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Surviving with Dignity is Scott Youngstedt's deeply humanistic and moving portrait of the trials and tribulations of Hausa men in Niamey, the capital city of the world's poorest country. Youngstedt's book is based upon a more than 20 year period of fieldwork in Niger. Given this enviable record of field research, the text is nuanced and sensitive. Accordingly, it describes without sentimentality the challenges of daily life in a spaces of deep and intractable poverty. But Youngstedt does not reduce poverty-or dignity-to a statistical profile or a discourse of disembodied analysis. Instead, he skilfully tells a wide range of stories that evoke the myriad existential challenges that his Niamey friends have confronted and struggled to overcome-with a measure of dignity. This ethnographic portrait of contemporary urban life in West Africa is a necessarily complex one. Guided by Youngstedt's clear and compelling narratives, the complex themes of urban poverty and social resilience weave together into a seamless whole. Surviving with Dignity clearly demonstrates the power of ethnography to represent a complex social reality that defies systematic reduction. This book is a model of and for contemporary ethnography, African studies and urban anthropology. -- Paul Stoller, Professor of Anthropology, West Chester University

Surviving with Dignity is Scott Youngstedt's deeply humanistic and moving portrait of the trials and tribulations of Hausa men in Niamey, the capital city of the world's poorest country. Youngstedt's book is based upon a more than 20 year period of fieldwork in Niger. Given this enviable record of field research, the text is nuanced and sensitive. Accordingly, it describes without sentimentality the challenges of daily life in a space of deep and intractable poverty. But Youngstedt does not reduce poverty-or dignity-to a statistical profile or a discourse of disembodied analysis. Instead, he skilfully tells a wide range of stories that evoke the myriad existential challenges that his Niamey friends have confronted and struggled to overcome-with a measure of dignity. This ethnographic portrait of contemporary urban life in West Africa is a necessarily complex one. Guided by Youngstedt's clear and compelling narratives, the complex themes of urban poverty and social resilience weave together into a seamless whole. Surviving with Dignity clearly demonstrates the power of ethnography to represent a complex social reality that defies systematic reduction. This book is a model of and for contemporary ethnography, African studies and urban anthropology. -- Paul Stoller, Professor of Anthropology, West Chester University Scott Youngstedt's aptly named Surviving with Dignity explores the gendered and generational quality of modernity in Niamey by drawing upon the reflections of men in a variety of homosocial conversation groups. For Hausa immigrants in Niger's capital Niamey who are caught in a kind of continuous liminality between rural and urban conversation groups provide a space for adapting to and interpreting a world in movement. Communications revolutions from the opening up of print and radio media to the explosion of use of cell phones have contributed to the dynamism of life in contemporary Niger without supplanting the value placed upon good conversation. With humanity and gentle humor Youngstedt renders in vivid terms the predicaments of men in a perilous economy who nevertheless find social and cultural resources to constantly regenerate a world worth preserving. -- Barbara Cooper, Rutgers University

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Scott M. Youngstedt earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology at UCLA in 1993, and is currently Professor of Anthropology at Saginaw Valley State University. His ethnographic research in Niger over the past 24 years is primarily concerned with exploring the ways by which migrant Hausa construct communities in diaspora, create modernities, and negotiate personal identities in the context of neoliberal globalization. His work has been published in Africa Insight, African Studies Quarterly, African Studies Review, and City and Society, among other places. Youngstedt currently serves as Vice President of the West African Research Association and is in line to become its President in November 2012.

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