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Serious Youth in Sierra Leone: An Ethnography of Performance and Global Connection
Barnes and Noble
Serious Youth in Sierra Leone: An Ethnography of Performance and Global Connection
Current price: $31.99


Barnes and Noble
Serious Youth in Sierra Leone: An Ethnography of Performance and Global Connection
Current price: $31.99
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Generational anxieties over what will happen to the young are unfolding starkly in Sierra Leone, where the civil war that raged between 1991 and 2002characterized by the extreme youthfulness of the rebel movementtriggered mass fear of that generation being "lost." Even now, fifteen years later, "children of the war" are regarded with suspicion. These fears stem largely from young people's easy embrace of globalization, enabled by the flood of international humanitarian aid following the war. Sierra Leone's increasingly global connectivity has triggered a cultural arms race between adults and their children, with adults often controlling, manipulating, and quashing the ambitions of the young.
Through an investigation of the lives and struggles of Sierra Leonean youth in the northern capital town of Makeni,
Serious Youth in Sierra Leone: An Ethnography of Performance and Global Connection
turns these fears on their head. Author Catherine Bolten argues that urban youth in Makeni are largely a conservative social force, rather than rebellious or revolutionarythe young want to have steady incomes, start families, and be respected. Adults misrecognize their children's conservative values and desires as radical because they interpret global engagement as a desire for social upheaval, rather than as a way to be noticed and taken seriously. Bolten articulates the social processes that lead to childrenthe future of a societybecoming a representation of a society's deepest anxieties about the destruction of its values and ideologies, and why those might be falsely construed.
Serious Youth in Sierra Leone
is a volume in the series
ISSUES OF GLOBALIZATION: CASE
STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGY
, which examines the experiences of individual communities in our contemporary world. Each volume offers a brief and engaging exploration of a particular issue arising from globalization and its cultural, political, and economic effects on certain peoples or groups.
Through an investigation of the lives and struggles of Sierra Leonean youth in the northern capital town of Makeni,
Serious Youth in Sierra Leone: An Ethnography of Performance and Global Connection
turns these fears on their head. Author Catherine Bolten argues that urban youth in Makeni are largely a conservative social force, rather than rebellious or revolutionarythe young want to have steady incomes, start families, and be respected. Adults misrecognize their children's conservative values and desires as radical because they interpret global engagement as a desire for social upheaval, rather than as a way to be noticed and taken seriously. Bolten articulates the social processes that lead to childrenthe future of a societybecoming a representation of a society's deepest anxieties about the destruction of its values and ideologies, and why those might be falsely construed.
Serious Youth in Sierra Leone
is a volume in the series
ISSUES OF GLOBALIZATION: CASE
STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGY
, which examines the experiences of individual communities in our contemporary world. Each volume offers a brief and engaging exploration of a particular issue arising from globalization and its cultural, political, and economic effects on certain peoples or groups.