[Zurück zur Programmübersicht] In the early twenty-first century, balance holds a very precarious position in Ghanaian society. For example, many Ghanaian people grew up balancing objects on their heads as part of their everyday existence: rural children transported their desks to and from school in this fashion; women mounted buckets of water and baskets of cassava; men bicycled from the forest to their homes balancing bundles of firewood that rivaled their own bodies in both length and weight. On the other hand, as more and more people moved to the city during the last half of the twentieth century, and as ideas about modernity and globalization circulated more rapidly, headloading was used as a marker of inferiority. It became a signifier of gendered, class-based, and age-grade differences: laborers and poor people were seen as more likely than professionals (and the wealthy) to carry things atop their heads; women - rather than men - headloaded, and children frequently placed items on their heads, but it was unbecoming for adults to do the same. In addition, people with disabilities were entering the public sphere in greater numbers, adding even more complexity to concerns with mobility and balance. While some individuals shunned headloading as backward, others whose bodies were supposedly "impaired" aspired to be able to balance: the very practice could provide independence and strength. How does a focus on headloading help crystallize the paradoxes that abound for contemporary Ghanaians in terms of attaining and sustaining "balance"? When disabled people reflect on their struggles to move about the city, when they recount experiences of losing their balance in the midst of traveling to work, how can this shed light on understandings of human embodiment in general and on moral imaginings about bodies, social relationships, and landscapes? Rooted in ethnographic observations, experiences, and interviews, this presentation will probe how embodied sensibilities get dis/abled through inattentiveness to balance. Moving between literal manifestations of balance and metaphorical reflections, I will explore these issues analogically. With balance as "a sort of hinge between the senses and movement", it is a precarious and perfect mechanism to use in exposing the ways in which material culture in metropolitan Accra - everyday objects, designs and architecture - contributes to a dis/abling of sensibilities and the human spirit.