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C u r r e n t A n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 46, Number 3, June 2005� 2005 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2005/4603-0001$10.00

When the FutureDecides

Uncertainty and IntentionalAction in ContemporaryCameroon

by Jennifer Johnson-Hanks

Young Beti women in Cameroon regularly assert that becausethey are uncertain about what the future will bring, they cannotmake any plans. But they do plan, strategize, and indeed actquite effectively. The purpose of this paper is to explain howthey do so, specifically in reference to marriage and reproduction,and thereby to contribute to a general understanding of inten-tionality, uncertainty, and social action. Action has been com-monly theorized as the fulfillment of a prior intention. But un-certainties, both the probabilistic uncertainty of events and thesubject’s experience of uncertainty, threaten to dissolve the linkbetween intention and its fulfillment. This paper argues that, atleast under the conditions of uncertainty applicable in contempo-rary Africa, effective social action is based not on the fulfillmentof prior intentions but on a judicious opportunism: the actorseizes promising chances. In other words, women’s negation ofWeberian rational action is not a lack; by engaging in heteroge-neous activities without a clear trajectory in mind, they are ableto get by. The paper makes this argument on the basis of ethno-graphic and demographic data from Cameroon and theoreticalanalyses of the work of Searle, Schutz, and Hume.

j e n n i f e r j o h n s o n - h a n k s is Assistant Professor in the De-partment of Demography at the University of California, Berke-ley (2232 Piedmont Ave. #2120, Berkeley, CA 94720-2120, U.S.A.[[email protected]]). Born in 1971, she was edu-cated at the University of California, Berkeley (B.A., 1994) andNorthwestern University (M.A., 1996; Ph.D., 2000). She is cur-rently developing a longitudinal study of reproductive intentionsand practice in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso, with a grant from theNational Institutes of Child Health and Development. Herpublications include “The Modernity of Traditional Contracep-tion” (Population and Development Review 28:229–49), “On theLimits of the Life Cycle in Ethnography: Toward a Theory of Vi-tal Conjunctures” (American Anthropologist 104:865–80), and AnUncertain Honor: Modern Motherhood in an African Crisis (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, in press). The present paperwas submitted 7 x 03 and accepted 30 ix 04.

Worshipping a dictator is such a pain in the ass. Itwouldn’t be so bad if it was merely a matter ofdancing upside down on your head. With practiceanyone could learn to do that. The real problem ishaving no way of knowing from one day to another,from one minute to the next, just what is up andwhat is down.

—chinua achebe

Half an hour into our second interview, I asked Martinehow many children she planned to have. “Not rightaway,” she responded. “I have to work before havingchildren. . . . I need even a house. I need to have perhapssaved a certain sum.” This answer, apparently so dis-connected from my question about child numbers,would have surprised me a few months earlier, but I hadgrown accustomed to it. In both interviews and informalconversations, young, educated Cameroonian womenroutinely responded “Not yet” to my question “Howmany children do you plan to have?” My thinking aboutthe topics of uncertainty and intentional action beganwith this mismatch between question and answer,which offers a portal into the analysis of the vital con-junctures of reproductive action and intention in the un-certain world of Cameroon at the end of the 1990s.

Reproduction offers a particularly appropriate locus forthe study of intentionality and its limits; “planning,”“intending,” and “trying” are at once indispensable andinsufficient modes of understanding social action aroundchildbearing. In quantitative social science as in policy,reproduction and especially child numbers are treated asobjects of rational, strategic action, building as much onWeberian Zweckrationalitat as on Bentham’s Utility.Since the late 1960s, international family-planning pol-icy has relied on the theory that poor countries have asubstantial “unmet need” for family planning, identifiedwhen women respond in surveys that they want no morechildren and that they are not using any means of con-traception (e.g., Bongaarts 1991, Bongaarts and Bruce1995, Casterline and Sinding 2000, Jain 1999, Westoff1988). The theory of unmet need and related conceptssuch as “desired fertility” assume that reproductive in-tentions are relatively coherent, stable, and articulableand that they are oriented primarily toward numbers ofchildren.1 Given the centrality of these theories to entireacademic disciplines and to the multibillion-dollar fam-ily-planning industry in poor countries, I went to con-duct my research in Cameroon thinking that questionslike “How many children do you plan to have?” and “Doyou want a(nother) child soon, later, or not at all?” wouldproduce relatively transparent responses, offering a yard-stick with which to calibrate my ethnographic results

1. The theory of unmet need is based on many of the same as-sumptions as expected-utility theory in economics; however, it vi-olates basic economic assumptions and is generally rejected byeconomists because the intertemporal discounting necessary to ob-serve such off-optimum behavior is implausible (see Pritchett 1994).

364 F current anthropology Volume 46, Number 3, June 2005

against those of 40 years of demographic surveys.2 Thereality was very different indeed.

What kinds of reproductive futures do young, educatedCameroonian women hope for? How do they try to bringabout those potential futures? How are these intentionsand actions inflected by the uncertainty of everyday lifein contemporary Cameroon? By addressing these empir-ical questions, I hope to contribute to a general under-standing of uncertainty and the relationship between in-tention, action, and outcome as ethnographic objects. Atleast since Brentano, action has been commonly theo-rized as the fulfillment of a prior intention; the assump-tions of the family-planning community are thus wellgrounded in Western philosophy and social thought. Butuncertainties—both the probabilistic uncertainty ofevents in the world and the subject’s experience or pos-ture of uncertainty—threaten to dissolve the link be-tween intention and its fulfillment. My interlocutors’experiences of uncertainty and intentional action in theirreproductive lives contrast starkly with the approachesto these topics from early probability theory, phenome-nology, and the philosophy of mind. Through the jux-taposition of ethnographic and statistical evidence withsocial theory and philosophy, I seek to view them “inthe pale light that each upon the other throws” (Stevens1990:54).

Life in contemporary Cameroon is extremely uncer-tain, both in the specific sense that death often comesearly and unexpectedly and also more generally: fewevents in everyday experience are predictable or consis-tent. From buses to paychecks to roadblocks to prices,common things elude standardization. Life was almostassuredly also very uncertain before the two-decades-oldeconomic crisis, but today people invoke la crise as anexplanation and excuse for the ambiguity and insecuritythat they experience. While the intensity of daily un-certainty in contemporary Cameroon draws the limitsof a classic intentional model of action into sharp relief,the model is also insufficient to account for social actionin the relatively certain, affluent West, if in more nu-anced and concealed ways. Social action everywherecombines intentional strategy and judicious opportun-ism; only the relative proportions change with time andcontext. This is not, therefore, a story of difference, con-trasting the forms of social action that emerge underuncertainty there with rational, strategic action here.Nor is it an explicit discussion of gendered action or therelationship between gender and certainty, although myexamples all concern women. Rather, it is a theoreticalanalysis of uncertainty and intentional action, using an

2. Although the assumption that demographic action is intentionalwithin the frame of post-Weberian theories remains strong, a grow-ing corpus of work both within and beyond demography has sig-nificantly refined understandings of the sources and modalities ofthose intentions. Perhaps most influential has been the work ofSusan Watkins and her collaborators, who have argued that socialnetworks play a key role in shaping women’s hopes, goals, andpractices regarding childbearing (Kohler, Behrman, et al. 2001, Ru-tenberg and Watkins 1997, Valente, Watkins, et al. 1997, Watkins2000).

ethnographic case and associated demographic data asfoils.

Intentional Action from Phenomenology tothe Philosophy of Mind

If the family-planning literature generally assumes thatwomen engage in reproductive action (e.g., using con-traception) in order to fulfill their prior reproductive in-tentions (e.g., limiting family size), it is not an assump-tion cut from whole cloth. To the contrary, a substantialWestern intellectual tradition—spanning economics, po-litical theory, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind—has analyzed action as behavior that fulfills a prior in-tention.3 Defining “action,” in contrast to mere behavior,as oriented toward the fulfillment of intention makesaction both cognitive and reflexive and thus necessarilythe activity of particular kinds of subjects and amenableto particular modes of analysis. These modes of analysisprove inadequate for the analysis of Cameroonianwomen’s reproductive practices; to understand how andwhy, it is necessary to address the theories of intentionalaction in some detail. I will here focus on the phenom-enology of Schutz and the philosophy of mind of Searle,arguing that their theories of the relationship betweenintention and action are largely consonant. Other schol-ars have also treated action as the fulfillment of inten-tion, Weber being only the most obvious,4 and much ofmicroeconomics, statistical demography, and quantita-tive sociology relies on the assumptions of rational-choice theory, a specific and highly formalized versionof the theories of intentional action. I focus on Searleand Schutz because they offer rich and nuanced examplesof the category fertile enough that even their limitationsare analytically useful.

For Searle, intending to do something is a special caseof intentionality, the general class of cognitive states thatare about something, such as wishing, believing, anddetesting. Among these, “intending to” has two specialproperties: first, the conditions of satisfaction of inten-tions—actions—are uniquely tied to the intentionsthemselves. Thus, the state of affairs that I hope for mayexist independent of my hopes, but “there are no actionswithout corresponding intentions” (1983:82). Second,

3. In addition to the citations below, see Baldwin and Baird (2000),Dennett (1998), McKaughan (2003), Montefiore and Noble (1989),Smith (1992).4. Weber’s concept of the Sinnzusammenhang (complex of mean-ing) and gemeinter Sinn (subjective meaning) were central toSchutz’s formulation of intentional action, and the two writersappear to concur on the key points for my purposes here. In definingaction, Weber writes: “Explanation requires a grasp of the complexof meanings in which an actual course of understandable actionthus interpreted belongs. . . . The subjective meaning of the action,including that also of the relevant meaning complexes, will becalled the intended meaning” (1978:9). The fact that Weber includessituations in which the actor is not consciously aware of his in-tended meaning does not seem to me to pose a problem; althoughconsciousness and intentionality overlap, neither is a prerequisitefor the other.

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the fulfillment of intention rests both on the outcomeand on the process through which it is achieved: myintention to visit my ailing aunt is not achieved if mycar happens to stall outside her house and I go inside towait for the tow truck. By contrast, my belief that shewill be home can be fulfilled regardless of how she cameto be there (pp. 84–91). Actions are therefore not merelythe fulfillment of intentions but also entail them; with-out some intention there can be no action.5

Responding to the potential criticism that some be-haviors that intuitively seem to be action—such as run-ning sobbing from the room—are performed suddenlyand without forethought, Searle distinguishes betweenprior intentions and intentions in action. Intentions inaction are part of the action, inseparable from it, andthus necessarily present even if the actor is unaware ofthem. Searle (1983:107) writes:

The action of my raising my arm consists of twocomponents, the intentions in action and the move-ment of my arm. Take away the first and you don’thave action but only a movement, take away thesecond and you don’t have success, but only a failedeffort. There are no actions, not even unintentionalactions, without intentions, because every actionhas an intention in action as one of its components.

In other words, any behavior that is associated with somekind of “trying to do something,” no matter how banal,is “action,” because the thing tried for constitutes anintention in action. The relevant distinction is not be-tween intentional and unintentional action but betweenprior intentions and intentions in action. This move re-cuperates my running sobbing from the room, killing myrosebush by pruning it too vigorously, and shifting gearsas I move onto the freeway as definitionally intentionalactions—even if not done “on purpose”—because eachis invested with intentions in action (“that my feetmove,” “that I cut this branch,” etc.). While philosoph-ically consistent, it has inconvenient consequences forthe social scientist. The generality, narrowness, and lackof structure of intentions in action seems to precludetheir social analysis. Intentions in action, as explainedby Searle, are little more than the cognitive represen-tation of the physical action itself: the intention in actionassociated with arm-raising is “that my arm go up.” Assuch, they seem to have little relevance to a social ac-count of voting, volunteering, waving, or any other ac-tivity in which arms might be raised. These broader,social aims inhere, rather, in what Searle calls “priorintentions,” intentions that come before the action bothin time and in causal sequence. The prior intention isthe motivation of the action, the aim in view, the in-order-to motive. Searle’s prior intentions correspondclosely to the idea of intention embedded in demographic

5. Searle’s position on intentionality has been amply debated inreference to causal theories of action, as well as in the philosophyof mind (see, for example, Costa 1987, Jacquette 1989, McCulloch1984, Mele 1999, Vermazen 1998, Walker 2003).

surveys and in theories of rational choice and also in thephenomenology of Schutz.

