Entre projeto e convivialidade: Um exercício de reflexividade etnográfica em torno da socialidade juvenil em Cabo Verde

This article presents the reflective path that accompanied an ethnographic research on collective and associative practices of young people living in poor suburbs of the city of Mindelo, Cape Verde. This analytical exercise is based on a relational interpretation of youth sociality in which young people’s processes of constitution as social subjects become the axis of revelation and understanding of various and complementary conceptions – both the author’s and young people’s – about youth and, consequently, about person. In the context of recent transformations in the Cape Verdean society, youth sociality seems to develop in a paradoxical way, between the imagination of individual projects of future fulfillment and the everyday investment in conviviality and interdependence among peers as a key way of self making, this tension being deeply dependent on – and defining of – the ambiguity and uncertainty associated with youth in contemporary Cape Verde.