoe, Caroline, Susana Lerner, and Jane Guyer, eds.
2000 Fertility and the Male Life-Cycle in the Era of Fertility De-
cline. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre
1984 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.
Richard Nice, trans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Central Statistical Authority
1999 The 1994 Population and Housing Census of Ethiopia. Addis
Ababa: Central Statistical Authority.
Cole, Jennifer
2004 Fresh Contact in Tamatave, Madagascar: Sex, Money,
and Intergenerational Transformation. American Ethnologist
31(4):573588.
2005 The Jaombilo of Tamatave (Madagascar), 19922004: Re-
flections on Youth and Globalization. Journal of Social History
38(4):891914.
Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff
2000 Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming.
Public Culture 12(2):291343.
2005 Children and Youth in a Global Era: Reflections on Youth
from the Past to the Postcolony. In Makers and Breakers: Chil-
dren and Youth in Postcolonial Africa. Alcinda Honwana and
Filip De Boeck, eds. Pp. 1930. Oxford: James Currey.
672
Covell, Maureen
1987 Madagascar: Politics, Economics, and Society. London:
F. Pinter.
De Boeck, Filip
1999 Domesticating Diamonds and Dollars: Identity, Expendi-
ture and Sharing in Southwestern Zaire (19841997). In Global-
ization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure. Birgit Meyer
and Peter Geschiere, eds. Pp. 177210. Oxford: Blackwell.
Dilley, Roy
2004 Islamic and Caste Knowledge Practices among
Haalpulaaren in Senegal. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univer-
sity Press.
Donham, Donald
1986 Old Abyssinia and the New Ethiopian Empire: Themes in
Social History. In The Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia:
Essays in History and Social Anthropology. Donald Donham
and Wendy James, eds. Pp. 348. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
1999 Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian
Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dore, Ronald
1976 The Diploma Disease: Education, Qualification, and Devel-
opment. London: George Allen and Unwin.
Durham, Deborah
2004 Disappearing Youth: Youth as a Social Shifter in Botswana.
American Ethnologist 31(4):589605.
Ellison, James
2006 Everyone Can Do as He Wants: Economic Liberaliza-
tion and Emergent Forms of Antipathy in Southern Ethiopia.
American Ethnologist 33(4):665686.
Ferguson, James
1999 Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban
Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
2006 Global Shadow: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Freeman, Dena
2003 Conclusion I: Understanding Marginalisation in Ethiopia.
In Peripheral People: The Excluded Minorities of Ethiopia. Dena
Freeman and Alula Pankhurst, eds. Pp. 301333. Lawrenceville,
NJ: Red Sea Press.
Friedman, Jonathan
1994 Cultural Identity and Global Processes. London: Sage.
Bizuneh, Genene, Teshome Adino, Giuseppe Gesano, Antonella
Guarneri, and Frank Heins
2001 Work Status and Unemployment in Urban Ethiopia. Addis
Ababa: Central Statistical Authority.
Gibson-Graham, J. K.
1996 The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique
of Political Economy. Oxford: Blackwell.
2006 A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Gondola, Didier
1999 Dream and Drama: The Search for Elegance among Con-
golese Youth. African Studies Review 42(1):2348.
Goodstein, Elizabeth
2005 Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Gould, W. T. S.
1993 People and Education in the Third World. Harlow, UK:
Longman Scientific and Technical.
Hansen, Karen Tranberg
2000 Gender and Difference: Youth, Bodies, and Clothing in
Zambia. In Gender, Agency, and Change: An Anthropological
Perspective. Victoria Goddard, ed. London: Routledge.

2005 Getting Stuck in the Compound: Some Odds against Social
Adulthood in Lusaka. Africa Today 51(4):217.
Harvey, David
1990 The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Herbert, Eugenia
1993 Iron, Gender, and Power: Rituals of Transformation in
African Societies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hoben, Allan
1970 Social Stratification in Traditional Amhara Society. In Social
Stratification in Africa. Arthur Tuden and Leonard Plotnicov,
eds. Pp. 187223. New York: Free Press.
1973 Land Tenure among the Amhara of Ethiopia: The Dynamics
of Cognatic Descent. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Howanda, Alcinda, and Filip De Boeck, eds.
2005 Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in Postcolonial
Africa. Oxford: James Currey.
Hutchinson, Sharon
1996 Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Jua, Natang
2003 Differential Responses to Disappearing Transitional Path-
ways: Redefining Possibility among Cameroonian Youths.