In his integration of Weber’s theory of social actionwith Husserl’s phenomenology, Schutz argues that thegoal—and therefore the meaning—of an action is its pro-jected act. This model of the projected act resemblesSearle’s notion of the prior intention in at least two ways:the action fulfills the intention or projected act, and thefulfillment is fundamentally concerned not only withoutcome but with process. For Schutz, action may bemeaningful because the actor removes himself from theflow of duration to reflect upon it, prototypically inmemory but also in projecting the future. He argues thataction is the fulfillment of a prior intention in the spe-cific sense that intended acts are envisioned as com-pleted, such that their completion in the world bringsabout an alignment between the mental representationand the external state of affairs (1967:61):

The actor projects his action as if it were alreadyover and done with and lying in the past. It is a full-blown, actualized event, which the actor picturesand assigns to its place in the order of experiencesgiven to him at the moment of projection. Strangelyenough, therefore, because it is pictured as com-pleted, the planned act bears the temporal characterof pastness. Of course, once the action begins, thegoal is wished for and protended. . . . It is thought ofin the future perfect tense.

Schutz explicitly argues here that the formulation of a“future perfect act,” an explicit, cognitive representationof an intended outcome, is a precondition for action. Atthe same time, he makes present meaning dependent onthe future’s resemblance to the past, if not on the future’spotential pastness itself. I will argue later that experi-ential uncertainty differs from statistical uncertaintyparticularly in its relation to time and to the relationshipbetween different temporal forms and that Schutz’sterms here help to formulate this basic difference. Fornow I want only to emphasize the necessarily temporalcharacter of intention, which runs through both Schutz’sand Searle’s interpretations. Intention precedes action asmemory follows experience (Searle 1983:96):

The prior intention to raise my arm is to the actionof raising my arm as the memory of seeing a floweris to seeing a flower; or rather, the formal relationsbetween the memory, the visual experience of theflower, and the flower are the mirror image of theformal relations between the prior intention, the in-tention in action and the bodily movement.

Thus, intention and memory are both intentional statesthat are about the conjunction of a physical phenomenon(a thing, a physical movement) and a cognitive one (thevisual experience, the intention in action), but the tem-poral sequence and the mode of fulfillment are inverse.6

6. Searle discusses this in terms of the “direction of fit.” The di-rection of fit is mind-to-world in the cases of belief and perception,where a breakdown would be described as an error on the part of


Whereas for Searle the prior intention is to the action asthe memory is to the perception, for Schutz the intentionentails an experience that resembles memory directly:the act is seen in the mind’s eye as a future memory.This interpretation is echoed in Miyazaki’s (2000) anal-ysis of hope in Fiji. Hope is the holding out of a promisefor a future closure, what Schutz would call a “pro-tended” state of affairs that, when actualized, will ini-tiate a new round of future perfects, a new round ofhopes.

Analyses that treat action as the fulfillment of a spe-cific intention establish a systematic relationship be-tween intentional projects and behaviors and thereby fa-cilitate the meaningful interpretation of those behaviors.Like any model, however, this theory of intentional ac-tion must foreclose the analysis of some situations thebetter to address others. Viewing action as the fulfill-ment of a prior intention commits us either to excludingbehavior that is not oriented to a clear intentional man-ifold from the category “action” or, following Searle, topositing that every action has an “intention in action”that comes into existence at the same moment as thebehavior, whether or not it can be articulated at anypoint. The first move offers a technical definition of “ac-tion”; the second offers a technical definition of “inten-tion.” Both, it seems to me, beg the essential ethno-graphic question of how to think about behavior that isclearly meaningful but is not strategically selected inadvance or behavior that emerges through the course ofengagement and moves the engagement forward butwithout the choreography of a specific imagined future.How can we analyze conscious, social, and meaningfulbehavior that is oriented neither to the fulfillment of aprior intention nor to the actualization of an act pro-jected in the future perfect tense?

For such a question, the ethnography of contemporarysouthern Cameroon is instructive for two reasons. First,the conditions of life—economic, political, and social—are highly uncertain, making the projection of future per-fects particularly tenuous. While lived uncertainties ex-ist everywhere, in contemporary Cameroon they aremore visible, more ethnographically inevitable than inthe United States or Europe. Second, there is substantiallocal ambivalence about the legitimacy, viability, andeven morality of intentional action in the forms thatseem so intuitive and self-evident to many scholars inthe affluent West. In their descriptions of their own ac-tion—past, present, and future—southern Camerooniansgenerally reject a model of prior intentions or protendedfuture perfects, instead describing their action as grasp-ing at whatever is available in the present.

Uncertainty in the Time of Crisis

According to many southern Cameroonians, the possi-bility of envisioning and seeking to attain specific fu-

the subject. In the case of intention, the direction of fit is world-to-mind, where breakdowns are described as failures to fulfill amental representation (1983:88 and passim).

tures is a thing of the past, an opportunity that was takenfrom them by the economic crisis of the past two dec-ades. As Ferguson argues for the case of Zambian mineworkers, many of my interlocutors have experienced lacrise “not simply as a lack but as a loss” (1999:238). In1987 the value of Cameroonian exports on the worldmarket fell by nearly half, setting in motion la crise: aperiod of economic hardship, increased interethnic con-flict, and a generalized state of distrust, a “routinizedstate of crisis” (Mbembe and Roitman 1997). The vola-tility in economic and social life brought about by lacrise extends almost everywhere, from the most mun-dane to the most intimate domain: transport is unreliableand petty credit impossible to obtain, and even loversare distrustful of one another’s motives.

Two related factors are at work here. First, life in con-temporary Cameroon is objectively unpredictable. Sec-ond, “crisis” has become available as a trope that servesto legitimate and reinforce both the interpretation of theworld as uncertain and behavior that contributes to thatuncertainty. Although most Cameroonians perceive theirpresent uncertainty as resulting from the economic andsocial crisis, there is no evidence that life prior to la crisewas objectively more certain. Many scholars have dem-onstrated the fluidity and complexity of African social lifein the past (e.g., Berry 1993:18), and Cameroon is no ex-ception (see Laburthe-Tolra 1981:51). Yet, by ascribingcontemporary uncertainty to the crisis, Cameroonianshave elevated the crisis to an inevitable force that ac-counts for incompetence, graft, sexual infidelity, schoolfailure, and even witchcraft. The widespread sense thatdisadvantage and unpredictability permeate not only theeconomy but also social and personal relationships—whatmy informants call la crise morale—reduces the socialpressure in favor of transparent and predictable action.After all, if corruption and witchcraft are inevitable and“everyone” engages in them, why resist? As a result ofthe common view that Cameroon is in crisis, the valuesassigned to specific social actions are remarkably fluid,with sometimes devastating consequences.

One example is the case of Madame Essele, a womanin her mid-50s living in a small town about an hour fromthe capital city. In early 1998 Madame Essele’s marriagehad become difficult, as her husband had taken a muchyounger second wife, and there was constant conflict inthe compound over money. Her daughter, by contrast,was doing well: working as a schoolteacher in Yaoundeand living with her promising and handsome boyfriendthere. Madame Essele went to visit them, and to cele-brate her coming the daughter and her boyfriend slaugh-tered a goat. Back in the town, tales of the goat circulatedand escalated. The goat became two goats, then a ban-quet, and then a feast. Madame Essele’s co-wife claimedthat the goat was a bridewealth payment for the daughterand that it should therefore have been given to theirhusband. Madame Essele, she asserted, had eaten (adi)the wealth that was by right due to her husband. Eatingout of place immediately invokes witchcraft in southernCameroon. An evu, a certain kind of dangerous spiritthat resides in the bellies of some people, induces its


host to eat (adi) the wealth of his neighbors, the healthof their children, or even his own relatives. Immoderateeating is akin to witchcraft and a woman disrespectfulof her husband a likely witch. Thus, by claiming thatMadame Essele had consumed a bridewealth goat, theco-wife was accusing her of witchcraft.

Those familiar with this case disagree about what hap-pened next. Some people say that Madame Essele’s hus-band paid to have her witched for disrespecting him.Others claim that it was the co-wife herself whose evuwas to blame. Still others assert that it was MadameEssele’s own guilty conscience that brought about herdemise. All of my informants agreed, however, that Ma-dame Essele fell ill on her way home from Yaounde anddied of supernaturally induced fever a few days later. Herdaughter remained in the city, afraid to return to thevillage even for the funeral.

This case, in which a goat becomes a plausible basisfor a witchcraft murder, points to the dramatic instabil-ity of life in contemporary Africa and serves as a goodmetaphor for the phenomenological experience of lacrise.7 Apparently small actions may have monumentalconsequences; neither the scale nor the direction of theiroutcomes can be predicted in advance. Bernstein (1994)warns against historical analyses that treat contingentoutcomes as if they had been inevitable or obvious fromthe beginning. So, too, in ethnography: although I canexplain the witchcraft accusations in reference to a setof local logics, I could not have predicted the outcomebefore it occurred. Nor could any of my Cameroonianinterlocutors, despite the fact that they all consideredthe story plausible after the fact. Most Camerooniansshare an acute awareness of the unpredictable: uncer-tainty permeates every plan, and action is rarely for-mulated as the fulfillment of a prior intention. What iscommon is a posture of openness to possibility, evocativeof the “subjunctive mood” described by Wagner-Pacifici(2000).

In contrast to the armed standoffs that constitute Wag-ner-Pacifici’s object, life in a routinized state of crisisdemands not a subjunctive mood (temporary, set apartfrom normal life, partially volitional) but somethingcloser to a subjunctive habitus, a system of “durable,transposable dispositions, structured structures predis-posed to function as structuring structures . . . as prin-ciples which generate and organize practices and repre-sentations” (Bourdieu 1990:53). The extreme uncertaintyof everyday life does not make people act recklessly orwithout structure but prestructures their expectationsand reactions in a particular way. A habitus born of re-peated experience of uncertainty and sudden change pre-disposes the actor to discount choice and refrain fromcommitting himself to specific imagined futures, futuresthat are—in any case—unlikely to be attained.

The hesitation to commit to specific futures that char-

7. Witchcraft is highly systematic, even the polar opposite of “blindchance”; nonetheless, widespread witchcraft increases uncertaintybecause it increases the range of possible outcomes of a given actionand may—as here—even reverse their valence.

acterizes the subjective mood should not be confusedwith concern about the evil eye or even simple modesty,both of which are also at play in southern Cameroon butin different spheres. The narratives that follow may ap-pear to indicate an avoidance of firm claims about thefuture for fear of bad luck or even witchcraft (cf. Castle2001). I assumed as much at the beginning of my field-work. However, nearly the opposite applies in a varietyof circumstances in southern Cameroon. People some-times refer to, address, and even treat others as if what-ever they are preparing for had already been actualized.Engaged women are called by their future marriednames, schoolchildren by their future titles. As an un-married graduate student I was regularly called “Madamele docteur,” and even the junior seminarians were called“the parish priests” (les Abbes). This is perhaps the mostextreme example of Schutz’s future perfect; not only aregoals wished for and protended but they are sociallytaken as already in play: Tous ce qui doit finir est dejafinit. The difference between the seminarians and me,on the one hand, and the young women whose stories Irecount below, on the other, was whether the trajectoryhad been begun. I was engaged to be married and workingon my degree, and the seminarians had been acceptedand were doing their studies: we were on a discerniblepath toward something. But before the trajectory isknown, the situation is quite different. When my inter-locutors claim that they cannot know the future andtherefore make no plans regarding it, we cannot disregardtheir refusal as false modesty or superstition. We mustrather take seriously the challenge that they are posingto intentional action as it is commonly understood. Thatsaid, their refusal of rational choice does not necessarilymean that they fail to act with intention of any kind.We must take their words seriously but not literally.

In the following quotes, high-school-educated womentalk about their plans for the future. These women rep-resent a local elite: while nearly half the women in recentcohorts in southern Cameroon have started high school,fewer than one in six have completed it. Completing highschool requires the ability both to mobilize financial re-sources from kin and to learn under challenging circum-stances, such as without textbooks. The first of theseappears to be much harder for girls than for boys. Thus,women attending the last grade of high school have beenunusually successful and their modes of action effective.That these modes appear far from intentional action sug-gests that models of such action are inadequate. My in-terlocutors regularly explained that they were not plan-ning to follow any specific path of training or to seekout any specific employment but would instead takewhat came to them. For example:

Ghislaine: Now times have changed. It is no longerlike before. One can no longer like something.Now everything that presents itself, you areobliged to attach yourself to it, to make do with[it]. Now you can no longer say, “I want to do thisthing, because that other thing does not interest


me.” No. Everything that presents itself, onemakes do.

