Resumen
As an anthropologist, I have had the ?privilege? of witnessing two almost simultaneous financial crises, in the country I lived in (Portugal) and in the country I have chosen as ethnographic site over the past ten years (Angola). Both countries inherit a long common past, intersecting colonial and postcolonial times, and to many extents it can be argued that in what comes to macro and micro economies, their longue and shorter financial durées cannot be disconnected. In fact, in many instances they appear as mutually configured, in particular in what concerns bilateral economic alliances and demographic movements between both countries. From this perspective, In this paper, through a series of ethnographic vignettes, I propose an ?existential (crisis) itinerary? through the effects of austerity in both countries, mapping the particularities of each case and also, through a ?mobile austerity? of sorts, the specific connections that bind austerities between Africa and Europe. I will explore two common threads that I identified in both contexts: the idea of a counter-developmental logic of 'temporal regression' (Knight and Stewart 2016), reaching towards pre-prosperity epochs in both countries; and, in response, the emergence (or heightening) of movements of protest against what is commonly perceived as an unjust, unequal financial system of distribution. I will argue that, more than temporal regression, austerity has provoked, both in Portugal and Angola, a 'denaturalization' of until then prevailing developmental, teleological narratives of the future.
Palabras clave
Austerity. Angola. Economy. Crisis.