Youth Cultures & the Fetishization of Violence in Nigeria

Abstract

In this paper I develop a conceptual framework for analysing youth cultures of resistance and violence in the context of customary and world religions in which old and new gods are important sources of ideological resistance. Condensing around points of intersection between capital and non-capitalist kin-based economies, I argue that militant youth cultures develop through a ‘double’ articulation between ‘parent’ cultures largely producing use values, and capitalist cultures pervaded by world religions (Christianity, Islam). The former construe social relations between groups struggling to establish rights over strategic natural resources (land, oil, water) in terms of spirit beings and their protective powers against attack; the latter preside today over production for sale and profit according to impersonal market forces that dissolve the social into relationships between ‘things’, the products of labour exchanged in the market place.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.