Jenna: That means [you would do] any old job?Ghislaine: Any old job. If you feel that you are capa-

ble, you do it. It is no longer like before. You canno longer choose. The essential [thing] is that onecan survive. You do whatever comes to keep yourlife in balance. That’s all.

Jenna: But before, you could choose?Ghislaine: One chose. It’s like with eating. The peo-

ple did not eat whatever like they eat now. Youcould not tell me to eat cocoyams when therewere ripe plantains, no! Now there is no longerany means to choose. When it’s cocoyams,whether you like it or not, you eat cocoyams.Whereas before one could choose, now no onechooses anything.

And similarly:

Jenna: What do you want to do after the bac [highschool diploma]?

Adele: We’ll see. Perhaps we’ll see after the bac.Jenna: You don’t have some general ideas?Adele: I do not yet have a precise idea, you see. I am

waiting. If I succeed, if the exams come out insuccess, then tomorrow I will tell you what’swhat.

Jenna: But in order to decide tomorrow, don’t youhave to have some ideas today?

Adele: Your vocation is not like that. It comes fromthe Holy Spirit.

Jenna: Yes, yes, I understand that, but don’t you likesomething?

Adele: Today, is it necessary to like something?Whatever presents itself in front of you, you do.

In addition to my blind determination to elicit an answerin the form of a Weberian project, resulting in some ex-tremely inelegant interviews, these passages show thatmy informants describe the future not as a set of choicesand intentional actions but as a sequence of assents:whatever comes along, one may choose to assent to it.At least as dramatically, the young women talk aboutthis lack of choice as a characteristic of la crise, statingflatly that in the past people could choose. I am lessinterested in the objective truth of this description of thepast (which I would estimate as close to zero) than inwhat it tells us about how young Cameroonian womenthink or at least how they elect to present their thoughtsin an interview. By focusing on the crisis as the sourceof uncertainty, my interlocutors do two things. First,they short-circuit any interpretation of “Western ratio-nality” as opposed to “native superstition,” placing un-certainty squarely as a product of globalization in thepostcolonial period (see also Johnson-Hanks 2004). Sec-ond, they make their own individual tactics of gettingby and making do the inevitable consequences of life inthe present. If la crise has made any kind of planningimpossible, then any individual woman’s lack of plan-ning can hardly be held against her.

Many young Cameroonian women would concur withGhislaine and Adele that careers cannot be planned byfirst selecting a preferred end and then finding the mostefficient means to achieve it. But, contrary to the localtheory of history that traces this uncertainty to the currentcrisis, my analysis suggests that these ways of speakingabout professional trajectories—as not chosen, as un-knowable in advance, as determined by divine interven-tion, and as similar to individual food preferences andtaboos8 —entail both change and continuity from depic-tions of Beti concepts of vocation from the classic sourcesand applicable to both men and women (Guyer 1984, La-burthe-Tolra 1981, Mbala-Owono 1974, Tessman 1913).Thus, the young women explain their action in the crisisas distinctly different from life in the past even whentalking about actions and circumstances that are preciselywhat past ethnographers have described as typical.

Classically, Beti personhood was represented as en-tailing the notion that each individual had a unique char-acter and destiny, the amalgam of various inheritancesand disparate sources of inspiration. Child rearing con-sisted largely of observing to ascertain where each child’sfuture might lead and then encouraging or fosteringthose individual talents: a sort of divinatory pedagogy.Future paths were seen in part as unfoldings rather thanas “choices.” The unfoldings could fail, to be sure; aperson could fail to develop inborn potential or to followand foster inherited gifts. However, it was not a matterof choosing a trajectory so much as one of recognizingit and assenting.9 Thus, possible trajectories were knownto God in advance, but whether the individual wouldachieve them remained contingent. This sense that cer-tain callings are inevitable, even if their fulfillment isnot, remains central in these young women’s ways ofspeaking about their futures, at the same time as theyfocus on the role of la crise eliminating the possibilityof choice. Before la crise, one chose.

Again and again, in interviews, casual conversation,and columns in the newspaper, Cameroonian womenemphasized how in their present condition any kind ofplanning was impossible. No kinds of futures could be

8. At least two things are at play here. First, food preferences aretaken very seriously and are accepted as being grounded in char-acter, physiology, or lineage. Some individuals are thought to bephysically incompatible with certain foods, either permanently ortemporarily. Second, the choice of cocoyams makes the associationwith sexuality all but explicit. The very common saying “One doesnot eat cocoyams every day” means that sex with a single partnerall the time is boring and to be avoided by any man who possiblycan (although not by women, for whom customary sexual practiceis more restrictive). To say that now no one has any choice to eatcocoyams also intimates that the system of sexual diversity—which has always rested on men’s abilities to offer enticing foods,clothes, and other gifts to their paramours—has also waned as aresult of the crise. My interlocutor was not explicitly making thislatter claim, but her choice of words nonetheless invites theinterpretation.9. This exhortation to perceive and accept the will of God is mir-rored in Catholicism as practiced in southern Cameroon. In Luke1:38, Mary receives the message that she will bear Jesus saying,“Be it unto me as is thy word,” a passage often explicitly cited bymy informants.


envisioned, no plans made, no intentional action under-taken: the future had been retracted. Uncertainty wasnaturalized to the point that many people found asser-tions about certain futures laughable, absurd. Knowingthat I was interested in young women’s marital, fertility,and professional intentions, village residents sometimesasked me these same questions. How many children didI want? What job would I like to do? What would I doif my husband took a second wife? These exchanges usu-ally took on a familiar form. I would say that I wantedtwo children, and my interlocutor would ask what Iwould do if I had five instead. I would say that I wouldn’thave five; I would stop when I had two. Then my inter-locutor and any bystanders would laugh uproariously andtell me that it was God who gave children and one couldnot refuse them. Similarly, if I said that I wanted to bea professor, I would be asked what I would do if I had towork in the fields instead. When I would assert that itwas impossible that I would be forced to work in thefields in the United States, my conversation partnerwould laugh and remind me that no one could know thefuture and anything was possible in this world. Camer-noonians are habituated into a kind of agnosticism aboutthe future: life is so uncertain that plans are always ten-uous, partial, more hope than conviction.

This posture of openness applies as well to plans re-garding childbearing. Questions such as “How manychildren do you plan to have?” and “Do you wanta(nother) child soon, later, or not at all?” have been cen-tral to demographic analyses of fertility since the initi-ation of the World Fertility Surveys in the 1960s. Theassociated and derived measures—average ideal familysize, wanted fertility, and the unmet need for contracep-tion—have been the basis of international policy, pop-ulation projections, and funding for family-planning pro-grams. Assuming a causal link between intention,action, and outcome, international aid agencies havespent hundreds of millions of dollars eliciting the repro-ductive intentions of women in poor countries. Becausemy project was to understand the social practices thatunderlay a specific demographic relationship, I askedwomen similar questions about their reproductive in-tentions. The answers were almost uniformly “non-nu-meric,” as the demographic euphemism would have it(van de Walle 1992). For example, Marie-Claire re-sponded to my question about how many children sheintended to have by saying:

Those are the things of the future. We cannot knowthem. Because there are, you know, you can proposeto do what you like, but you cannot know if it willhappen. . . . There is first a stage when one is igno-rant of certain things. But then you become aware,and you say, “But life is not what one believes! It isbizarre. It is ambiguous.” Therefore, you must bewise.

Marie-Claire asserts that it is only in the stage of igno-rance that one believes in the possibility of achievingwhat one intends; awareness and full adulthood come

when one understands that life is in fact bizarre andambiguous. It is by rejecting the naıve belief in the causalefficacy of intentions that one becomes wise (cf. Wegner2002). Similarly, a student who planned either to becomea nun or else to have children explained that her actionswould depend in part on whether her parents neededmore children: “One never knows what life holds instore. It holds too many surprises. It could happen thatone moment [my brother] just leaves, and our family isnot large enough. We’ll see what the future decides.”This last is a common turn of phrase, used interchange-ably with “For that, you never know” and applied totopics from the price of mangoes to the outcome of na-tional elections. A third example has, again, the samestructure:

Jenna: Sometimes people say to themselves, “Iwould like to have a lot of children” or “I wouldlike to have only a few children.” Do you knowthe number of children you would like to have?

Annette: I can’t speak [about that] because I am notmarried. I have never had a child.

Jenna: But me neither. I am not married. I do nothave children. But I already know that I wantmaybe two or three children.

Annette: You, you can have some ideas about chil-dren because you already have a fiance. Me, I donot have a fiance or husband or even a boyfriend. Iam alone. So, how is it that I can think aboutchildren? Does one make a baby alone? When Godsends me a husband, then together we will see thenumber of children we will be able to have. That’show it is.

Whereas the claim that reproductive intentions aregrounded in specific marital relationships would be un-remarkable, that is not what Annette says here. Rather,she explains that when God sends her a husband theywill see together the number they will be able to have(“qu’on arrive a faire”). Even models of joint decisionmaking or mutually constructed intentions are insuffi-cient. Annette is not saying that she and her husbandwill decide how many children they want once she ismarried but rather that the number of children that thefuture decides for them will then become clear. Ratherthan predicting a future time when the prototypic in-tentional act will be possible, Annette is disavowing thevery possibility of reproductive action in an intentionalframe.

At one level, the quotes from Annette and the otherssound like ordinary acknowledgments of the world ofchance. The economic analyst for a venture capital firm,for example, would likely make similarly humble state-ments about the uncertainties of prediction. However,venture capitalists can manage probabilistic outcomesby diversifying risk, while individual women trying toplan individual lives cannot. Going 60% into childbear-ing and 40% into education is not a feasible option.Rather than profit maximization in the face of an unrulymarket, we should think here in terms of “contingency


plans” that can “smooth the roughest edges of risk”(Bledsoe 2002:24) and of action in the subjunctive mood.

Returning to Schutz, we could say that the inabilityto act with consequence in the context of la crise arisesfrom the fact that no “future perfects” can be viablyenvisioned. In other words, the potential futures entailedin any here-now can never become “full-blown, actual-ized events” and are therefore not meaningful in the for-mal sense of motivating action. Schutz argues that actionis ultimately possible because future acts are envisionedas “completed and lying in the past,” but it is exactlythis synoptic illusion of certainty that la crise has madeimpossible. At the limit, because of the crisis people canno longer decide what courses of action to follow, bothbecause the social ends that they might hope to attainare being contested and revised and because they cannotknow which means will result in the desired ends. It ishere that Searle’s notion of the intention in action provesuseful, at least as a point of departure.

While my interlocutors are explicit about their with-drawal from prior intentions, from the formulation ofSchutzian future perfects, they nonetheless engage in ef-fective action in the moment, recognizing and seizingopportunities as they come. The challenge is not to for-mulate a plan and implement it regardless of what comesbut to adapt to the moment, to be calm and supple, rec-ognizing the difference between a promising and an un-promising offer. I call this alternative to rational choice“judicious opportunism” and suggest that it is wide-spread in social action, both in sub-Saharan Africa andin the rich West, whenever the social structures thatenable and enforce rational choice are absent or weak.Maintaining options is the central aim of action underjudicious opportunism, as made explicit by Martine,whose thoughts about child timing opened the paper.Martine explained why she would not use any form ofhormonal contraception, although she and her boyfrienddid not yet want children. Hormones can foreclose pos-sibilities, she explained, whereas effective action relieson chances’ always being kept open: “This is the incon-venience of those pills there. This is the reason that Iam against them. Sometimes after using the pill it canmake you have a lot of children that you didn’t evenwant. It can also make you not have any children at all.So, I think that you must put that aside and play theodds.” This mode of judicious opportunism and stanceof openness is unique neither to life in the crisis nor toCameroonians. Padgett and Ansell (1993) make the casethat it was not strategic rational choice but rather thiskind of following of promising leads whatever theirsource that enabled the Medici to dominate fifteenth-century Florence. On a smaller scale, the experientialuncertainty and judicious opportunism that it demandsarise as one finishes one’s dissertation and tries to imag-ine life beyond the defense. Will I find a job? Where willI be living? Will my relationship survive the move?Should I do a post-doc? Dissertation finishing is a mo-ment when the potential futures are maximally open andthe actor’s potential to act intentionally to bring aboutsome specific desired future is particularly limited. La

crise—as a social expectation as much as a period ineconomic history—has made such moments the statis-tical norm.

