Thug Realism: Inhabiting Fantasy in Urban Tanzania

One of the more compelling developments in contemporary sociocultural anthropology is its increasing attention to "the imagination." From the most spectacular fantasies to the most mundane reveries, imagining the world as it is and as it might be seems to be a rapidly expanding form of activity. Such imaginative acts are now held to be relevant-indeed necessary-not only to such predictable endeavors as consumption and leisure but to fields as diverse as the construction of civil society (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999a), the production of biomedical knowledge (Martin 1998), and nuclear proliferation (Gusterson 1999). This move towards all things imagined has further been characterized by an important kind of reflexivity, as exploring the complexities of "imagined communities" requires the exercise of the "ethnographic imagination." Indeed, even a cursory review of current ethnographic observations might lead us to conclude that nothing is now unimaginable. In this article I will examine the imaginative implications of contemporary Tanzanian economy and society for a select, but by no means peripheral, group of young men living and working, mostly in barbershops, but also in other "informal" businesses in the city of Arusha, one of the largest cities in Tanzania. The expansion of this informal sector in urban Tanzania and the diverse modes of imagining that characterize it are clearly emergent under conditions of what has been described as "globalization," and it is the intersection of these rubrics-"the imaginary" and "the global"-that I intend to explore. I would suggest as a point of theoretical departure that the analytical coupling of the imagination to processes of globalization has often obscured the ways that imaginative acts are in fact materially grounded in social activities. While calls for "localization" and attention to "lived experience" have been legion, too often the act of imagining is unmoored from the specific forms, times, and places through which persons project their possible lives. Thus, it is possible for Abu-Lughod to insist that viewers of Egyptian soap opera are "part of the same cultural worlds we inhabit-worlds of mass media, consumption, and dispersed communities of the imagination" (Abu-Lughod 1997:128). Surely the forms of global connectivity exemplified by soap opera establish, or at