Technologies of Moral Containment: Masculine Withdrawal and the Re-Making of Self in Urban Namibia, by Jack Boulton

Jack Boulton (LAMC, ULB)

Abstract: In Swakopmund, Namibia, men sometimes withdraw from social life after rupture: bereavement, relational collapse, or other destabilising events that unsettle a sense of self. For days or weeks they remain indoors, minimally communicative, eating little, and often praying; only later is this interval named, sometimes as uudhigu or uupakadhi (lit. ‘problems’, often translated as ‘depression’). Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this article argues that such times are best understood as technologies of moral containment: temporally bounded practices through which men regulate permeability to others at moments when emotional and spiritual exposure feels dangerous. Withdrawal is here read as a disciplined act of stepping back – a way of managing presence in worlds where reputation and vulnerability circulate relationally, and where being seen carries risk as well as standing. These intervals may function as care – protecting others from the spillover of ‘darkness’ or despair – even as they remain structurally ambivalent and can intensify solitude or strain intimacy. By treating invisibility itself as ethnographically constitutive, the article shows how masculine composure is achieved through calibrated absence and gradual reintegration. It thereby extends debates on masculinity, care, and selfhood in Africa by foregrounding containment as a distinctive mode of managing vulnerability in everyday life.

Bio: Jack Boulton is an anthropologist working primarily on gender and architecture in contemporary urban Namibia. His FNRS-funded postdoctoral project at LAMC (ULB) concerns gender and architecture in Swakopmund and Windhoek, examining how remnants of Namibia's German colonial period are understood and experienced in relation to gender today. His doctorate (KU Leuven, 2018) examined masculinities in the context of uranium mining in Swakopmund, published as Have Your Yellowcake and Eat It: Men, Relatedness and Intimacy in Swakopmund, Namibia (2021). Before joining LAMC in 2024, he was a DFG-funded Walter Benjamin Fellow at the Institut für Ethnologie, University of Freiburg, working on masculinities and the urban landscape in Namibia. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Stimulus Respond and Handling Editor at African Diaspora (Brill). His research interests include masculinities and gender, architecture, urban anthropology, and ghosts in all their forms.