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- Title
Rewarding frictions: fieldwork and street vending in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
- Authors
Malefakis, Alexis
- Abstract
Fieldwork is sometimes marked by experiences of frictions and frustration. Fieldwork with mobile street vendors in an African city may confront the fieldworker with the problem of locating the 'field' and attaining access to it, both spatially and temporally. As I will show by reference to my fieldwork with a group of shoe vendors on the streets of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the frictions that occurred at the beginning of my fieldwork nevertheless ignited a process of ethnographic knowledgegaining that led me to understand the importance of temporality and rhythmicity for the shoe vendors' practices. In their active engagement with the spatio-temporal landscape of the city, the street vendors organised their practices as an experiential rhythm that unfolded as sequences of rising and subsequently declining cognitive and corporeal tensions. These rhythms did not flow smoothly, but were necessarily interspersed with disturbances and frictions by the rhythms of other pedestrians in the streets, whose attention the street vendors tried to attain.
- Subjects
DAR es Salaam (Tanzania); URBAN anthropology; STREET vendors; URBAN landscape architecture; FIELD work (Sociology)
- Publication
Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 2015, Vol 140, Issue 2, p177
- ISSN
0044-2666
- Publication type
Article