Hope Is Cut

Daniel Mains is Wick Cary Assistant Professor of Honors at the University of Oklahoma.

• Series Editors’ PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Youth, Hope, Stratification, and Time1 The Historical and Cultural Roots of Unemployment and Stratification in Urban Ethiopia2 Imagining Hopeful Futures through Khat and Film3 “We Live Like Chickens; We Are Just Eating and Sleeping”: Progress, Education, and the Temporal Struggles of Young Men4 Working toward Hope: Youth Unemployment, Occupational Status, and Values5 Hopeful Exchanges: Reciprocity and Changing Dimensions of Urban Stratification6 Spatial Fixes to Temporal Problems: Migration, Social Relationships, and WorkConclusion: Sustaining Hope in the Present and the Futurenotesreferencesindex

"Hope Is Cut is a thoughtful, penetrating, and moving analysis of the lives of young men in Ethiopia and how their predicament sheds light on existing debates in social theory regarding time, space, temporal narratives of progress, social stratification, youth, and neoliberal capitalism in Africa. Mains’s book not only looks at an issue of great importance in the contemporary world; it also connects the study of youth to issues in broader social theory. Hope Is Cut should have a wide array of potential applications and a long shelf life." -Jennifer Cole, Professor, Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago, and author of Sex and Salvation: Imagining the Future in Madagascar