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- Convenors:
-
Wale Adebanwi
(University of Pennsylvania)
Katrien Pype (KU Leuven University)
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- Discussant:
-
Richard Werbner
(University of Manchester)
- Stream:
- Irresponsibility and Failure
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 April, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel examines how the state determine and (de)regulate and/or are determined and (de)regulated by ordinary people's everyday ideas and practices of institutional and personal responsibility in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Long Abstract:
Anthropological reconsiderations of formal and informal encounters of ordinary people with, and the simultaneous (re)production of, state institutions, agencies and processes through the 'capillaries of everyday life' can illuminate our understanding of the complex ways in which the idea and practices of 'responsibility' are constituted in particular social formations. The experiences of people in their everyday transactions with the institutions and agents of the state constitute a critical barometer for gauging the meanings and the significance of state-citizens' relations. In this panel, we wish to tease out the everyday grammars of state and citizens' responsibilities by examining how the state, through its institutions, agencies, processes, etc. determine and (de)regulate and/or are determined and (de)regulated by ordinary people's engagement with the relationship between institutional and personal (citizen) responsibility in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in relation to infrastructures, education, health, safety and security, and citizenship. We are interested in the multiple sites in which ethnographic insight, based on theoretical reflections, can help us in explaining what happens when people come 'face to face' with the state - sometimes as (a) 'metaphorical Person(s).' How do everyday encounters with the state provoke particular meanings of 'responsibility'? How do everyday experiences of ordinary people, in both their symbolic and material dimensions, (re)constitute the ideas and practices of rights and responsibilities? We invite perspectives that throw intelligible light on everydayness and the ideas and practices of responsibility.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
With a particular focus on the often shambolic relationship between the rural citizens and the public health care system, I here discuss how the 'absent-present' state in Burkina Faso shapes the everyday life of rural citizens and how it affects the citizens' trust in the democratic state.
Paper long abstract:
The security situation in the West African region is subject to international concern, as it appears increasingly fragile. Burkina Faso was for decades highlighted as a peaceful country without any major conflicts despite great ethnic and religious diversity. In recent years, the situation has changed dramatically. Violent incidents and terrorist attacks initiated by various jihadist groups in different parts of the country have shattered the political stability in Burkina Faso. Furthermore, a popular uprising in 2016 where Blaise Compaoré, the president for 27 years, was dismissed and later replaced by a former compatriot of Compaoré, has not stabilized the situation in any significant ways. These conflicts coupled with high levels of rural poverty - Burkina Faso being ranked as number 183 out of 189 on UN's Human Development Index (UNDP 2018) - create a delicate situation. Drawing on more than twenty years of engagement with Burkina Faso, this chapter explores the critical relationship between rural citizens and the state from "below" taking the point of departure in the everyday formal and informal experiences of ordinary people with the state and its local representatives. With a particular focus on the often shambolic relationship between the rural citizens and the public health care system and other locally based government representatives, I discuss what consequences the 'absent-present' state have for the everyday life of rural citizens, as well as how it affects the rural citizens trust in the democratic state.
Paper short abstract:
Starting out in Jos, Nigeria, the paper unravels how the deterioration of communal infrastructures undermines the coherence of national narratives, and challenges people to try to make sense of a timeline in which the present connects to the past and the future in less and less convincing ways.
Paper long abstract:
Taking a starting point in the Nigerian city of Jos, the paper unravels the ways in which the state is called into presence in everyday encounters with the materiality of infrastructure. Here, life is inextricably nestled into webs of wires, roads, and pipes, and, through the materiality of infrastructure, the state surrounds its citizens, invades their homes, and structures life to such an extent that it becomes part and parcel of nearly any mundane undertaking, aspiration for the future, and memory of the past. But as the supply of electricity, communal water, fuel, and so on, is highly intermittent, the state comes out as an infrastructural conundrum of presence, absence and fluctuation, whose identity continually needs to be re-interpreted. The decades that have passed since infrastructures peaked in the 1970s have been an experience of gradual subtraction not only from the coverage and integrity of public grids but also from a grand narrative of national progress that was backed by the formidable materiality of the state. Now, however, as the deterioration of infrastructures has subtracted considerable materiality from the state, the solidity of this trajectory is disintegrating. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Jos over the past two decades, the paper explores how people try to make sense of everyday life in a timeline that appears less and less linear, and in which the present connects to the past and the future in less and less convincing ways.
Paper short abstract:
Analyzing practices of patience, acceptance and compliance in Rwanda, and the agency expressed in these modes of being, the paper argues that there are important aspects of how subjects relate to power which we omit when we emphasize the ways people subvert political control.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyzes practices of patience, acceptance and compliance in Rwanda, and the agency expressed in these modes of being. It is motivated by the concern that although multiple actors practice both overt and covert resistance in Rwanda, there are important aspects of how subjects relate to power and violence, which are omitted in the analytical tendency to emphasize the ways people subvert political control. The paper analyzes situations where radical acceptance, which entails not only obeying orders but feeling calm in doing so, is framed as an essential attitude for surviving extreme hardships. In other situations, patience and compliance are described as responses to the cunning of political and other forms of authority, who wanted to trick my respondents into making themselves arrestable. Patience, in general, may be understood as a way to navigate the infinitely possible futures of a political context marked by the often arbitrary exercise of sovereign violence. To understand these shifts in relations to sovereignty, the paper ends by reading Ashis Nandy’s fragmented selves together with Seyla Benhabib’s narrative model to characterize patient subjectivities marked by adaptability to drastic and radical change. Agency in this view is expressed in control over ones narrative, even if this narrative is contradictive or exhibits attachment to sub-ordinating structures.