Cultivating Moral Citizenship. An Ethnography of Young People's Associations, Gender and Social Adulthood in the Cameroon Gra (ePub)

In Cultivating Moral Citizenship, ethnographer Jude Fokwang unpacks the meanings, mechanisms and processes through which young people in an inner city of the West African nation of Cameroon respond to local and global challenges as they seek to position themselves as social adults. Faced with the decline of old predictabilities, the diminishing capacity of the postcolonial state to control its destiny and the precarity of waithood, young people instrumentalise the opportunities and resources afforded by associations to build reciprocal relationships that advance their individual and collective pursuits in a community that has increasingly become transnational. In positioning themselves as moral actors, the young people in this ethnography invest in high profile social and communal projects, including the enforcement of moral orthodoxies that enable readers to appreciate the ways in which moral citizenship is engendered, expanded and eroded simultaneously. Jude D. Fokwang is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Regis University. He is also an ethnographic filmmaker and director of the award-winning film, Something New in Old Town (2016). His research and publications have focused on the sociocultural and political subjectivities of young people, women and traditional leaders in Cameroon and South Africa.