S5 Petal 1 , Maison de la paix, Geneva | Online
This is part of the Anthropology and Sociology Department's Seminar Series.
This paper unpacks the events and reactions surrounding a mysterious ‘fainting wave’ that swept through middle and high schools in Angola from early 2011 on. While spirit possession and mass hysteria are long-standing concerns for social anthropology, the default analytical position often seems to fall back on binaries between opposing rationalities. By attending to the historicity and materiality of the fainting wave, the paper critically interrogates why in Angola the strong conviction of a dark political intentionality behind this inexplicable phenomenon took root, and why this conspiratorial interpretation prevailed over alternative explanations of a more psychological or spiritual bent. Through this, this essay contributes to disaggregating the seemingly monolithic, neo-authoritarian state; more importantly, it points to the limitations of an anthropological mode of analysis pivoting on an idea of opposing rationalities, while at the same time demonstrating how historically deep ethnography can help us overcome the limits of more ‘scientistic’ psychological explanations.
Jon Schubert is a political and economic anthropologist, currently working on infrastructures, crisis, and transnational capitalism. He has published extensively on the affect of authoritarianism, post-war state-building, and the workings of extractive industries on African polities, based on long-term research in urban Angola and Mozambique. His monograph, Working the System: A Political Ethnography of the New Angola (Cornell University Press 2017), is a landmark ethnographic study of contemporary neo-authoritarianism seen through the prism of the emic notion of the ‘system’, and offers important theoretical insights on African politics, urbanism, capitalist development, identity politics, and the co-production of hegemony.