| When the Future Decides: Uncertainty and Intentional Action in Contemporary Cameroon |
| Authors: |
Jennifer Johnson-Hanks |
| Source: |
Current Anthropology, Volume 46, Number 3, Pages 363-377, June 2005 |
| Topic(s): |
Fertility
|
| Country: |
Africa
Cameroon
|
| Published: |
JUN 2005 |
| Abstract: |
Young Beti women in Cameroon regularly assert that because
they are uncertain about what the future will bring, they cannot
make any plans. But they do plan, strategize, and indeed act
quite effectively. The purpose of this paper is to explain how
they do so, specifically in reference to marriage and reproduction,
and thereby to contribute to a general understanding of intentionality,
uncertainty, and social action. Action has been commonly
theorized as the fulfillment of a prior intention. But uncertainties,
both the probabilistic uncertainty of events and the
subject’s experience of uncertainty, threaten to dissolve the link
between intention and its fulfillment. This paper argues that, at
least under the conditions of uncertainty applicable in contemporary
Africa, effective social action is based not on the fulfillment
of prior intentions but on a judicious opportunism: the actor
seizes promising chances. In other words, women’s negation of
Weberian rational action is not a lack; by engaging in heterogeneous
activities without a clear trajectory in mind, they are able
to get by. The paper makes this argument on the basis of ethnographic
and demographic data from Cameroon and theoretical |
| Web: |
http://www.demog.berkeley.edu/~johnsonhanks/future.pdf |
|