School of Social and Political Science

Description

This paper explores how relationships shape access to accommodation in Tanzania in the context of rising costs and escalating inequality .  Longstanding expectations about “building life”  which centre on  constructing a home for ones growing family are becoming unattainable. Ideas about building a life informed by  post-independence discourses valorising self-reliance are increasingly detached from economic realities which enforce ongoing relations of interdependency between differently situated persons. Most such interdependencies involve accommodation within the houses of other family members.  People build on entitlements enmeshed in relationships with others  to gain accommodation in new locations.   Those unable to move on through expected steps from renting , finding a partner and building can find themselves precariously situated as  junior resident in someone else’s household, inhabiting lower status service roles which they would have expected to have long since socially outgrown. Living with other people, Lauren Berlant suggests, demands ongoing adjustments. Accommodation implies accommodations, inhabiting roles and, in situations of unequal power relations, taking on domestic occupations.