Youth and the occult infrastructures of urban life in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire

Studies on youth and the occult have represented two blossoming, yet relatively discrete fields of anthropological research on urban Africa over the past two decades. Building on twenty-eight months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2016 and 2019 among young men and women living in the city of Abidjan (Côte d'Ivoire), this dissertation bridges these two domains of study by taking as a primary point of observation how young people relate to the discourses and practices concerning the occult. The significance of this perspective stems from the recognition that for many young residents of this city, the dynamics that manifest betwixt and between the physical reality of daily life and the invisible reality of the spiritual worlds are a central component of urban life. Drawing on anthropological approaches that have restored the centrality of immaterial and social infrastructures in African urban worlds, this thesis suggests to regard the multiple relations between young urbanites and invisible forces as "occult infrastructures" of city life. In order to support this assertion, I describe different situations in which the intermeshing of invisible forces and occult practices in the everyday life of some young urbanites surfaces as infrastructural dynamics. In particular, I examine how the entanglement of invisible forces in the intersubjective relationships of these youths informs the texture of their everyday life, their temporalities, their geographies of mobilities, and their perceived constraints and possibilities. Furthermore, I describe how these occult infrastructural dynamics are shaped by the ways these young people rework long-standing discourses and practices concerning the occult to adapt them to the novel socio-historical circumstances in which they find themselves as they enter adult life. This line of argumentation is developed through in-depth ethnographic descriptions of daily situations in which occult forces affect the lives of the young men and women I met during my fieldwork. The empirical chapters focus extensively on the case of young Abidjanese men and women who have engaged in newfound digital and erotic occult economies over the past fifteen years. These occult economies are predicated upon the redefinition of long-standing practices of influencing the hidden forces working alongside the apparent reality for one's own social and material benefit. The description traces how these youths have come to see these forms of socio-spiritual action as a productive way to depart from the sense of being "stuck" in a state of "temporal impasse," "powerlessness," and "waithood" that have been widely reported in the anthropological literature on youths in the Global South. In many respects, young people who have engaged in these occult economies have acquired more control over their conditions of existence despite the precariousness of their socioeconomic condition. Accordingly, these modes of action have led many of them to adopt redefined temporal imperatives, ideals of a fulfilling life, meaning of adulthood, and paths to attain a socially valorized status that move away from the aspirations and expectations of their elders at a similar biological age. However, these youths never simply consider the occult forces that affect their daily lives as beneficial, controllable, or workable, but also as potentially deleterious, devastating, intractable, and unruly. Achieving a fulfilling life is therefore not simply perceived by them as a matter of acquiring occult capacities to move beyond material scarcity and embrace the youthful standards of living of the time, but also constitutes a constant endeavor to avoid, circumvent, and control, as far as possible, the inevitable negative undersides of urban sociality. To this end, many youths engage recurrently in spiritual journeys toward rural parts of the country in search of occult and spiritual healing practices that are deemed more efficient and reliable than their urban counterparts. Indeed, establishing trans-local spiritual linkages constitute for them the only viable pathway to strike some kind of balance between the contrasted effects of invisible forces.

Publication year:2020

Accessibility:Closed