Intimes paysages d’une course après le vent : ethnographie d’une jeunesse qui se tend, se rend, se vend « educated » à Opuwo (Namibie) – Face A et B
(2020)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Laurent, Pierre-Joseph
- Abstract
- In Opuwo, a small town in the North-West of Namibia, one can notice a contrast in the appearances (that Hélène Carmon qualifies in her thesis as visible and audible) between several people. Some are described as “traditional” and often subjected to so-called “cultural” tourism for that matter, whilst others adopt to their best capabilities the physical and behavioural codes locally related to a “western” or “modern” way of life. Relying on her fieldwork observations among the (mostly female) urban youth of Opuwo, Hélène Carmon starts from an emic classification between “educated people” and “traditional people” to analyse the deep social change that it reveals, just as the top of an iceberg. Instead of focusing on a population, it is thus a particular way of making oneself to the worlds that is being ethnographed by the anthropologist in her thesis. She borrows then to one of her female interviewees the image of “chasing the wind” to express metaphorically this phenomenon that consists in “tending towards/stretching oneself, becoming, selling oneself “educated”” in order to inserting oneself and secure one’s fate into the “modernité insécurisée” (Laurent, 2008). To do so, Hélène Carmon divides her analysis in three sections, three intimate landscapes « partials, (…), instantaneous and ephemeral, uncomplete because they ceased to believe in the possibility of wholeness » (Face A, p.53). The intimacy in this thesis approximates a way of looking more than an object. It’s a look that dwells on the “landscape of the “where” and the “when”” (Chap. 1) ; the “landscape of the “who” (“how” and “what for”)” (Chap. 2) ; and on the “landscape of the bond and the attachment” (Chap. 3) of this “chase after the wind”, to underline the necessity to maintain ambivalence in these various plans. In a « Face B » that appears as a second front cover thanks to a layout twist, the author offers a thought on the ethnographic writing and, just like a stylistic composition, she tries her hand at putting into practice a writing technique that benefits from literature and poetry as tools to transmission and vulgarization for the anthropological analysis.
- Affiliations
Citations
Carmon, H. (2020). Intimes paysages d’une course après le vent : ethnographie d’une jeunesse qui se tend, se rend, se vend « educated » à Opuwo (Namibie) – Face A et B. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/118300