Statistics and the Quantification ofUncertainty

Educated Cameroonian women talk about life transi-tions as largely random events: they are wholly unpre-dictable and therefore not subject to planning or inten-tional, effective action. The explanation that my inter-locutors give for the impossibility of planning is thatevents in the world are random—they have no apparentorder and cannot be relied upon to remain stable or con-stant enough to serve as the basis of planning. Socialstatistics (such as demography, quantitative sociology,and variational sociolinguistics) aims precisely to ana-lyze and formalize such random events, abstractingstructure from apparent disorder by examining relativelyfew attributes of a large number of cases. It quantifiesuncertainty, measures it formally, and compares degreesof uncertainty across cases. As Hacking (1990) has ar-gued, social statistics serve to “tame chance,” identify-ing statistical regularities as a new kind of law. I willargue that experiential uncertainty and statistical un-certainty are more different than alike, particularly intheir relationships to time and to contingency. For thisreason, the inferences about uncertainty and intention-ality derived from a close reading of ethnographic con-text and content cannot be directly integrated with thosederived from statistical analysis of quantitative data.

As Bledsoe (2002) and Whyte (1997) show, contingencycontributes significantly to the creation of experientialuncertainty. Bledsoe argues that among Gambianwomen, physical aging is nonlinear and unpredictable inadvance precisely because it depends on—that is, is con-tingent on—so many things, particularly including theirreproductive histories. From the perspective of the in-dividual planning a life, the more things are contingenton other things, the more unpredictable they are. In de-mography and quantitative sociology, by contrast, whatis contingent is precisely not uncertain; contingency isthe linchpin of statistical association and regularity.

Three key tools in the quantification of uncertaintyare measures of dispersion, the confidence interval, andtests of significance. In order to know the true value ofsome length, the researcher may measure it ten timesand average the results. The results of these measureswill vary somewhat, and this variation in values can beformalized with the standard deviation, a measure of thedispersion of values around the mean. In this simplestcase, the standard deviation measures the uncertaintydue to measurement error. In measures of some char-acteristic in a population, where each individual con-tributes one value, the standard deviation indicates thedegree to which individuals differ from the average; apopulation that is very homogeneous in reference tosome characteristic will have a low standard deviation


for measures of that characteristic. Uncertainty takes theform of variability; characteristics that show greater dis-persion are more uncertain.

Now, I may want to know the range of values withinwhich I can be 95% certain that a true length lies: theconfidence interval. The confidence interval depends onthe standard deviation and the sample size (number oftries) and assumes that the distribution from which thesample is drawn has a particular shape.10 This assump-tion is quite good in the case of measuring length, a casecomparable to the one for which the distribution wasdefined. As numerous demographers and quantitative so-ciologists have pointed out, however, it is a relativelypoor assumption for some population statistics, forwhich there is no a priori reason to assume one distri-bution over another one. What confidence intervals re-turn is not results that are 95% right but results thatwill be right 95% of the time, over the long run, underthe stated assumptions about the shape of the distribu-tion. Alternatively, I may want to know how improbableit is that an object’s true length is 30 inches. Tests ofsignificance, appropriate here, indicate the probability ofobtaining a certain result given that the true value equalssome specified quantity, as well as some assumptions.Like confidence intervals, tests of significance quantifythe frequency with which some inference would be cor-rect over the long run—that is, they quantify uncertaintyin terms of how often we are likely to be wrong in alarge number of tries.

Means, standard deviations, and confidence intervalshave unambiguous interpretations in reference to mea-sures such as lengths of objects, where variation is dueonly to error. But population averages—such as the av-erage age at marriage or the average number of sexualpartners before age 25—have an interesting ambiguity,made explicit in the first half of the nineteenth centuryin the work of Quetelet and his interlocutors (see Des-rosieres 1998:73; Porter 1986:41–50). Quetelet arguedthat this variation, too, is a form of error, because thepopulation average (the famous l’homme moyen) is theideal toward which all strive (1997 [1835]),11 whereas hiscritics viewed population means as mere descriptions oftheir respective populations, with no independent exis-tence or moral force. The latter interpretation is almostuniversally held today. Nonetheless, Quetelet’s generalconcept that individuals in a population could bethought of as independent “trials” (parallel to tosses ofa coin or measures of a distance) and these independenttrials used to estimate some parameter of interest plays

10. Standard confidence intervals of the mean assume that the sam-ple is drawn from a normal distribution. Historically, the normaland the binomial distributions were thought to be the same, as seenin De Moivre’s (1718) Doctrine of Chances. The binomial curve isthe limiting distribution of a histogram of outcomes of a fair cointoss or some other random, dichotomous event. The historical pro-cess through which the distribution of outcomes of a fair coin toss,the error pattern of measurements, and the distribution of char-acteristics that have “myriad little causes” came to be viewed asthe same is described in Hacking (1990) and Stigler (1986).11. There is an interesting echo of this position in Durkheim’s (1962[1938]:8) concept of the social fact.

a central role in contemporary social statistics, especiallyin the use of regression analysis (see discussions in Ball2002, Barnes 1998, Freedman 1999, Le Bras 2000, Poovey1988).

Regression and correlation both estimate the degree towhich variation in one parameter accounts for variationin another or the degree to which two variables are as-sociated. Regression additionally provides an equationdescribing the shape of the relationship12 and assessesthe certainty with which that equation predicts valuesof the dependent variable. In both cases the analysis re-quires a large number of cases, either trials in the classicsense or individuals in a population, each representingone “trial.”13 Such methods can be used to estimate howmuch of a dog’s weight can be predicted by its length,how much of a man’s income can be predicted by hiseducation, or how well a student’s grade-point averagecan be predicted by her SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test)score. The relationships described in these equations area form of contingency in the most straightforward sense:one value is contingent on another, not determined bybut nonetheless dependent on it. Indeed, the aim of re-gression is to establish such contingent relationships,reading backward from actual outcomes to the latentpotentials that apparently existed before anyone knewhow to recognize them. To claim that income, for ex-ample, is strongly contingent on education means to asocial statistician that income is not uncertain: to thecontrary, it can be predicted with relatively little error.Contingency thus plays opposite roles in individual ex-perience and statistical analysis.

In regression, the quantification of uncertainty is morecomplicated than in the simpler case of a single popu-lation mean because it has several sources. Not only iseach trial measured with some error but the relationshipbetween the two variables may also be more or lessstrong. For most purposes, the relevant form of uncer-tainty is measured by the prediction errors (calculatedas the standard error of estimate), the degree to whichestimates of the dependent variable differ from observedvalues. Thus, statistical approaches quantify two dis-tinct, although related, kinds of uncertainty: the uncer-tainty of measures, which arises from error and popu-lation variation, and the uncertainty of prediction,iconically represented by the standard error in regressionanalysis. Both the uncertainty of measures and the un-certainty of prediction result from variability. Indeed,unexplainable, unpredictable variation is statistical un-certainty. Given that Cameroonians experience such in-

12. This does not mean that regression can “find” a relationshipof any form; the most commonly used regression technique, or-dinary least squares regression, assumes that the relationship islinear, and the equation describes the intercept and slope.13. Ordinary least squares regression was developed by La Place ina treatise on the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn (1787). The trials,observations of the planets, included variables such as the longitudeof Saturn, its annual motion, and its eccentricity. It is easy to viewthese observations as a series of measurements comparable to mea-sures of length. The extension of this concept to social statisticsdid not occur until the nineteenth century.


tense uncertainty, we would expect the demographicrates also to be highly variable, and indeed they are.

In 1998 I conducted a survey of 184 women in southernCameroon that recorded, among other things, the datesof life events such as bridewealth and church marriages,pregnancies, school transfers, and periods of formal em-ployment.14 As retrospective reports about events in thepast—sometimes far in the past—these data surely con-tain some measurement error: some women will reportthat they left school at 15 although in fact they were 16,as the result of a memory lapse or mistake. Measurementerrors are random in direction, and because the eventsare important these errors should be small: few womenwill mistakenly say that they left school at 15 if theywere in fact 20. However, such data may also be subjectto systematic bias. As in narrative life histories, peoplemay well “correct” past events to make them appearmore nonnative or coherent (Rosenwald and Ochburg1992:5; Hoerning and Alheit 1995; Ochs and Capps1996). Post-hoc correction generally results in more cus-tomary or normalized accounts of the past, that is, re-duces the apparent uncertainty. Yet, despite the retro-spective correction that is almost certainly happening,these data show remarkable variability in the timing andsequence of life events.

Figure 1 shows a modified box plot of the ages at whichwomen who were at least 30 years old at the time ofinterview underwent six life transitions: leaving school,civil marriage, bridewealth marriage, first birth, first for-mal employment, and first residence apart from consan-guine kin.

Two things shown in the plot are of consequence tomy analysis. First, the number of women who had madethe indicated transitions varies widely, from just about50% for bridewealth marriage to over 90% for leavingschool.15 Given that these are such socially salient tran-sitions, it is interesting that none of them are universaland some are actually quite rare. Second, even amongthose women who had experienced the respective events,the transitions occurred at widely varying ages: the in-terquartile ranges are more then 8 years for all six events,and three are more than 15 years. This wide range ofvariation according to two measures is—from a statis-tical perspective—uncertainty.

Despite its usefulness in indicating age and time, fig-ure 1 cannot show the sequence of events in the lives ofindividual women. Theoretically, the ages at whichwomen undergo events and the proportion undergoingthem could both be highly uncertain even though thesequence of events was clearly fixed. Figure 2 demon-strates that this is not the case. Each of the six eventsoccurred first in the lives of some survey respondentsand last in the lives of others. Although the events arenot equiprobable in each sequential position, four of the

14. The sampling methods and interview protocol are available onrequest.15. In order to be included in the sample, women had to have eitherpermanently left or completed high school. Thus, the women whohad not yet left school were attending university or technicaltraining.

six have a distribution that is indistinguishable fromchance. A more detailed analysis would look at eachpossible trajectory through the six events; however, thereare 720 possible ways of undergoing six ordered events,16

the analysis would require more than the 184 cases thatI have. Nonetheless, even at this simpler level, theamount of variability is already staggering. There is nodominant sequence of transition events, and the rangeof ages over which the events occur is very broad. Thetiming of major life events in southern Cameroon is for-mally uncertain.

This might appear the end of the analysis: Cameroon-ians experience radical uncertainty in their lives, and—mirabile dictu—we find a huge amount of variation inthe timing and occurrence of demographic events. Thisway of combining qualitative and quantitative researchso that they both “tell the same story” is widespread.But there is an intellectual danger in agreeing tooquickly. Sometimes, ethnographic and statistical anal-yses use the same terms to analyze quite different things.Uncertainty offers one example. Instead of treating quan-titative and qualitative data as complementary, I proposeinstead to focus on the disjunctures and discontinuitiesbetween them, looking for the instances in which con-fronting ethnographic interpretation with statistical pat-terns produces a new analysis or at least new questions.In this way, we can throw Stevens’s “pale light” of eachon the other. Here, the disjuncture between the phenom-enological experience of uncertainty as reported in thenarrative self-representations and the statistical mea-surement of uncertainty rests on the roles of time andcontingency.

We can use regression analysis to learn about statis-tical contingency, that is, to learn what factors are as-sociated—with what degree of certainty—in a retrospec-tive sample with given outcomes, such as the numberof children that different women have had. Looking atsequences of events that have already occurred, it is pos-sible to establish patterned relationships between thoseevents, identifying characteristics as indicators of futureoutcomes. Under one reading, this is a form of the du-bious practice of “backshadowing” as critically analyzedby Morson (1994) and Bernstein (1994) in that it aims tofind early traces of known later outcomes. But it is alsopossible to argue that, by using large numbers of casesto identify patterns rather than seeking out premonitionsof individual outcomes, regression is doing somethingquite different. Regression may be more a form of com-parative history than of backshadowing.

