Working the System - by Jon Schubert (Paperback)

About the Book

Working the System offers key insights into the politics of the everyday in twenty-first-century dominant party and neo-authoritarian regimes in Africa and elsewhere. Detailing the many ways ordinary Angolans fashion their relationships with the system--an emic notion of their current political and socioeconomic environment--Jon Schubert explores...

Book Synopsis

Working the System offers key insights into the politics of the everyday in twenty-first-century dominant party and neo-authoritarian regimes in Africa and elsewhere. Detailing the many ways ordinary Angolans fashion their relationships with the system--an emic notion of their current political and socioeconomic environment--Jon Schubert explores what it means and how it feels to be part of the contemporary Angolan polity.

Schubert finds that for many ordinary Angolans, the benefits of the post-conflict "New Angola," flush with oil wealth and in the midst of a construction boom, are few. The majority of the inhabitants of the capital, Luanda, struggle to make ends meet and live on under $2.00 per day. The "New Angola" as promoted by the ruling MPLA, Schubert contends, is an essentially urban, upwardly mobile, and aspirational project, premised on the acceptance of the regime's political and economic dominance by its citizens. In the first ethnography of Angola to be published since the end of that country's twenty-seven years of intermittent violent internal conflict in 2002, Schubert traces how Angolans may question and resist the system within an atmosphere of apparent compliance. Working the System will appeal to anthropologists and political scientists, urban sociologists, and scholars of African studies.

Review Quotes

Working the System is a great book. It holds the promise of its subtitle and offers a deep 'political ethnography of the new Angola'.... [It] skillfully keeps the balance between the sensitivity of an account at the first person and the reflexivity of an analysis in dialogue with a wide range of scholars. The result is that every encounter sounds both intimate and purposeful.... The capacity of this book to absorb the shock of fast-paced political transformation in Angola is certainly the best proof that it is worth not only being read but being read again!

-- "Allegra Lab"

Although the book is intended to be a political ethnography, it rapidly evolves into something more, becoming a vivid journey during which, anchored in the author's experience and mental map, the reader is masterfully taken through those "very real places" "where people live and die, and trade, shop, walk, love" (p. 54). Indeed, the novelty in Schubert's analysis of contemporary politics in Angola is that, through his enmeshed topdown/bottom-up approach, he masterfully connects people's memories, aspirations, and individual stories with the larger political history of the country

-- "H-Luso-NET"

How do you explain the workings of a system where, ostensibly, there is no system? This is the central puzzle of Jon Schubert's highly relevant book on the 'New Angola.' The book is skillfully structured around key themes of everyday life that help to explain state-society relations in the capital.

-- "Journal of Southern African Studies"

This book is short and well written enough to use in courses in anthropology, sociology, international relations, and political science. It also serves as a great supplement to courses on urbanity and the city, contemporary Africa, comparative politics, and ethnography. At a time when few folks are doing real ethnography, along comes Working the System to refortify my belief that good ethnographic research and political ethnography are more important now than ever.

-- "American Ethnologist"

About the Author

Jon Schubert is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Leipzig.