Serious Youth in Sierra Leone: An Ethnography of Performance and Global Connection: Issues of Globalization:Case Studies in Contemporary Anthropology

Through an investigation of the lives and struggles of Sierra Leonean youth in the northern capital town of Makeni, Serious Youth in Sierra Leone: An Ethnography of Performance and Global Connection turns these fears on their head. Author Catherine Bolten argues that urban youth in Makeni are largely a conservative social force, rather than rebellious or revolutionary--the young want to have steady incomes, start families, and be respected. Adults misrecognize their children's conservative values and desires as radical because they interpret global engagement as a desire for social upheaval, rather than as a way to be noticed and taken seriously. Bolten articulates the social processes that lead to children--the future of a society--becoming a representation of a society's deepest anxieties about the destruction of its values and ideologies, and why those might be falsely construed.

Serious Youth in Sierra Leone is a volume in the series ISSUES OF GLOBALIZATION: CASE
STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGY, which examines the experiences of individual communities in our contemporary world. Each volume offers a brief and engaging exploration of a particular issue arising from globalization and its cultural, political, and economic effects on certain peoples or groups.