Because the use of regression to identify patterns gen-erally requires samples larger than mine, I have em-ployed the results of the 1998 Demographic and HealthSurvey, a nationally representative sample of 5,501women interviewed about their reproductive histories,their health, and the health of their children by Macro

16. That is, six possible first events times five possible secondevents times four possible third events, etc. (6 # 5 # 4 # 3 # 2p 720). Since women may have completed anywhere from noevents to all six, there are 1,997 possible trajectories.


Fig. 1. Observed distribution of ages at specific life events. The boxes represent the interquartile range of agesat transition; the lower edge of the box is the age by which 25% of the women reported having completed theevent and the upper edge the age by which 75% reported having done so. The “whiskers” above and below thebox indicate the full range of ages within which any observed woman reported making the transition. Many ofthe women surveyed had completed only some of the transitions prior to the survey; the numbers of those whohad completed each transition are indicated at the bottom of the figure.

International in conjunction with the Cameroonian na-tional statistical bureau.17 Table 1 shows the results ofordinary least squares regression estimating the param-eters of an equation for the total number of children everborn as a linear combination of five variables: themother’s age, whether she attended secondary school(dummy variable, 1 p yes), the number of years sinceher first marriage, whether she lives in an urban area(dummy, 1 p yes), and whether she has been marriedmore than once (dummy, 1 p yes), C p c � Saixi � �.Linear equations of this form necessarily assume thatevery unit of increase in the predictor variable has thesame effect on the outcome, and this equation includesno interactions between the variables.18 Yet, despitethese extreme simplifications, this equation is able toaccount for over half of the variation in numbers of chil-dren ever born (adjusted R-square of 0.60); the numberof children that a woman has borne is highly contingent

17. The data and sampling methods are available at http://www.measuredhs.com.18. The more numerate reader will argue that this is not an optimalformalization, because ordinary least squares regression treats thedependent variable as if it were continuous whereas in fact thenumber of children is discrete. This is true: an ordered logit modelwould be more appropriate. I present the ordinary least squaresregression results because they are qualitatively right and moreintuitive for the reader unfamiliar with statistics.

on these five factors, and by knowing them we can dosubstantially better than chance in accounting for familysize.

All of the variables are highly significant, which meansthat we can be confident that their effects are non-zeroand in the indicated direction. The point of showingthese results is not that they are in themselves surpris-ing. The fact that older women have borne more childrenthan younger women is almost definitionally true, anda vast corpus of research has discussed the inverse re-lation between education and fertility (but for Cameroonspecifically see Johnson-Hanks 2003). Rather, what isimportant here is how easily, in retrospect, the socialstatistician can account for variation in the number ofchildren that different women bear. Although in prospectwomen themselves are unable to say what they intendor plan, it is simple to identify which attributes are as-sociated with which outcomes in large data sets after thefact. In a situation of extreme experiential uncertaintyand substantial variation in outcomes, those outcomesnonetheless conform to patterns of contingency that arediscernible in the aggregate.

This situation inverts formalizations of knowledge, in-tention, and uncertainty as commonly theorized sinceHume. In most such models, the statistician is assumedto be at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the social actor, because


Fig. 2. Sequence of life-history events.

the actor knows his own motives whereas the statisti-cian can only trade in probabilities. For example, imaginea statistician estimating the likelihood that a commuterwill select train A over train B, based on long-run prob-abilities, at perhaps one in three. The estimate is fun-damentally uncertain: either A or B could occur in anygiven case. For the commuter herself, however, no suchuncertainty exists: she works in Berkeley rather than SanFrancisco and will therefore enter train B every time.Because the commuter knows the motivation of her ac-tion, which serves as its formal cause for Searle and itsmeaning for Schutz, her action is not uncertain. In thisexample, there will always be greater uncertainty in theestimates of the external observer than in the experienceof the intentional agent. But in the case of reproductivepractice in southern Cameroon we find the opposite:women cannot themselves predict what reproductiveoutcomes they will have in advance, although in retro-spect the statistician can accurately account for the var-iation. To think through the implications of this inver-sion, we turn to Hume’s discussion of probability anduncertain knowledge.

The Probability of Cause and the Probabilityof Chance

Hume’s primary work on probability is embedded in atreatise on the sources and forms of human knowledge.The work investigates how we make inferences aboutthe world and when such inferences are valid. Probabilityand uncertainty are thus treated in conjunction with cau-sation. Hume posits an observer who is invested in the

world, emotionally attached to it. Describing the mentalstates of the observer of a random die toss attempting topredict which surface will fall uppermost, Hume (2000[1739]:89) writes:

We run all of them [the possible outcomes] over inour minds: the determination of the thought is com-mon to all; but no more of its force falls to the shareof any one than what is suitable in its proportionwith the rest. ’Tis after this manner the original im-pulse, and consequently the vivacity of thought,arising from the causes, is divided and split in piecesby the intermingled chances.

It is easy to see how the social actor whose “vivacity ofthought” is “divided and split in pieces by the inter-mingled chances” would find life a “bizarre and ambig-uous” as did Marie-Claire, my interlocutor quoted above.Hume’s depiction of the analyst confronted with truerandomness corresponds with the descriptions of actiongiven by women confronted by the phenomenal expe-rience of uncertainty. When no outcome is more likelythan any other, ambivalence is inevitable. In southernCameroon, much of experience—from waiting for a bushtaxi to waiting for a paycheck, from the bribes demandedby policemen to those expected by schoolmasters, fromgetting pregnant to getting malaria—appears random.People may maintain a posture of uncertainty becausethe world that they face is, indeed, one of intermingledchances.

However, according to Hume, not all variation in ob-servable outcomes is evidence of chance. Apparently ran-dom outcomes may arise from the working of chancebut also, he reasons, from “the secret operation of con-


table 1Results of Ordinary Least Squares Regression Predicting the Number of Children Ever Born

Coefficient Standard Error t P 1 t 95% Confidence Interval

Age 0.2201 0.0029 76.37 0.0000 0.2145 0.2258Attended high school �0.2577 0.0585 �4.40 0.0000 �0.3724 �0.1429Years since first

marriage �.01465 0.0062 �23.53 0.0000 �0.1587 �0.1343Married more than

once �0.6729 0.0526 �12.79 0.0000 �0.7760 �0.5697Lives in an urban area �0.2802 0.0532 �5.27 0.0000 �0.3845 �0.1759Constant �0.1365 0.1267 �1.08 0.2820 �0.3849 0.1120

source: Cameroon Demographic and Health Survey, 1998.note: Number of observations p 5,501; R-squared p 0.6029.

trary causes” (2000 [1739]:90). As each commuter entersthe train, the diversity of directions appears random untilthe observer learns of the hidden causes that lead onecommuter into the train for Berkeley, another into theone for San Franscisco. Similarly, if a leaf on a lake ispushed in one direction by the current and in the op-posite direction by the wind, it may skitter back andforth, caught between the contrary causes. The identi-fication of such contrary causes (now usually called par-tial causes) is a major aim of multiple regression andother classic methods in social statistics, where any pos-sible causes are necessarily incomplete. Analyses of thecontrary causes, whether statistical or “experimental”as Hume writes, necessarily look backward, identifyingregularities in the past (p. 96):

When the mind forms a reasoning concerning anymatter of fact, which is only probable, it casts itseye backward upon past experience, and transferringit to the future, is presented with so many contraryviews of its object, of which those that are of thesame kind uniting together, and running into oneact of the mind, serve to fortify and enliven it.

These “objects” and “facts” are the conjunctions thatplay so important a role in Hume’s theory of causation.This passage develops the idea that whereas absoluteregularity of past experience leads the mind to infer arelation of cause and effect, a series of experiences withcontrary outcomes leads the mind to be “determined tothe superior only with that force, which remains aftersubtracting the inferior” (p. 95). Both stand in contrastto the vivacity of thought “split in pieces by the inter-mingled chances” in the case of pure chance, where noexperience outweighs any other and the mind cannotsettle on any outcome at all. Since Hume argues thatcausation cannot be directly observed but only inferredfrom repeated observation of associated events, the anal-ysis of cause and probability is necessarily backward-looking, over a large number of past cases. Regressionanalysis can thus be thought of as the quantitative for-malization of Hume’s method of causal inference.

Let us return to consider the statements of my Ca-meroonian interlocutors—“Those are things of the fu-ture, we cannot know them,” and “Everything that pres-

ents itself, one makes do”—in light of the formalizationsof uncertainty from statistical analysis and Hume. Evenif educated Cameroonian women understood perfectlythe relative chances, they might still assert that they didnot know how many children they would have or when.What, then, does this claim of ignorance mean? One pos-sibility is that they are simply being analytically care-ful—even after considering the different elements of con-tingency, a substantial uncertainty remains. Even if awoman finds herself in a situation in which 90% of sim-ilar women have borne children, she may still “notknow” because the vivacity of her thought is split inpieces by the remaining 10%. This, I think, is the leastlikely reason that women express uncertainty. A moreprobable explanation is that they perceive the entire sys-tem of social relations—including the relative likelihoodof this or that’s happening to women of such-and-suchcharacteristics—as subject to sudden and extremechange. Said differently, they are unsure whether pastexperience offers a good guide for future outcomes be-cause so much about the future appears to be in flux. Astill more likely explanation is that women are wellaware of the contingency of certain outcomes (like child-bearing) on other events (like marriage), but the fact thatmarriage is no easier to predict means that this contin-gency increases uncertainty rather than reducing it. Ifnone of the relevant parameters can be foreseen, thenthe power of contingency established retrospectively isof no use. Looking prospectively at an individual lifecourse, contingency is uncertainty (Bledsoe 2002).

In the contrast between the die toss and the subwaytrain, the intentional state of the commuter—that of in-tending to go to work—serves as a hidden cause. Standingon the platform, the commuter envisions the plannedact of arriving at work in the future perfect tense. Ex-perientially, there is no uncertainty about the course ofaction to follow. The train to Berkeley arrives, and sheboards it. From the perspective of the analyst, the eventof train-entering is either uncertain or not, depending onwhether he has identified the relevant relationship ofcontingency. In this example, intentional action servesas the prototype of Hume’s probability of cause: thecauses may be hidden to observer or partially contradic-tory, but they are causes nonetheless, and with sufficient


information their causal force can be identified. But howare we to theorize social action that lacks the explicitprior intention of commuting to work? It is one kind ofproblem to identify the underlying systematicity in ac-tion that is strategically constructed but quite anotherto explain action that takes place when the actors do notknow what the range of possibilities will be or evenwhat, exactly, they will try for. When all that is left isthe intention in action, prediction becomes very difficultindeed.

The Routinized State of Uncertainty

I conclude where I began, with the question of why ed-ucated Cameroonian women so often answer questionsabout desired child numbers with statements about in-tended child timing. The first answer is simple enough—the final number of children is highly contingent on alarge number of factors, outside of their control, whereasthe timing of the first child is contingent on fewer things.While statistically and in retrospect relationships of con-tingency reduce uncertainty, in individual cases and inprospect they increase it. Thus, women answer questionsabout child numbers with statements about child timingbecause it is something that they are more likely to beable to know and represents a future that can viably beenvisioned. Yet, it is not only because the timing of thefirst birth is more immediate that women are more will-ing to predict it. Or, rather, their statements about birthtiming are not really predictions of future outcomes asmuch as assertions about the selves that will inhabit thatfuture. They are signposts toward a very different wayof thinking about the objects of intentionality and therelationship between intention and action.

Both answers turn on the problem of uncertainty andthe challenge that lived uncertainty poses for classicalmodels of action. In the first case, the intentional modelfails because no future perfects can be clearly imaginedor because they can only be imagined provisionally,pending whatever dramatic upheaval will inevitablycome. Perhaps the clearest example of these upheavalsis the story of the woman who wanted to be a nun, re-counted to me by one of my research assistants:

From preschool on, she stayed with the nuns. Sheattended all of primary school there, and middleschool. She was a peculiar sort of person. Because at[the school], from the time you enter you are alreadya nun, because there is the novitiate. When she wasin tenth grade, she met a young guy during one ofher visits to her parents on the weekend. . . . Shesays that she doesn’t know what seized her. Thefirst time she saw that guy was the first time shehad sex. She says that she doesn’t know [why] andshe regrets it. She slept with the guy and fell preg-nant. She left school right around April when shecould tell that it was getting serious. She took offher nun’s habit and ran away. She nailed the habiton the front gate to the school. She nailed her habit

to the front gate and turned her back. She said, “Me,I wanted to be a nun, but life wanted otherwise.”

