"Poverty" and the Politics of Syncopation

Urban Examples from Kinshasa (DR Congo)

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2224548
AutoresFilip De Boeck (0000-0003-2510-0457, KU Leuven, autor correspondente)
Ano2015
Volume56
FascículoS11
PáginasS146-S158
Data de publicação2015-10-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoCurrent Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0011-3204 • E-ISSN: 1537-5382
EditoraUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/682392
OpenAlexW2248742714
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas25
Referências citadas12

By means of an ethnographic "urban acupuncture" of a specific building within the city of Kinshasa, this article explores how poverty effects emerging publics in the city. Poverty "rhythms" city life in specific ways, and these rhythms may be best understood in terms of a politics of the syncopated and the suspended through which urban publics are constantly splintered and reassembled. The suspensions and missed beats that thus punctuate urban daily living often produce violence, closure, and isolation, but simultaneously they also generate unexpected accents that form openings into the "something else" of the offbeat track, thereby hinting at the (always vulnerable and equally problematic) possibility of alternative collective action and the ad hoc creation of new groups, publics, and public spaces

Political science · Politics · Poverty · Publics · Sociology · Urban poverty · African Studies and Ethnography · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Law · Water Governance and Infrastructure