Unemployment among educated young men has become a central feature of globalization. In this article, I examine the experiences and strategies of unemployed young men in the north Indian city of Meerut. Many of these men complain that they are “just passing time” (doing “timepass”) in run-down government universities. But they also use this idea of themselves in limbo to fashion novel cultures of masculinity that partially bridge caste divides. I use a discussion of these young men's predicament to argue for an ethnographically sensitive political-economy approach to the study of youth, culture, and neoliberal transformation, one attuned to both the durability of social inequalities and counterintuitive cultural practice.

Timepass: Youth, class, and time among unemployed young men in India

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Council on Higher Education

Introduction: exploring witchcraft, power and politics. Society, cosmology and the making of witchcraft -continuity and change in the history of Green Valley witches of the Lowveld and their familiars -conceptions of duality, power and desire witchcraft, cognates, affines and neighbours - the distribution of witchcraft accusations, 1960-1995 "a witch has no horn" - social tensions in the subjective reality of witchcraft witch-hunting and political legitimacy -chief, comrades and elimination of evil, 1930-1990 the ANC's dilemma - the symbolic politics of three witch-hunts in the 1990s conclusions - witchcraft and the post-colonial state.

Witchcraft, Power and Politics: Exploring the Occult in the South African Lowveld

This report offers a comparative perspective on the nature of youth agency in different parts of the world, demonstrating how ‘youth’ can provide a window on subaltern responses to economic restructuring. I outline key points about the theorization of agency within human geography and then describe the importance of young people’s resistance. I then discuss young people’s resourcefulness as a form of agency as well as ‘negative agency’: instances in which children and youth reproduce and deepen dominant structures of power. Finally, I identify a need to reflect further on the social nature of young people’s action and the importance of humour and irreverence in youth practice.

Geographies of children and youth II: Global youth agency

"The Bank of Japan is our mother," bankers in Tokyo sometimes said of Japan's central bank. Drawing on this metaphor as an ethnographic resource, and on the example of central bankers who sought to unwind their own technocratic knowledge by replacing it with a real-time machine, I retrace the ethnographic task of unwinding technocratic knowledge from those anthropological knowledge practices that critique technocracy. In so doing, I draw attention to special methodological problems-involving the relationship between ethnography, analysis, and reception-in the representation and critique of contemporary knowledge practices.

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Real time: Unwinding technocratic and anthropological knowledge

served as a way station on the road to revolutionary politics, the school's rigid discipline apparently provoking widespread defiance of authority In the lower grades, student dissidence took innocuous forms   But by the time B entered the upper grades   student dissent had become more sophisticated He became a member of a radical student group that organised discussion circles and circulated illegal literature   [At this time] social unrest and open protest   deepened and spread   at 16 B was already a leading member of the student movement   The feverish disorders of that year drew B and a generation of like-minded schoolboys into the arena of serious revolutionary politics   At seventeen, B thus became   a full-time activist

Colin Bundy

Papers

Street sociology and pavement politics: aspects of youth and student resistance in Cape Town, 1985