Aside from the aesthetic appeal of a pregnant womanrunning off in the night, her habit nailed to the frontgate of the novitiate, flapping in the wind, this storyemphasizes the radical and unpredictable turns that Ca-meroonians simply expect life to bring them. Even peo-ple with clearly defined aspirations anticipate that—aslikely as not—something will happen that throws ev-erything into disarray.

The second reason that educated Cameroonian womenusually talk about the social timing of births instead ofabout their number is that numbers simply do not mattervery much. Or, more accurately, in reference to repro-duction, numeric goals are extremely vague, whereas thesocial goal of honorable motherhood—being a womanwho bears all her children within monogamous mar-riage—is less so. This dilemma of vague or underspeci-fied goals poses a critical problem for a theory of actiongrounded in the fulfillment of prior intentions. When theintentional object of the action is vague or underspeci-fied, it can be fulfilled in a variety of ways. In such cases,what is at stake is not the selection of alternative meansto achieve a single, desired end but rather a process ofestablishing exactly which of a range of viable ends willbe actualized on the basis of the means that presentthemselves. In Searle’s terms, there are only intentionsin action; what may appear in retrospect as prior, mo-tivating intentions are formulated only through the pro-cess of finding out what is possible.

Models of intentional action and particularly rational-choice theory assume that the actor chooses betweenalternative means to achieve some desired ends. At thelimit, these models assume that actors are maximizingsomething—whether utility or prestige or material gain.But many aspirations, including, I contend, the majorityof family-formation goals in southern Cameroon, areconceptually large and multifaceted and can be fulfilledin different ways. At the same time, the possible path-ways to achieving any such thing—any part or versionof this underspecified aspiration—are few and hard tofind. The activity, therefore, is not to develop a good planand follow it but rather to respond effectively to thecontingent, sudden, and surprising offers that life canmake. On the basis of these offers, the aspirations, oncevague, will be concretized. Instead of rationalizing meansto chosen ends, therefore, actors take advantage of what-ever means are available and thus settle on a specific endout of the many that would have been acceptable. Socialactors engaging in judicious opportunism select the endsto suit the available means rather than the reverse.

In their analysis of the rise of the Medici, Padgett andAnsell have argued for a similar approach to social ac-tion, writing that “ambiguity and heterogeneity, notplanning and self-interest, are the raw materials of whichpowerful states and persons are constructed” (1993:1259). The schoolgirls and young, educated womenwhose reproductive lives concern me here may be nei-ther as wealthy nor as powerful as the Medici, but their


successes are no less real and their modes of robust ac-tion no different. Under extreme uncertainty, when allthe rules are changing, what works is not the best strat-egy but the most flexible one—the one that takes everypresent in the subjective, that keeps every alternativeopen as long as possible, and that permits the actor toact rapidly and flexibly to take advantage of whateveropportunities arise.

In previous work, I have analyzed specific conjunc-tures in the life courses of young women when multiplealternative futures are available or under reconsideration(Johnson-Hanks 2002). These vital conjunctures, like thearmed standoffs analyzed by Wagner-Pacifici (2000), areparticularly clear examples of action under uncertaintybecause they are extreme cases, not quotidian, habitualpractice. In these extreme cases—where multiple poten-tial futures are in play, where the consequences of actionare at grave but largely unknowable and unfold in mul-tiple time-frames—the inadequacies of a model of inten-tional action become especially apparent.19 But what isstriking about la crise, and perhaps more generally aboutAfrican modernity, is the degree to which everyday ex-perience takes on the ambiguity, intensity, and uncer-tainty of vital conjunctures and standoffs. In the routin-ized state of crisis of contemporary Cameroon, everyaction has the potential to explode into a full-blownstandoff; even quotidian events hold the possibility ofgenerating vital conjunctures.

I have argued that neither classic models of intentionalaction nor formal probability can capture the judiciousopportunism employed by young Cameroonian womenin managing their reproductive—and, more broadly, so-cial—lives. Intentional models fail because they insiston clear goals and ignore uncertainty. Probabilistic mod-els fail because in the management of individual livesthe denominator is always one, and the long-run chancesmatter little. When the future decides which paths willbe possible, it is not fatalistic to say that one does notknow which path one will follow. Educated Cameroon-ian women who refrain from saying how many childrenthey hope to have are neither indifferent nor supersti-tious. Having recognized that life is “bizarre and ambig-uous,” they are articulating the rules of a different game,in which the pathways themselves partially determinethe goal in view. After Adele passed the baccalaureateexam on which she had previously said so much de-pended, I asked her again what she planned to do. Withcharacteristic poetry, she responded: “There where thedoors will be opened for me, I will set off for that place.”

19. Despite important similarities, vital conjunctures and standoffsalso differ in several significant ways. Standoffs are partially definedby their limited set of potential outcomes—deals, surrenders, andviolence (Wagner-Pacifici 2000:214 and passim); standoffs neces-sarily have two adversaries and the action is necessarily dialogic(p. 7); in a standoff, the desired or intended outcomes (at least fromthe perspective of law enforcement) are relatively specific and short-term.

Comments

john c. caldwellDemography and Sociology Program, Research Schoolof Social Sciences, HC Coombs Building 9, AustralianNational University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia([email protected]). 5 xii 04

“When the Future Decides” provides a satisfactory de-scription of the uncertainty of life in sub-Saharan Africa.What is less satisfactory is that it manages to imply thatattitudes to the future are different among young Ca-meroonian women than they would be among youngWestern women placed in the same situation.

Many aspects of life are very uncertain in sub-SaharanAfrica. This uncertainty arises from poverty and therapid transition from traditional lifestyles as first colo-nialism and then independence in a globalizing worldimpinged on Africans. Dictatorships can suddenly causepast legal promises or apparently firmly held jobs to dis-appear. Inflation can completely destroy savings; somecurrencies in recent decades have been devalued to lessthan one-thousandth their previous values. Whole pop-ulations have been ordered from their villages by plan-ners or made part of refugee streams by armies. AIDShas come from nowhere to decimate many ethnic groups.This is why, in putting forward wealth-flows theory, Iargued that almost the only safe path in planning for thefuture was to invest in children.

Western populations often engage in short-term plan-ning and seeing what opportunities are open to them,but they necessarily do so in different contexts fromthose found in Cameroon. Many adopted just such short-term strategies in the early years of the Great Depressionof the 1930s and again during World War II. As marriageand fertility rates have plummeted in much of the con-temporary West, many young people have decided oncohabitation, formal marriage, or the having or forgoingof having children over relatively short periods and asthe occasion arose. Only a minority have, like Johnson-Hanks, been certain of marrying and bearing two child-ren.

Marriage and reproduction have become increasinglyunpredictable in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Arrangedmarriage has largely broken down; bridewealth may bepaid fully, in part, late, or not at all; partnerships areincreasingly unstable; contraceptives may or may not beavailable continuously and may be usable only with thepartner’s agreement; children coming before or withoutmarriage may well be looked after by the mother or ma-ternal grandmother even in a patrilineal society. Mostyoung women finding themselves in the situation ofyoung Cameroonian women would react as the Came-roonians did—by saying that they could not predict thefuture and would open doors as they became available.A closer parallel with the Western situation would beasking Western respondents what they would do if they


were diagnosed as having cancer or found themselveswithout employment.

Certainly, the fertility surveys have adopted artificialdevices such as the concepts of “ideal” or “desired” fam-ily size. The question is probably no more nonsensicalin Cameroon than it would be to ask a Western womanif she planned to marry and if she planned to continuein a married state without divorce. In Cameroon the “up-to-God” responses often mean exactly what they say. Inthe West such questions conspicuously failed to predicteither the recovery of fertility after the economic de-pression of the 1930s or the “baby bust” after the late1960s. Neither our sense of probability nor the teachingsof David Hume stopped us from changing our mindsabout family size. The fertility survey questions may notpredict the future in either the First or Third Worlds, butin both they are often surprisingly close to actualfertility.

Is marriage less predictable in Cameroon than in theWest? Probably not. Is fertility less predictable than inthe West? Probably. Do Cameroonian women react sen-sibly (rationally?) to the reproductive situation in whichthey find themselves? Almost certainly. Is life less cer-tain than in the West? Usually. Are the different attitudesand responses to reproductive questions in Africa andthe West better explained by different cultural heritagesor different circumstances? Undoubtedly the latter.

s imone dennisDiscipline of Anthropology, School of Social Sciences,University of Adelaide, Adelaide 2005, Australia([email protected]). 10 i 05

This article problematizes models of intentional actionand probability on the ground that they ignore the pos-sibility or (in this ethnographic case, it seems) the cer-tainty of uncertainty. It devotes theoretical attention tothe notion of uncertainty in and through rich and en-gaging ethnographic material and by drawing attentionto the idea that intentionality and “resultant” action areenduring even in postmodernity, in which flux andchange abound. In this regard, it achieves a broader andunarticulated aim in that it shows that anthropologymust continue to reflect the conditions of the people andcircumstances it studies. As the conditions of being hu-man change, so too must anthropology’s range of theo-retical, methodological, and analytic techniques for ex-ploring those conditions. This article ought to promptus to continue to examine how our discipline respondsto the people and conditions we explore, for it is a fineexample of grounded theory, in which important aspectsof an ethnographic study emerge to generate the theo-retical parameters used to explore social life in a partic-ular context.

The article also contributes to the insights that an-thropological and phenomenological frames can lend oneanother. The shortcomings of intentionality in phenom-enology are validly critiqued here, but I wonder if morerecent contributions from those who have merged phe-

nomenology with anthropology might be fruitfullydrawn upon to explore the lives of these Cameroonianwomen. I would be interested to see how Michael Jack-son’s (1998) concept of intersubjective ambiguity, for ex-ample, might be used to explore what Johnson-Hanksdescribes as “unfoldings” and “assents” as opposed tothe more certain and intentional “choices” and direc-tionalities. The notion of intersubjective ambiguity maybe useful because it suggests that uncertainty is char-acteristic of human conception and perception. As Jack-son argues in Minima Ethnographica, phenomenologistsoppose measuring experience itself against a standard (orgoal) and insist that what matters, really, is the experi-ence and its social outcomes. It is perhaps here that abalance between being mastered by the world and mas-tering it is struck—as Jackson insists, action (whetherreligious, artistic, ritual, or otherwise) and its outcomesare made sense of, in models and language, to subordi-nate the world to “the hegemony of reason.”

This notion of “mastery” is of course drawn from Bru-ner (1976, 1990), who used it in such a way as to indicatethe potential for reauthorship, reconstruction, and re-versal in situations in which transformation of entrappedor restricted experience is desirable. I was led to wonderas I read whether the statements of Cameroonian womenindicating their awareness of uncertainty and their strat-egies for dealing with it with “wisdom” and “waiting”were not examples of a variety of mastery. No fools they,to submit to the bizarreness and ambiguity of life byattempting to change these conditions; rather, they willwait until the future reveals itself to embark upon acourse of “being able to do” something. It strikes methat this may be a form of submitting the world to reasonand reclaiming a mastery of sorts over it, in Bruner’ssense. This line of thought seems to retain the author’sclaim that intentional-action models do not fit the eth-nographic circumstances and that intentions and plansmay not neatly and elegantly lead to a course of resultantaction and goal attainment but still lends a sense ofagency and strategy to living over and above the “indi-vidual tactics” of making do.

On this note, I would recommend in the strongest ofterms that the author draw back from the practice ofcharacterizing phenomenology and intentionality in theterms used by a few phenomenologists. It would be wiseto avoid using Schutz to stand metonymically for “thephenomenologists,” since he clearly does not. I alsothink that there is some confusion around “intention-ality,” since the term as it is used in phenomenology isnot reducible to planning, strategizing and acting and iscertainly not to be confused with the common use ofthe word “intention,” where this word refers to the pur-pose one might have in acting. The phenomenologicaluse of the term pertains to theories of knowledge, asopposed to theories of human action (see Sokolowski2000).