African Studies Review 46(2):1337.
Kinfu, Y.
2000 Below Replacement Fertility in Tropical Africa? Some Ev-
idence from Addis Ababa. Journal of Population Research
17(1):6382.
Koselleck, Reinhart
1985[1979] Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time.
Keith Tribe, trans. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Levine, Donald
1965 Wax and Gold: Tradition and Innovation in Ethiopian Cul-
ture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1974 Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
MacGaffey, Janet, and Remy Bazenguissa-Ganga
2000 Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the
Law. Oxford: James Currey.
Mains, Daniel
2004 Working, Dreaming, and Chewing: Chat Use and Employ-
ment among Young Men in Jimma, Ethiopia. Paper presented
at the Workshop on Khat and the Ethiopian Reality: Production,
Marketing, and Consumption, Addis Ababa University, April 16.
2007 We Are Just Sitting and Waiting: Aspirations, Unemploy-
ment, and Status among Urban Young Men in Jimma, Ethiopia.
Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Emory
University.
In press Cynicism and Hope: Urban Youth and Relations of Power
during the 2005 Ethiopian Election. In Contested Power: Tradi-
tional Authorities and Elections in Ethiopia. Kjetil Tronvoll, ed.
Oxford: James Currey.
Masquelier, Adeline
2005 The Scorpions Sting: Youth, Marriage and the Struggle for
Social Maturity in Niger. Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute 11:5983.
McNaughton, Patrick
1993 The Mande Blacksmiths: Knowledge, Power and Art in West
Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Newell, Sasha
2005 Migratory Modernity and the Cosmology of Consumption
in Cote dIvoire. In Migration and Economy: Global and Local
Dynamics. Lillian Trager, ed. Pp. 163190. Walnut Creek, CA:
AltaMira.
Pankhurst, Alula
2003 Introduction: Dimensions and Conceptions of Marginal-
Neoliberal times ! American Ethnologist
isation. In Peripheral People: The Excluded Minorities of
Ethiopia. Dena Freeman and Alula Pankhurst, eds. Pp. 126.
Lawrenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press.
Pankhurst, Alula, and Dena Freeman
2003 Conclusion II: Change and Development: Lessons from
the Twentieth Century. In Peripheral People: The Excluded Mi-
norities of Ethiopia. Dena Freeman and Alula Pankhurst, eds.
Pp. 334366. Lawrenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press.
Piot, Charles
2005 Border Practices: Playing the US Diversity Visa Lottery. Pa-
per presented at the African Studies Association Annual Meet-
ing, Washington, DC, November 1720.
Poluha, Eva
2004 The Power of Continuity: Ethiopia through the Eyes of Its
Children. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet.
Postone, Moishe
1993 Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of
Marxs Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Serneels, Pieter
2004 The Nature of Unemployment in Ethiopia. Oxford: Center
for the Study of African Economies.
Sharp, Lesley
2002 The Sacrificed Generation: Youth, History, and the Colo-
nized Mind in Madagascar. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Silberschmidt, Margrethe
2004 Masculinities, Sexuality, and Socio-Economic Change in
Rural and Urban East Africa. In Rethinking Sexualities in Africa.
Signe Arnfred, ed. Pp. 233250. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainsti-
tutet.
Taussig, Michael
1980 The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Tekeste Negash
1996 Rethinking Education in Ethiopia. Uppsala: Nordiska
Afrikainstitutet.
Thompson, E. P.
1967 Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism. Past and
Present 38:5697.
Tsing, Anna
2002 Conclusion: The Global Situation. In The Anthropology of
Globalization: A Reader. Jonathan Inda and Renato Rosaldo,
eds. Pp. 453486. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Weiss, Brad
2002 Thug Realism: Inhabiting Fantasy in Urban Tanzania. Cul-
tural Anthropology 17(1):93124.
2004 Contentious Futures: Past and Present. In Producing
African Futures: Ritual and Reproduction in a Neoliberal Age.
Pp. 120. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill.
2005 The Barber in Pain: Consciousness, Affliction, and Alterity
in Urban East Africa. In Makers and Breakers: Children and
Youth in Postcolonial Africa. Alcinda Howanda and Filip De
Boeck, eds. Pp. 102120. Oxford: James Currey.
accepted April 18, 2007
final version submitted May 1, 2007
Daniel Mains
African and African American Studies Program
Washington University
One Brookings Drive, CB 1109
226 McMillan Hall
St. Louis, MO 63130
dmains@alum.emory.edu
673