I read your post and thought “yeah, you might be onto something!”. I found boredom in my reaserch. During my Phd work, which I have been conducting for two years and a half, I lived in a small south-western Tunisian town located in a phosphate mining basin. I was there to investigate how marginality was constructed in an “out-fo-the-way” place. I wondered how political, cultural and social factors could form the collective and individual experiences of being “put aside”.

Boredom was central in this experience, especially for youngsters who often are either unemployed or under-employed. By the way, boredom is a characteristic of the local life even for those who work. Life is routinized: women spend their time at home or paying visit to relatives or neighbours, men lie in the cafés, which was an “activity” I participated in.

I read elsewhere that boredom is a feature of modernity, but I think we can conceive it in a different way. Sometimes, I think, boredom is the result of a “technique of power”, i.e. the political choice of “forgetting” about a social group or a region. In the place I lived in, no cinemas, libraries, theatres were open; no cultural events were organised, except for a “mining basin festival” charged of representing local mining’s culture and history. So, time collapsed into an eternal present, every day was the same day and living was conceived as slowly dying.

Being put aside was being “timely” neglected: the activities and speed of urban life in Tunis was something far from that region, and even the ever-changing circumstances of the democratic transition were not recognizable there. As a response, people narrated the stories of a past full of events, as the resistance under colonial regime or the social movements that erupted in the region in 2008. Remembering the past is, I think, one way to feel into a national history and a temporality which is not the everyday life and which help people not feeling put aside of modernity, development, progress, modernization. It it, I argue, a means by which people try to construct themselves as citizens who participated to the national history and, as a consequence, are worth to receive State aid and develpment.

So, my question is: how much boredom is the other face of modernity and how much is it the result of a governmentality which ecxludes people from a full life?

Best
Stefano