This article reminds us that the world is indeed con-fusing and less than straightforward, that we are oftenengaged in attempting to submit it to the strength andsolidity of “truth” and “reason” to render it less ambig-


uous in both theoretical and lived terms, and that wemust continue to submit our theoretical propositions,no matter how long-held or comforting they may be, tothe most rigorous anthropological critique and inquiry.This is because, as Jackson has reminded us, culture it-self is the outcome of the freedom to toy with the pos-sibilities and the limits of being human in any givencontext.

jane i . guyerDepartment of Anthropology, Johns HopkinsUniversity, 3400 N. Charles St., 404 Macaulay Hall,Baltimore, MD 21218, U.S.A. ([email protected]).31 xii 04

Rational-action theory has always been frustratinglylimited for anthropologists, and Johnson-Hanks adds anew set of logical and ethnographic reasons. Actors inpresent-day Cameroon see the world as “highly ran-dom,” thus suspending any possible presumption of or-derly means-end causal chains. How, then, does one“capture the judicious opportunism” through which peo-ple produce the behavior—such as reproductive life—that has otherwise been formally modeled or quantita-tively summarized on the assumption of predictability?Identification of patterns, with inferential statementsabout plausible causation, is—she implies—a weak andeven misleading endeavor. Ethnography aims to graspthe experiential level, and if people’s experience con-vinces them of indeterminacy then social science shouldnot impose orders of its own (Durkheim’s classic studyof suicide might need addressing here).

There is a great deal here that is worthy of deeperexploration. I sympathize with the author’s impulse tobreak down the sequences and the human logics intosmaller units and subject each concept, statement, andfinding to searching critique. In this spirit I would liketo push the argument one small step farther in two ways:first, to abandon the “rational-actor” model altogetherand incorporate both tight means-ends thinking and ju-dicious optimistic improvisation into a single categoryof “reasoning” about complex trajectories over time and,second, to suggest that moving even farther away fromconventionalization of the variables at play may bringnew aspects of “ordering” out of apparent randomness.

First, for social spaces outside or on the margins of stateand Western formal disciplines, we can be ill-served byconflating the ways in which individuals really think un-der a variety of conditions and the models of that thinkingthat are developed in order to build the institutions tocontain it (in all senses of the word “contain”). Weberhimself was clear that instituted rationality could be aniron cage, a construct that sanctioned all other forms ofhuman reasoning as its opposite, “irrationality.” Institu-tions are aimed at channeling behavior, not reflecting it.Therefore, in trying to “capture” the forms of reasoningin arenas where—for example—singular actions are notmarked off from trajectories and entailments, calculablesanctions do not swing into play automatically to redirect

courses of action, and outcomes are not held up author-itatively to the general view, one needs a theory of rea-soning that can encompass other and perhaps originalforms of those processes. Reclaiming reasoning—with in-stitutionalized rationality as a small component—seemsto me a worthy implicit aim of the paper.

If one does that, do new domains for enquiry emerge?One of the baleful effects of rational-choice social scienceis its conventionalization of concepts and variables. Onechallenge that emerges from this paper is more rigorousand imaginative attention to pathways. In this regard, theauthor could go a step farther in an ethnography of judi-cious opportunism to focus on the recurrent idea, ex-pressed by her Cameroonian subjects, of definitive mo-ments or turnings that initiate a process: the door opening.How are those presented, recognized, and seized under“routinized uncertainty”? The present account gives ex-amples of indeterminate pathways that are primarily ret-rospective. But is there also a certain preparation for pros-pection? Are there specific forms of sociality that optimizethe occurrence of promising novelties or spiritual or in-tellectual qualities cultivated to recognize promise anddanger? And are there new institutions that rise up tocolonize life-segments and even entire sequences? Thepaper itself opens these doors by cutting through some ofthe iron cage of thinking about rationality while remain-ing oriented to people’s capacity for reasoning.

hirokazu miyazakiDepartment of Anthropology, Cornell University, 261McGraw Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 10 i 05

Johnson-Hanks’s nuanced examination of Cameroonianwomen’s conceptualization of uncertainty in light ofWestern philosophy and statistical reasoning is elegant,forceful, and convincing. Her attention to Cameroonianwomen’s focus on “getting by” enriches the current an-thropological debate about actors’ conceptualizations ofagency and its limits (see, e.g., Herzfeld 1990; Keane1997; Mahmood 2001; Miyazaki 2000, 2004). The im-plications of her argument for the idea of family planningand for population studies more generally are significant.She demonstrates how ethnographers can contribute topolicy-relevant technical knowledge.

Johnson-Hanks argues that Cameroonian women ex-plicitly reject planning as a viable method of approachingreproduction and the world more generally because theyperceive the world as having become extremely unpre-dictable. They believe that they “no longer” can makeplans and choices for the future. Instead, they try to seizeon whatever opportunities become available to them and“get by.” Johnson-Hanks calls this modality of engage-ment with the world “judicious opportunism” and arguesthat it challenges some of the most influential theories ofaction in Western philosophy and social theory. She con-trasts these women’s experience of uncertainty with thenotion of uncertainty underlying statistical reasoning.

Underlying this observation is Johnson-Hanks’s con-


cern with what I have termed the temporal orientationsof different kinds of analysis (see Miyazaki 2003, 2004).To rephrase her observations in my own terms, bothSchutz’s and Searle’s reflections on the temporal sequenceof intention and action, on the one hand, and statisticians’retrospectively discovered uncertainty, on the other, failto recover the real-time immediacy of Cameroonianwomen’s sense of uncertainty. I wonder, however, if John-son-Hanks has fully explored the implications of this in-sight for the temporality of her own analysis. Her critiqueof philosophy and statistics invites further questionsabout her own discipline and its method. In particular, Iwonder if she is willing to consider how one can recapturethe immediacy of actors’ sense of temporality in an in-evitably retrospective ethnographic description. For ex-ample, one opportunity that she could exploit more fullyconcerns Cameroonian women’s sense of radical change.According to Johnson-Hanks, these women interpret thecurrent heightened state of uncertainty surrounding theirlives as a consequence of Cameroon’s political and eco-nomic crisis. But what is interesting is that their explicitrejection of planning as a modality of engagement withthe world is framed as a response to a new situation. John-son-Hanks is absolutely right in not taking for grantedthese women’s invocation of newness; she sees in theircharacterization of the nature of the world both continuitywith and discontinuity from the well-documented Beticonception of personhood and time. However, I wonderif there is something more to Cameroonian women’s in-sistence that the world has changed. In emphasizing thatthey can no longer make plans and choices for the future,perhaps these women are drawing attention to the factic-ity of radical change itself as much as the realness of theuncertainty of the world. From this point of view, by treat-ing the discourse of crisis as a framing device for the sub-ject of uncertainty Johnson-Hanks may inadvertentlyhave erased the reality of these women’s apprehension ofchange and newness. In light of the current pervasive in-terest in open-ended, provisional, and emergent forms ofanalysis in anthropology and other social sciences (see,e.g., Ong and Collier 2005), it would be interesting to con-sider what an analysis would look like if one emulatedCameroonian women’s concern with “getting by.”

catrien notermansDepartment of Cultural Anthropology, RadboudUniversity Nijmegen, Comeniuslaan 4, 6525 HPNijmegen, The Netherlands ([email protected]).23 xii 04

I greatly welcome Johnson-Hanks’s criticism of the use-fulness of Western modes of analysis for explainingwomen’s reproductive futures in Cameroon. During sev-eral periods of fieldwork in eastern Cameroon I also dis-cussed marriage and motherhood, and I recognize thenarrative dimension of women’s attitudes towards long-term planning that she mentions. I fully share her con-cern about the disjunctures and discontinuities betweenqualitative and quantitative data; statistics often fail to

capture women’s opinions and worries about life.Whereas statistics want to talk “numbers,” women wantto tell “stories” in which numbers are flexible and ne-gotiable. Though the statistical truth may give the im-pression of “telling the same story,” women’s lifecourses are much more dynamic and open to creativitythan any statistics may discern. I agree with Johnson-Hanks that women’s uncertainty about possible futuresdoes not make them powerless, passive, or incapable ofdefining their futures. They do have agency, and theyconstantly make choices in a rational strategic way; itis simply not our way.

Johnson-Hanks’s objective of explaining women’s un-certainty, however, seems to lack a kinship argumentthat may contribute to an understanding of that uncer-tainty. Johnson-Hanks generally connects women’s un-predictable futures to the uncertain world of Cameroonat the end of the 1990s and argues that people invokethe economic crisis as an explanation and excuse for theambiguity and insecurity that they experience. As sheadmits, “there is no evidence that life prior to la crisewas objectively more certain”; this idiom for describinguncertainty only partially explains the problem she dis-cusses. Supplementary to her analysis of the inadequa-cies of a model of intentional action, I would like to focusnot only on the crisis but also on the importance of kin-ship in women’s lives. Whereas a (Eurocentric) rational-choice model assumes persons to be autonomous indi-viduals who aim at goals defined by self-interest, inCameroon women’s experiences and choices are rootedin a society that is saturated with kin relationships. Tounderstand women’s uncertainty we must think ofwomen as “the site of a plurality of relationships” (Piot1999:7).

Throughout my research women stated again andagain that from their first menstruation onwards, rela-tives never stopped emphasizing that the children theywould bear in the future would be not for themselvesbut for the whole family. Since the number of childrenwomen will have depends on the agency and choices ofrelatives, women hesitate to answer questions such as“How many children do you plan to have?” A womancan hardly be sure about the number of children she willhave to care for because relatives may claim her (bio-logical) children as foster children at unpredictable mo-ments throughout her life (Notermans 2004). When chil-dren are born in marriage, they may be claimed by theirmother’s husband and his sisters or brothers; when theyare born out of wedlock, they may be claimed by theirmaternal grandmother or their mother’s brothers and sis-ters “born from the same womb.” Though women cancounterbalance this loss of biological children by claim-ing foster children from their brothers or sisters, the out-come cannot be predicted, as life circumstances changeover time. A married woman will judge the desired num-ber of children differently from an unmarried one. More-over, a woman with a good marriage will judge childnumbers differently from one facing divorce.

Beyond the interdependent agency of women and theirrelatives, conjugal flexibility also has to be considered


in explaining women’s “failure” to plan their futures.Women’s life courses are often characterized by a highfrequency of divorce and a sequence of formal and in-formal marriages. Selecting and entering into differentrelationships simultaneously and successively in differ-ent stages of life, women attempt to pursue their bestopportunities. Moving between the households of formalhusbands, informal husbands, mothers, and brothers,women live like nomads in a wide network of kin re-lationships. This posture of openness of possibility en-genders different attitudes to child numbers at differentmoments of life.

Comparing ethnographic studies on women’s repro-ductive lives in Cameroon can help us understandwomen’s lives and interpret their different and often sur-prising attitudes towards life. I would like to continuethe dialogue with Johnson-Hanks, but we’ll see “whatthe future decides.”

sara randallDepartment of Anthropology, University CollegeLondon, Gower St., London WC1E 6BT, U.K.([email protected]). 10 i 05

Johnson-Hanks is to be congratulated for this elegantcombination of ideas emerging from philosophy, eth-nography, and statistics to investigate a subject that hasbeen the backbone of much demographic research in re-cent years and the foundation for much policy and actionbut has caused unease amongst many demographers, par-ticularly those who combine qualitative with quantita-tive approaches. For those of us unfamiliar with philo-sophical thought this paper clarifies where our uneasemay lie. Although the many demographic surveys onfertility intentions and ideal family size come up withplausible numerical outcomes, such numbers may notadequately reflect the responses obtained with other re-search methodologies in which uncertainty, non-nu-merical responses, and evasion are much more frequent.Johnson-Hanks’s plausible discussions of the reasons Ca-meroonian women respond in such ways will ring trueto many others who work in this field and should makedemographers challenge many international demo-graphic and health survey findings. However, I wouldhave liked to see this aspect taken farther. Her commentthat most of her sample (of well-educated Cameroonianwomen) provided “non-numeric” responses to her ques-tions on reproductive intentions raises the question whymost surveys produce so few such responses, especiallyfor such categories of women. How do the enumeratorsmove from the initial non-numerical responses to therecorded numerical ones? Were such movements evidentin the interviews with these respondents?

