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- Convenors:
-
Maarten Bedert
(Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Anais Ménard (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
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- Chair:
-
Anita Schroven
(Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- KH209
- Start time:
- 30 June, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
As ties between the rural and urban intensify with increased mobility and technological innovations, social distinction becomes more pronounced. This panel explores how the desire for an authentic life influences images, representations and performances of the urban and rural as social categories.
Long Abstract:
With growing rates of urbanization, new ways of living together have impacted questions of belonging and identification. Still, there continue to be lasting connections between urban and rural lives, as shown by the recent wave of studies of autochthony. At the same time, studies of urban modernity call into question the direct and inadvertent effects of the intensification of urban-rural social ties.
In this panel we assume that technological developments make ties between the urban and the rural more intense and obfuscates boundaries, creating new forms of life that span both presumed geographical and social divides. At the same time, these networks and technologies are not equally accessible to everybody, creating distinctions and stratification within urban and rural communities alike. The urban and the rural thus become new categories of social differentiation. More than geographical spaces, they become interconnected representations driven by a desire for authenticity associated with both an (urban) globalized, modern and interconnected world and, a (rural) traditional, grounded, local setting, each offsetting some of the perceived shortcomings of the other.
In this panel, we explore the importance of this desire for authenticity and invite contributions that study empirical representations of the urban and the rural as social strategies of distinction and stratification. We are keen to learn about the ways in which imaginaries of the urban and the rural become performed/performative acts of identity associated with particular emic notion of social distinction, articulated through signs like language use, profession, religious acts, regimes of literacy, dress code, etc.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Anais Ménard (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores, in the Sierra Leonean context, the social ambivalence of an ethnic identity that allows individuals to navigate rural and urban identity registers, especially by performing belonging to specific religious categories.
Paper long abstract:
In Sierra Leone, Sherbro ethnic identity is socially ambivalent, as it relates both to a Krio urban lifestyle and an indigenous rural origin. It allows individuals to employ two identity registers (Krio and kɔntri) and claim an autochthonous status, while displaying the attributes of urban modernity. The ability to use different social fronts, and to display the emblems attached to each, is central to Sherbro social duality. Thus, concealment and disclosure of social ‘fronts’ constitute moments of intense dramatization of a person’s dual identity. Such strategies are highly contextual and depend both on an individual’s ability to use specific emblems (language, clothes, religious signs etc.) and the audience for which social roles are performed. This paper explores how people separate contexts, locations and audiences when using Krio and kɔntri registers, with a particular focus on religion and ritual practices. Ritual practices constitute a privileged space for making statements about social identifications. Claiming an “authentic” indigenous identity requires membership in indigenous religious institutions (secret societies). Membership is important in establishing one’s kɔntri identity. Yet, being ‘Krio’ also entails a commitment to Christian practices. The personal ability of combining two religious registers, and keep them separate in social and semiotic practices, is critical for claiming Sherbro ethnicity and performing social duality. At the same time, it tends to draw a line between “urban” individuals – who tend to reject practices of initiation and stick to Krio religious standards – and “rural” individuals, for whom initiation is a vector of social navigability.
Oriol Puig (University of Barcelona)
Paper short abstract:
Libya's war in 2011 caused the return to Niger of thousands migrants from Niamey who had lived in the Mediterranean country for years. They reformulated their social role within new values and strategies, due to their urban condition and their migrant experience. They are the Niameyzé migrants.
Paper long abstract:
During decades, Gaddafi's Libya was like Eldorado for thousands of economic migrants from a fragile country as Niger. After different migration flows from rural nigeriens areas, people from Niamey join the way to Libya during the 2000s. They did it with a different project, more "individualist" and conceived in a "capitalist" way. Libya's war caused their return in vulnerable conditions, as well as circular rural movements. However, the migrants from the capital assumed the failure of their migration plan with certain privileged circumstances, as a result of their urban feature and experience in Libyan cities. This new collective worked as a workforce in multinationals and public companies during their life in Gadafi's country. It is a flow with specific characteristics and it qualifies itself as Niameyzé, which refers to "authentic" citizens from Niamey. They use their experience in Libya and their perfomative "cosmopolitism" to try to obtain the "development rent", subventions from international cooperation. This paper wants to approach to this forced return of Niameyzé, trying to treat the reconfiguration of this urban collective identity used to stratify from rural migrants. It will explain how the migration to Libya has impacted to the urban imaginarie through the main important sociable masculine space in Niger, the fada. Our fieldwork has developed in these originally urban sites, related to globalized culture, where returned migrants talk about their residence in Libya and express their emic notion of their distinction as a urban migrant.
Juliet Gilbert (University of Birmingham)
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers how young women in urban Nigeria use marriage ceremonies to demonstrate cosmopolitan identities. Doing so, I argue that urban femininities do not stand in opposition to rural femininities but necessitate urban young women to know when and how to reveal their rural connections.
Paper long abstract:
In Calabar, a Christian city in southeast Nigeria, couples usually undertake three ceremonies to define their urban matrimony. The court marriage denotes legality in the eyes of the state, the white wedding solemnises the union in front of God, and the traditional marriage finalises an agreement between two families. Despite the tendency for urban couples to demonstrate their cosmopolitan lifestyles by throwing lavish church services and receptions, the traditional marriage remains the most significant part of the extensive nuptial process. Held in the bride's paternal village, the traditional marriage represents the handing over of a daughter from one community to another. Yet it also represents the inclusion of the rural in the urban imaginary, the necessity of village approval and participation in the reproduction of Calabar's social relations.
Focusing on the viewpoints and actions of young women in Calabar, this paper explores how the performance of three marriage ceremonies has become an important strategy for demonstrating urban femininity. Highlighting the tensions between feminine agency and the authority of elders, the paper argues that the urban feminine ideal does not exclude the rural but necessitates a certain knowledge of when and how to engage with village relations. Furthermore, as wealthy families now bring 'the village' to their Calabar compound to conduct traditional marriages, thus allowing urban dignitaries to attend, this paper considers how evolving urban-rural imaginaries create stratifications even within urban feminine ideals.