Johnson-Hanks honestly articulates some her own pre-conceptions before undertaking the research and the con-sequences of these preconceptions in generating “someextremely inelegant interviews.” Her subsequent under-standing and reformulation of women’s responses is veryconvincing but still depends substantially on accepting

the articulated responses from such interviews (whetherinelegant or elegant) as representing women’s experi-ences and their judicious opportunism. While not de-nying the plausibility of her interpretation, it would beuseful to have more discussion of the forces influencing“how they elect to present their thoughts in an inter-view” and thus the conclusions that can be drawn. To adegree this is confronted through contrasting the Ca-meroonian practice of referring to future trajectories us-ing potential titles with Castle’s work in Mali, whichsuggested that invoking future events may incur witch-craft or sorcery penalties. The stakes are very different,however: referring to others’ futures through titles poseslow risks to the individual respondent compared withthose invoked by intimating plans for one’s own (andone’s children’s) future. Difficulties in accepting state-ments about future reproductive plans at face value arecompounded elsewhere in Muslim Africa (Senegal andMali, for example) by strong social sanctions againstchallenging divine will with respect to giving children.Fear of crossing such boundaries can inhibit people fromexpressing any ideas which suggest such forward plan-ning: in interview contexts it can be extremely difficultto interpret silence—to differentiate ideas which havenever been thought from those which should not be ex-pressed. There is certainly evidence elsewhere in the pa-per that similar associations between divine will andchildbearing operate in Cameroon, and therefore it isessential to consider the evasive answers to fertility-planning questions not just in terms of uncertainty butalso in terms of the respondent-interviewer relationshipand the acceptability of publicly stating privateintentions.

dianna j . shandyDepartment of Anthropology, Macalester College,Carnegie Hall 04, 1600 Grand Ave., St. Paul, MN55105, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 11 i 05

This paper advances the notion of “judicious opportun-ism” to explain social action under conditions of uncer-tainty in contemporary Africa. It is significant in pro-viding a means of theorizing social action in Africansettings in ways that avoid what Mudimbe (1988) iden-tifies as the ideological construction of Africa and Af-ricans as prone to decisions based on emotion or reactionrather than on rationality, objectivity, or long-term plan-ning.

Taking the mismatch between a standardized demo-graphic survey question and Cameroonian women’s re-sponses as a point of departure, Johnson-Hanks mountsan effective challenge to a dominant model in reproduc-tive-policy circles and exposes the futility of interna-tional aid agencies’ quest to elicit “the reproductive in-tentions of women in poor countries.” She makes acompelling case that the limited and limiting questionof how many children a woman plans to have falls shortof apprehending the complex social, political, and eco-nomic realities that inform reproductive outcomes.


The paper is ambitious in its attempt to chart ques-tions of aspirations and attitudes as ethnographic terrain.I recall being told in graduate school that “anthropolo-gists don’t do attitudes”—that ethnographers were betterpositioned to observe what people do than to speculateabout their futures. And, indeed, there is truth in this.Yet, in the field, ethnographers encounter the full tem-poral range of informants’ pasts, presents, and hopes forthe future. Particularly for those in applied or policy set-tings, attention to plans for the future is vital. By cou-pling ethnographic and demographic data with socialtheory pertaining to intention, action, and outcome,Johnson-Hanks carves out stimulating analytical spacefor wide-ranging comparative inquiry that provides amodel for understanding present action as it relates tofuture intentions.

That said, it is worthwhile to question the choice ofreproductive action as “a particularly appropriate locus”for the study of intentionality and its limits. When I dida mental survey of how the Western, educated womenin their thirties of my own social network who haveexperienced the gamut of challenges to reproductive as-pirations (e.g., miscarriages, stillbirths, lack of a partnerand a ticking biological clock) would respond to a ques-tion about intended family size, I concluded that John-son-Hanks’s notion of allowing the future to decide is,perhaps, not unique to the contemporary Cameroon. Atleast of equal weight, it seems, is what appears in thearticle as a subsidiary supporting example about similardynamics of uncertainty regarding post-secondary-school aspirations.

While the author states that gendered action is not anexplicit aim of this paper, it seems to be the elephant inthe room when she is discussing parallel (but in her casesnot intersecting) examples of fertility and education inAfrica. This seems particularly important in the case ofsuch a select sample (where one in six persons finishesschool). Johnson-Hanks points out that educationalachievement is predicated on two variables, mobilizingfinancial resources and learning under challenging cir-cumstances. She fails to note the importance of man-aging fertility in the pursuit of educational achievementin African settings. The reader is left to wonder how andwhen gender becomes explanatory in such an explorationof social action.

Ultimately, the argument seems to hinge on the notionthat it is the unpredictability of the structural conditionsin which these young women live that informs theirresponse to questions about their futures, including fam-ily size. Johnson-Hanks makes an intriguing point aboutthe relative degree of uncertainty in the lives of youngCameroonian women, in which “common things eludestandardization.” While she is at pains to avoid a di-chotomy between here and there, I pondered what im-pact interviews with Beti women living in the Westwould have on the analysis. Would we expect the higherdegree of certainty about quotidian life to translate intomore decisive plans for the future? Or is there a culturalelement to articulating a future trajectory that Johnson-Hanks’s argument does not consider? For instance, at

several points “God” and “the Holy Spirit” emerge aspivotal entities in these women’s views of their unfold-ing futures. We do not have enough ethnographic con-textualization to evaluate the significance of these ref-erences, but they do raise questions about the extent towhich these women’s perception of the future can beexplained strictly in terms of the environment in whichthey currently live.

This is a very stimulating article that showcases amodel for anthropological inquiry to make specific con-tributions when directed survey questions dead-end. Themodel for theorizing social action that it advances willprove valuable in myriad settings.

Reply

j ennifer johnson-hanksBerkeley, Calif., U.S.A. 28 i 05

I am grateful to the commentators for their generous andastute responses, criticisms, and suggestions for furtherwork. In particular, I appreciate the proposals—presentin nearly all the comments—for specific extensions ofmy theoretical framework to other cases.

Both Caldwell and Shandy ask whether judicious op-portunism does not also describe social action in the richWest, that is, to what degree the analysis here is specificto Cameroon in crisis. The fact that they come to op-posite conclusions is evidence that the question is bothfundamental and very difficult. My position, argued hereand elsewhere (2002, 2004, n.d.), is that action under theprinciple of judicious opportunism occurs everywhereand among people of all kinds of backgrounds—in otherwords, that the model of rational, strategic, intentionalaction is inadequate even for explaining action here. Atthe same time, judicious opportunism is more commonin southern Cameroon than in the West for three relatedreasons. First, the West has more numerous and moreeffective institutions that serve to reduce uncertainty:the money supply is stable, public transit mostly works,mortality and morbidity are low and concentrated at theend of life, the courts enforce legal contracts, and so on.Judicious opportunism is thus simply less necessary. Sec-ond, people in the West are habituated to this relativelycertain state of affairs: through recurrent experience wehave been inculcated with the expectation that our ac-tions will be efficacious and with the disposition to actwith intention. Although in specific contexts people inthe West certainly do engage in judicious opportunism,waiting to see what possibilities will develop and thenquickly grasping the ones that seem promising, we havelearned to be inclined to act otherwise. Third, explicitintentions and intentional action are represented andculturally elaborated differently in southern Cameroonthan in the West. As both Randall and Shandy percep-tively suggest, in some contexts Beti would consider firmintentions at least morally ambivalent, if not outright


hubris. Action under the principle of judicious oppor-tunism is therefore neither a universal, rational responseto uncertainty nor a cultural peculiarity but a social prac-tice both grounded in material conditions and variablyculturally elaborated.

Caldwell points out that survey questions on fertility,bad as they may be, nonetheless tend to predict fertilityreasonably well. At the aggregate level, he is correct.Some dozen papers have now assessed the degree towhich reproductive intentions predict subsequent be-haviors (e.g., Dasilva 1992; Miller and Pasta 1995; Mor-gan 1982; Nair and Chow 1980; Schoen et al. 1999, 2000;Tan and Tey 1995; Vlassoff 1990; Westoff and Ryder1977). The results of these studies have been mixed, butthe one consistent finding is that the population averagescorrespond far better than the individual-level data. Da-silva (1992) found that nearly 30% of women in a SriLankan survey had outcomes discrepant with theirstated intentions just three years later. In Taiwan, Nairand Chow (1980) found that over 30% of the coupleswanting no more children did indeed bear a child in thethree-year interval between the first and second surveys.Vlassoff (1990) found no relationship between Indianwomen’s reported desired family size and their fertilityten years later. Although the average intention in a pop-ulation corresponds well to the average reproductive out-come, for ethnography and especially for a social theoryof reasoning population averages are inadequate. Indi-viduals matter.

Dennis correctly points out that Schutz does not rep-resent the views of contemporary, more ethnographicallyinclined phenomenologists any more than Searle repre-sents all philosophers of mind. I use their work none-theless because it is masterful, compelling, and widelycited. Her references provide thought-provoking alter-natives that I welcome.

Guyer and Miyazaki both call for pushing the analysisfarther, if in different directions. I am fully in accord withGuyer that the long-run aim must be to break free ofrational-choice models altogether and that a rich eth-nography of reasoning would be a promising way to doso. If in this paper I am still battling with rational choice,it is because I am convinced that the only way to sup-plant such powerful analytic paradigms is by showingwhere they fail. Guyer’s second proposal, that we moreclosely examine the “preparation for prospection” andthe “forms of sociality that optimize the occurrence ofpromising novelties,” is even more exciting becausemore radically new. It also combines productively withMiyazaki’s thoughtful critique of the temporality of theanalysis and writing itself. Here, both Guyer and Mi-yazaki ask how we can think of an ethnography that isnot always thought backwards, always representing pastevents, experiences, and organizations. Their concern isparticularly relevant for southern Cameroon, where in-novation has long been valued (see Guyer 1996, Guyerand Eno Belinga 1995), and the “facticity of radicalchange” that Miyazaki notes is indeed important. I havethought of vital conjunctures (developed in my forth-coming book) as a partial solution to this problem; how-

ever, even vital conjunctures have to be written and an-alyzed after the fact, so the temporal problem remains.

Notermans insightfully calls attention to kinship andespecially to fosterage and conjugal flexibility as addi-tional important sources of uncertainty for women inCameroon. She is of course entirely right, and a moreexhaustive analysis would have to explore the roles ofkinship both in creating uncertainty and as a resourcefor managing it. One provocative place to explore thisinsight might be the changing institutional forms of mar-riage. Some events that in the past were significant, rit-ualized transitions in the social recognition of a unionhave all but disappeared, and new ones have developed.How do these emergent social forms relate to the un-certainty of the crisis? It is a question that I look forwardto exploring.

Randall draws attention to the methodological prob-lems of interviewing and questions the transparency ofinterview answers. She perceptively focuses on how in-terviews unfold as social interactions and on culturalrepresentations about what should and should not be saidas sources of bias or error in interviews. And of courseshe is right that both of these matter very much. WhenI was working with research assistants, we found thatwomen whom I interviewed were far more likely to re-port having had an abortion than women interviewed bymy Cameroonian assistants. Several times, as I got toknow women whom I had interviewed better, I learnedof important things that they had neglected to mentionin the interview. These are both examples of the situa-tions that Randall, I think, has in mind. The centralquestion, however, is whether the unfixity of intentionalprojects dissolves once these methodological problemsare considered. On the basis of participant observationin a variety of settings, I can say that it does not. Randalland I agree on the need for constant, skeptical evaluationof our sources of evidence; we perhaps disagree on theuniversality and importance of fixed, private intentions.

Finally, Shandy suggests that reproduction is too easya mark for a critique of intentional action and its limitsand that Western women facing the “gamut of challengesto reproductive aspirations” might well engage in judi-cious opportunism in just the same way. I agree with herthat reproduction tends to produce uncertainty. Repro-ductive events—from unintended pregnancy to miscar-riage to a diagnosis of infertility—open up vital con-junctures, periods in which a wide range of futures ispossible and there is no clear path forward. During vitalconjunctures, action under the principle of judicious op-portunism may be the only alternative. However, repro-duction is far from the only domain in which vital con-junctures emerge. Completing school, getting ill, movingacross the country—all of these may generate similarkinds of uncertainty and open horizons. Reproductivepractice offers a compelling locus for the study of un-certainty and intentions because it is universal, funda-mental, and highly variable.


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